Bed 5 of the 6 we have made is to be the deep mulch, no dig potatoes bed. First up we forked up any big persistant weeds that are in the bed, but otherwise we avoided disturbing the soil. we covered it over with a thick layer of half rotted cardboard, part of what had been left over from the summer Workhouse festival last year. All the none-food biodegradeable waste from the event has been kept in a straw bale clamp to biodegrade/ store for future use. It is an excellent resource for establishing new beds.

Card layer of mulch to kill off any weeds

The idea of the card mulch is that it excludes all light, therefore killing off all the weeds and preventing them from growing up through the bed, whilst slowly rotting down and feeding the soil.

Adding a good layer of rotted horse manure and straw

This was then covered with a generous layer of rotted horse manure and straw. Spuds love lots of moisture and nutrient to grow and this will provide them with everything they need. Once we had done this we topped up the bed with fresh topsoil which was available from earthworks going on elsewhere on the site.

This well fed deep raised bed should be ideal for growing our spuds in. Soil microbes and of course worms will digest and mix up all this matter with the soil and it should be ready to grow follow-on crops in later in the year. Growing a crop of spuds is a great way of breaking in new ground and establishing new beds. Our seeds potatoes are still chitting on the window ledge in my studio, we will plant them in the next session.

Actually the third picture is of bed 3 which we prepared in a similar way, using less mulch and organic matter, but the same principles, this is planned for growing salads and lettuce.

Cut and come again salads. there are lots of cut and come again types of salads, often supplied in a mix of seeds. However, it has to be noted that many of the varieties used in these such as mizuma, mibuna, mustard etc. are actually brassica family, and as we are setting up a strict rotation here, we are not going to use those varieties here for that reason. Ideally one should plant lettuce’s every 2 weeks, to ensure a supply throughout the season. It is fine to keep sowing lettuce until very late in the year and they are pretty hardy, they will go dormant when it is too cold to grow.

The finished bed, topped up with topsoil

Clean seed beds

Soil will always contain weed seeds and when it has been disturded those near the surface will be stimiulated to germinate. In order to get a clean seed bed, free from weeds it needs to be lightly hoed at 2 week intervals. It is important to only hoe the surface, so as not to bring up weeds seeds from deeper down, but after three lots of hoeing at 2 week intervals all the weeds in the bed should have been killed off.. meaning when you do sow into anything that does germinate is something that is desired.  The plan for bed 3 the salad bed is to keep sowing salad until July, when we will replace letttuce with leeks, which we will have started off in pots, ready to be transplanted.

Bed 2 is our Roots bed and we are now interplanting the parnsips we sowed a few weeks earlier with beetroot – the idea being to harvest and eat the beets to allow more space for the parsips to grow into later in the season. Parsnips grow slowly, as yet there is no sign of germination… so there will be plenty of time to get a crop of beetroot in as well. The other half of the roots bed will be for carrots which we are sowing today. Carrot seeds are very samll, so it is a good trick to mix them with dry sand to make them easier to handle. We broadcast carrot seed over the whole area, and will thin out selctively as they grow, giving a yield of mini carrots and making space for the remaining ones to grow into. Once we had broadcast the seeds we covered them over with fine soil we collected from mole heaps in the next door field. This fine tilth is idea for a seed bed, ensuring a regular depth of covering for the seeds.

Measuring the beds

We held the first part of our 20 (60hr) week organic gardening course at the Workhouse on thursday, and we will be running this for the duration of the growing season right up to the end of July. Its 12.30-3.30 every Thursday, designed so people attending can collect kids from school and to support you throughout the growing season.

It is not too late for latecomers to join us for at least a couple more weeks and we will update anyone who has missed some of the content. The first session went very well and I am hopeful that this will be a great course. I already feel like I have learned a lot.

We are building 6 new beds  and will be planting them up and managing them as the practical part of the course, so you will get the theory and the practical experience of growing. Its a simple system, tried and tested.. the beds are 1.2m wide, so you can easily reach over it without have to stand on the soil. There is a path every 3m which also reduces the remptation to jump over the bed to get to the other side. the long paths are 1.2m wide, which is plenty wide enough for a wheel barrow or wheel chair and the short paths are 1.5m which allows extra width if required for access.

The key thing being that we must not stand on the soil as it compacts it and negates all the the hard work done on preparing it in the first place. Especially in organic systems we are relying on soil microbes and earthworms to maintain the fertility and as these all generally are oxygen breathing organisms them we dont want to squash all the air out of the soil.

New raised beds at the Workhouse

A point about raised beds… they dont need to have boxed-in sides in wood, slate or whatever.. and having sides has certain advantages and disadvantages. At the Workhouse where we occasionally have big public events and all sorts of other activities it is important for us to make it clear where people can and cant walk. So by building very clear defined beds we should be able to accomplish that without having to use keep off signs and other unfriendly things like that. Good design should show where you can and cant walk. So we do aim to build a nice boxed in beds for this reason. Also as Emma Maxwell, the course tutor pointed out, they also look better if they are for example down to green manure, it looks more purposeful and less like a bunch of weeds, again a consideration for a public place. But if you jsut want to mound up the earth with no sides, then its your call.. its less places for the slugs to hide and less work for you, so you decide.

There are still places available and its only £30 for the whole 20 weeks if you are on tax credits and there is a 100% grant available for those without any level 1 qualifications (eg g.c.s.e)..at full price its only £110, so its only about £5 a week!

If you are interested and maybe have some questions then please just get in touch!

studying in the spring sunshine

The Workhouse is an interesting place to be thinking about sustainability and the challenges the transition process is going to throw up for us. Basically back in the day when the place was populated by paupers much of the work they were engaged in at the Workhouse was in maintaining themselves. Anything they could not produce for them selves had to be levied from taxes which of course was never popular.

As I understand it each 20 parishes had to fund a Workhouse, so they were never happy about the idea of paying for people to be idle. They did all sorts of work there, like unpicking old rope and breaking stones, but i suspect more of it was to do with self maintenance; growing and preparing food, making, washing and mending their clothes and all that stuff. So they were engaged in their own kind of local economy, albeit for different reasons.. but it is a poignant reminder of the realities we might be faced with in a post oil world.

For many the Workhouse is a history project, preserving the past, and not forgetting how our society was, not really that long ago.. for me it is very much a sustainability project, learning from the past.. and a key lesson is that community and a strong local economy is what is at the heart of sustainability.

Much of the potential for the project down there is to use to build the sustainability agenda into local community.. weave that thread back into our daily and local lives.

Growing and sharing food, managing the landscape, recycling resources and trading with each other as much as we can for things that we really need. It might start with growing a few vegetables but for me the vision is about extending that through co-operation to housing, business and finance.. But lets not get ahead of our selves… its back to learning the 4 course rotation and relearning our gardening principles on this course and that is not a bad starting point.