London Road Station Partnership Blog

Well, that was the shady garden at London Rd Station back at the beginning of April. We’re now just over a month later and it’s been very warm and dry. The spring flowers are over, the foliage has grown huge and the soil is at risk of drying out. We’re prioritising watering of the ornamental planters and our edible plot.

We did have some lovely wild flowers in the shady area. The celandines were particularly pretty, but they’re now a mass of yellowing leaves. They just die back and seem to reappear again the following year. We’ll water a bit on Tuesday and then mulch. The shady plot is just shades of different green during the summer. The site is almost in total shade underneath a sycamore tree which drips sticky sap. Not ideal for pretty planting. But it provides greenery and humidity if our summer gets hot. And it’s amazing how big and leafy the main plants have become: fatsia japonica, aucuba japonica and acanthus dominate. We’ve also managed to keep a Portuguese laurel going and a holly has crept in from somewhere. Meanwhile our main focus is on our edible growing area, our mini-orchard and our newly planted sweet peas which we hope will grace the railings and delight passers-by.

It’s an annual feeling of relief: suddenly the sky is blue and despite cold nights, the sun has been out most days.

Buds are opening on our fruit trees at London Rd Station. Last week, we started pruning our crazy overgrown plum tree: this should be done when the tree is coming into leaf. I think I may have jumped the gun a bit: we have blossom but not much in the way of leaf. However, the plum tree has never really fruited well and it’s currently shadowing the rest of our edible garden. So reduced it must be …

We also sowed some lettuce seeds in one of our inherited containers and planted a handful of Sarpo Mira potatoes in the bed by one of our apple trees. It’s the shadier area of the plot but potatoes have thrived in the raised bed opposite which is no more sunny. And courgettes have germinated after a few days in my sunny window.

Meanwhile the shady garden is growing well – it’s at its best in Spring – enlivened by daffodils and magenta primroses.

The daffodils in the platform planters, meanwhile, are already over – difficult to know what we can put in at this stage that would be bright and colourful. We’ll probably just need to wait for summer planting now. We can think about that at tomorrow’s session. I suspect we’ll also be doing quite a bit of watering.

The weather has been encouraging hibernation: very low light, damp and rainy, then cold and frosty. What the weather bods call ‘anticyclonic gloom’ seems to have dominated the south east of England for the past months. But the days are getting longer and bulbs are pushing up shoots. This is the time for pruning apples and pears.

Every year, I put it off … it requires ladders, a pruning saw, loppers and the strength to turn exuberant shoots into stumps. But it has to be done – the apples and pear we have cordoned against the station wall have grown strongly. Chopped back they must be, if only to allow for more air to circulate to counteract the prevailing damp. Fingers crossed they respond vigorously with a good crop of fruit. You never can tell …

Meanwhile our plum-in-a-box (Marjorie’s seedling) has grown enormous and if we don’t get it pruned, will shade the whole edible growing area in the summer. A ‘seedling’ it is not.

I think we’re going to need professional help again with this tree. It needs solid pruning back. It’s never really fruited well so there’s not a lot to lose. I’m hoping Brighton Permaculture Trust who helped us set up the mini-orchard back in 2012 will be able to advise.

You need celebrations in an English winter. The weather this year has been relentlessly damp, dreary, dark and drizzly. we managed a joyful Christmas tea just before Christmas – a more festive version of our usual Tuesday tea, with mulled wine, mince pies and a range of sweet treats, including chocolate covered dates and peanuts brought back from Egypt.

We also managed a sort-of harvest supper this year – a joyous occasion of a dinner made (in principle) from our produce. I say ‘sort of’ because by the time we managed to get together at the end of November, the ‘harvest’ was well and truly over.

It wasn’t a great year for produce anyway. But the spinach and chard at the harvest supper were from my garden, the starter was based on veg from Lynda’s garden, the crumble was made with frozen apple purée from our mini-orchard trees with Ditchling Rise plum compote, there were a few home-grown tomatoes and herbs, and the tiny bright red crab apples from the station garden provided colour for the table centrepiece.

The main thing was to have a really enjoyable evening together – and that was certainly achieved.

I’m always in two minds as to whether we should continue to plant up the tree pits in front of the station building. Given that they house trees – two Rowan trees and a new small elm variety – the environment can be rather difficult: the trees need a lot of water and in the summer, the tree pits dry out easily. But bright flowers look so pretty in the tree pits, it’s hard to resist.

We’ve now had frost and then plenty of rain so the soil is fairly friable. We had planted some cyclamen in the right side tree pit but several got dug up – I reckon dogs, though there are local foxes too. I rescued the plants and they recovered well in my greenhouse. We bought some more cyclamen and some bright yellow daffodil bulbs in flower.

So we’ve now been able to plant up all three tree pits and bring a bit more colour to the station forecourt. A dad and his daughter stopped to tell us how much they appreciated the colourful flowers, which they passed every day on the way to the school. That makes it all worthwhile …

We’ve just renewed the planting in our platform planters, with help from Maggie who used to garden with us. Fingers crossed, the bright cyclamen and early daffodils will last into the spring. It’s been a dry couple of weeks but sure enough, this Tuesday afternoon, it decided to rain, luckily only a light shower on the wind. True, the planters needed water and we’ve added plenty of our superb compost to keep the soil moist and add more nutrients. Now people, please don’t sit on the planters. Squirrels and foxes, no digging up – and slugs and snails, please go and eat something else!

End of October, beginning of November … the clocks have gone back to GMT, the evenings are dark. Gardens are winding down towards the winter. We still have flowers out at London Rd Station, and the weather has been remarkably mild. There are lots and lots of leaves, particularly from the sycamore trees around the station forecourt. We’ll try and clear some of them at our session tomorrow. Otherwise it will be planting cyclamen and generally tidying the plots … but not too much. Latest thinking is that less is more at this time of year. Leaves mulch into the soil, dead flower stalks protect the living plants from frost and berries provide food for the birds and insects. We will try and renew our wood chip paths which have got very messy, and tidy up our shed. Thankfully this week is dry, so a good one for autumn clearance.

Beautiful blue sky this morning at London Rd Station, and thankfully we did a bit of work late morning rather than our usual afternoon slot. We planted ‘Minnow’ daffodils in Madeleine’s mini-garden planter. We also cleared the rampant squash in one of the tree pits and planted cyclamen and daffodils (‘tête à tête’), and also cleared up Madeleine’s tree pit.

The big job was clearing the sycamore leaves from the station forecourt – four big bags’ worth. I’m not keen on storing these leaves for leaf mould; they seem to be a bit diseased. But the forecourt looks so much better – of course, more leaves will be down soon.

Indeed, by the beginning of the afternoon, the deluge showers had started … Tuesday afternoon … and haven’t finished. The silver lining? I’d forgotten to water in the cyclamen. All done now, … but along with a further drop of sycamore leaves.

The unexpected crops are always the best. This afternoon I set out to dig over the potato bed by the wall, adding compost and eventually sowing with green manure seeds. What I was not expected was a generous crop of Sarpo Mira potatoes hiding forgotten in the soil.

These are potatoes from self-seeded plants. The last time we planted Sarpo Mira in that bed was at least two years ago. The plants must have grown from the tiny seed potatoes that appear on potato plants towards the end of the season. It’s apparently not great to leave them in the soil as they are susceptible to blight. But Sarpo Mira is a pretty blight-free variety.

I cleared the bed completely today and sowed rye grass and phacelia. A warm week or so is forecast so I’m hoping the seeds will germinate well. Come the spring, we’ll dig the plants in and they should provide nutrients for whatever we decide to plant there. Sadly, I think the soil needs a break from potatoes.

Bulbs can be very annoying. They come up with wonderful colour to break through the grey of February and March but after April, the flowers fade and the long ungainly leaves droop.

Received wisdom is to let the leaves die back, forming an unsightly tangle in May. This provides the bulb with nutrients for the following year, or so they say. We then try to camouflage the tangle with summer flowering plants, and end up digging up the bulbs. Committed gardeners may dig up the bulbs, store and replant, but this seems such a faff and it means the bulbs themselves don’t expand in the ground to produce rich clumps of flowers. But this last year, as we replanted ‘Madeleine’s’ tree pit on the left of the station several times, I dug up a whole lot of tête à tête daffodils and put them in a brown paper bag in the garage.

It’s time now to find them, and like a squirrel, bury them again in the ground. We’ll clear the crazy squash that has exuberantly grown over the tree pits, lay down some of our compost (no doubt containing more random tomato and squash seeds for next summer – ha ha!) and try and find space to stick in those daffodils, and some fresh ones. Come those final miserable days of February, we’ll be delighting in their joyful yellows.