London Road Station Partnership Blog

In late May, we planted out a fairly random collection of annual flower seedlings around the tree pits in Shaftesbury Place, just as last year we’d scattered a motely selection of remaining flower seed there. The result: a beautiful display of summer colour which has been delighting people as they walk towards the station. If only we could say we planned it, but yet again, it’s more the result of serendipity. The magenta, pink and white of the cosmos, the pinks, whites and mauves of the nicotianas, the pinks and white of the cleome have all blended beautifully together, highlighted by the orange of the marigolds. If we needed proof of randomness, there’s a bolting lettuce creeping out from the flowers.

Today we cleared dead leaves, dead flowers and generally tidied up around the station, trying hard to get some water into the soil after two weeks of hot and dry weather. We will try and extend our successful ‘random’ flower arrangements to the other tree pits in Shaftesbury Place next year – always a little dangerous to plan, but we’ve still got lots of annual flower seeds which will need sowing next year.

But for now, we were content celebrating late summer colours – and in particular, that wonderful combination of magenta and yellow, with Madeleine matching the cosmos. Not colours I’d immediately think of putting together but I seem to remember they face each other on the colour wheel and therefore do something magical when you see them together. Under a brilliant blue sky today, we delighted in the bright colours, along with lots of fluffy bumble bees.

Our raised beds require frequent watering

It’s been a busy summer and despite low temperatures and lots of rain earlier in June and July, our gardens are drying out quickly. At London Road Station, we are dependent on water butts and rain water so we spend a lot of time watering.

I’ve been aware that I’ve let all my exercise routines slip this summer because I’ve told myself being in the garden is just as good and I don’t have time to go to the gym or pool. As we come to the middle of August, I’m not so sure that ‘just’ gardening is enough … I’m starting to feel the strain of the watering can. In my own garden, I’ve reverted to using mains water and the hose. This is not good on so many levels, so this morning, as I waited the 30 seconds it takes to fill the 10 litre watering can, I started doing some of the exercises from the NHS 10 minute workouts. I quickly felt better and the garden got watered without using mains water – how virtuous is that!

So here’s my little routine that I’m going to try to adapt to gardening at London Road Station. All the exercises below can be done while waiting 30 seconds for the watering-can to fill. If you see a mad lady on the platform, doing squats while carrying watering cans, you’ll know what’s going on. I will try to be discrete …

Obviously different exercises suit different levels of fitness. The ones below are mostly from NHS Choices site, but please be aware of what works for you and don’t strain.

3 minute brisk walk

NHS Choices has ‘3-minute March on the spot’ as the first warm-up exercise: I’m going to replace this with the ‘3-minute brisk walk and garden check’: run down the stairs, out the back door, through my garden chicane, down the lane, up the station steps, into the edible plot, back out again, along the platform to check the planters, back via the shady plot checking the tree pits on the way. Ideally, I’ll try not to stop to deadhead and remove yellow leaves, but at least, this combines exercise with my usual garden recce.

Water can 1 – Heel digs 1 (30 in 30 seconds)

Move each leg forward alternately, tapping your heel on the ground. Keep your supporting leg slightly bent. Punch arms out with each heel dig.

Water can 2 – Heel digs 2 (30 in 30 seconds)

Water can 3 – Knee lifts (30 in 30 seconds)

Standing, bring alternate knees to touch the opposite hand. Keep your supporting leg slightly bent.

Water can 4 – Shoulder rolls (2 sets of 10 repetitions)

March on the spot, roll shoulders 5 times forward and 5 times backwards, with arms loose at your sides. Repeat.

Water can 5 – Knee bends (10 repetitions)

Stand with feet shoulder-width apart and arms/hands outstretched. Bend knees to lower yourself by 10 cm. Come up and repeat.

Other watering can exercises

Tap backs

Step back on your right leg and swing both arms forward in the air. Repeat with the opposite leg. Repeat 15 times, pause and do again (or as long as it takes to fill the watering can).

Wall push-ups

Stand at arm’s length from a wall. Stretch out your arms and place your hands on the wall at chest height, a shoulder-width apart. Bend your arms to lower your body towards the wall. Let your heels come off the floor and keep your body straight. Repeat 15 times or more.

Calf raises

Stand straight, but avoid locking your knees. Move onto your toes, lifting heels off the ground and slowly lower your heels onto the ground again. Repeat 15-30 times. To make this more challenging, you can do it with two full watering cans, one in each hand, but make sure the weight of the watering cans is taken by your abdominal muscles and shoulder blades.

Torso rotations

Legs apart, hands on hips, lean back slightly and let your torso rotate. Then reverse direction.

Waist pinchers

Stand with legs shoulder-length apart, hands on hips. Raise your right arm, bring right knee up, out to the side and pull your arm down to meet your raised knee. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKFVZu_4Lq4

placed in a sunny but windy corner

Growing potatoes in compost bags

It’s been a while … holidays, trips away and changes to computer and software have meant keeping up with this blog has been tricky. And though none of us feel we’ve had a summer even here in the south of England, the gardens have been growing rapidly during June and July because of regular rain, so just keeping plants under some control has taken quite a bit of energy. Of course, they will do their own thing anyway, which is one of the joys of gardening.

Sarpo mira and Sharpes express

Our ‘experiment’ this year was growing potatoes in old compost bags, using a mixture of proprietary compost and our own kitchen-waste compost: good to use resources which otherwise would have been waste to extend our growing area. We sowed four seed potatoes each in three bags, using three different varieties: first earlies ‘Sharpes Express’, second earlies ‘Charlotte’ and the main crop disease-resistant ‘Sarpo Mira’. Unfortunately, we managed to misplace the markers reminding us which bag was which, so we harvested them all at the beginning of July.

This was also because the weather conditions during June had been unstable: heavy rain, then no rain but high winds and cool temperatures. The compost sacks were in a sunny but windy corner – and there was precious little sun. By early July, the leaves and stalks had got damaged – I don’t think it was blight as it was too early though there was certainly a lot of moisture in the air which would have favoured blight.

I think these were Charlottes

We didn’t have a massive crop, but it was a successful one: two lots of white potatoes and the Sarpo Mira – which can be harvested in late September – were a red variety. All were delicious, divided up between the three or four of us present and cooked that evening. What was perhaps most memorable was the excitement of splitting open the compost bags and digging around to find the potatoes. We were assisted in this by a four-year-old neighbour who giggled delightedly every time we pulled out another potato!

It’s all growing – growing so fast I can’t keep up. Our potato plants are huge, with leaves billowing over the old compost bags (wow! our compost must have been powerful) and we’ve now got flowers – good sign. Our fruit trees are looking beautiful with lots of little applets and pearlets and plumlets; we’ve even got blueberrylets and strawberrylets. Our green leaf beds are doing well: last year’s rocket is powering away, this year’s sowings of lettuces of various kinds are taking well, cavalo nero and chard seedlings are in and happy after the rain and beetroot seedlings, planted with two enthusiastic school children about a month ago, are doing well. We’ve got beans and courgettes surrounded by marigolds and the leeks and onions, sown earlier in the year, are growing well.

Slugs and snails are a bit of a problem this year, but the grease bands around the fruit tree trunks seem to have worked – amazingly. Certainly the station trees are doing better than my own plum trees which have been badly attacked by rosy aphids, and I forgot to give them the grease band treatment.

And we’ve got hanging baskets of flowers: finally, Marlene has persuaded us by bringing hanging baskets and seeds, that it might be nice to have some colour around the place. We planted them up a couple of weeks back with petunias, geraniums and lobelia and put in plenty of water crystals and absorbent lining. They drip onto other pots when we water them.

It’s all lovely – May this year has been such a wonderful month of transformation. A cold and wet April meant we had a slow start this year, but May has given us hot days and lots of rain. It’s all been happening very quickly, so quickly that I haven’t been able to steal the time away from the gardens to post photographs of everything that’s been happening. That will have to wait …

Meanwhile, Mark has cleared the pipes down to our water butts so we should have a good supply of water with a couple of downpours forecast. It’s all happening …

We have experimented this year with potatoes in plastic compost bags using around a third of our own compost as well as compost from old grow bags and pots.

Yippee … The Sharpes Express first earlies are showing signs of life along with one or two of the Charlotte second earlies. Can it be this easy?

We’ve registered for Miles of Spuds, set up by The Green Centre, Brighton. It turns out that the Sussex Land Army women planted a mile of potatoes across Brighton during the Second World War and this initiative is to celebrate that.

Clematis ‘Pilu’

There’s a lot in this blog about the weather: our gardening lives are dominated by it. Today started out a bright cold morning: blue sky, sunshine and a sense of spring in the air. A morning designed to inspire optimism and plans.

Some of us had arranged to go to our local garden centre; it was the kind of morning when I have to be restrained from buying every beautiful plant in sight. We bought more dwarf daffodils and some pansies to fill spaces in the tree pits and platform planters, along with the primroses imported from Wales and some lovely red primula, reduced in price at a garden centre last week. We also bought another clematis (‘Pilu’) for the Lewes planter and leek seedlings (‘Musselburgh). I envisaged an active work session of planting out.

Indoor gardening

As we looked back across the Downs from the garden centre, we saw – and felt – the clouds and the cold roll in. The sky was bleak and overcast by the time we got out to the LRSP gardens this afternoon. We retreated to the conservatory to sow some more seeds. This is how it is at this time of year: lots of plans, lots of aborting plans cause of the weather – too wet, too cold, too windy, too frosty. This year has had a very different set of gardening frustrations to previous years: very wet and over 10c before Christmas, now dryer but falling to just above freezing at night and in single figures during the day. In March in the south of England, that’s unusually chilly. And not great for sowing seeds, which typically need 15-20c to germinate.

So this afternoon everything was in the conservatory: us, the seeds, the compost, the seed trays, the watering cans, the propagators – all a bit of a muddle. But we have managed to sow this week and last:

• Courgette ‘midnight F1’
• Lettuce ‘Lettony’
• Lettuce ‘Salanova’
• Swan river daisy
• Cleome
• Marigold French petite mixed
• Lovage
• Basil (Italiano Classico)
• Basil (Crimson king)
• Sweet peas (Giant waved)
• Cleome

So far no sign of germination, except the classic Italian basil: tiny green shoots pushing through the soil. Just enough to make me feel it’ll all grow, despite the cold.

Sandi Toksvig in her Brighton show on International Women’s Day urged women to get out there, and be active and joyful in a mad and somewhat surreal-ly skewed world. We were …  and will be: all four decades of us.

Yesterday was bright and sunny and for the first time in 2016 I spent the whole day in the garden, pottering and clearing. Sadly, this morning, it’s grey and overcast and we can’t do our planned garden centre visit. Time, though, to take stock of our seeding plans and … do the washing-up. Our seed trays and pots will need to be washed in Jeyes fluid (a dreadful smell, but one I now associate with the excitement of early spring) and set out to dry or be wiped down ready for this year’s seeds.

Last week, over a cosy tea, we reviewed our planting from last year and planned for this year.

• sweet corn: ok, but didn’t produce enough for the space they took up
• squash: the ones we deliberately planted didn’t do well, the ones we didn’t know we planted rambled all over the training wires for the mini-orchard and we all now have beautiful displays of yellow and green striped gourds in our houses! They do require space.
• tomatoes: for the investment in time, water and feed, they are not worth growing in grow bags and pots outside. My greenhouse probably produces enough for us all, so more ‘sweet million’ in grow bags indoors.
• carrots: need very carefully prepared soil – didn’t do much in containers

The problem with things like purple sprouting broccoli and other brassicas is that they take up a lot of space and get devoured by caterpillars. Rather more adventurous things like aubergines and peppers require sunlight, warmth and shelter. So we settled on the following list for our small site which gets South westerlies blowing through and where the only water source is our water butts:

• Shady bed: leeks (miniature), chard,onions, cavalo Nero (inevitably!)
• Warm front bed: courgettes (bush miniature), French beans
• Back slightly shaded bed: runner beans, rocket and other leaves, also beetroot
• Orchard bed: beetroot and lettuces
• And lots of basil and parsley!

We should also sow some marigolds and other companion plants, and maybe some other pollinator plants that will look pretty (and survive) in Marlene’s hanging baskets.

Last week, I was asked by our railway company, GoVia-Thameslink-Railway, to give a talk on funding to a gathering of people involved in station partnerships. It was a very friendly get-together, with lots of great ideas and a real commitment to what we’ve certainly come to feel is the core of a station partnership – the sense of community it generates. That’s what brings small-scale funding and donations, that’s what makes the whole thing meaningful.

I think we’re probably reluctant fund-raisers at London Road; we’d rather be getting our hands dirty in the soil. But looking back on our five years, we’ve been very lucky that people around us (local businesses, neighbours, local organisations) have helped us with small-scale funding, as well as lots and lots of donations in kind.

And just today, a new venture at London Road Station made yet another contribution to what we do. The Gorilla Kitchen is a mobile pizzeria, producing excellent fresh pizzas in front of your eyes at London Road Station on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s a great initiative, though it can’t have been easy setting up first in gales and torrential rain, and now in freezing cold.

We decided to try it tonight, got talking to the lovely people running it about the LRSP and the residents’ association. They mentioned how they really liked our herb planters; we talked about what fun it would be to have musical performances on the station terraces in the summer. When our pizza was finished, we tried to pay; they refused payment. We remonstrated … they refused. We compromised on a donation to the London Road Station Partnership. Not fund-raising on our side or buying advertising on theirs … but a shared sense of making a small contribution to the area.

As I promised my fellow participants at last week’s station partnership event, I’ve written up my talk ( Funding and finance is fun) and here’s a copy of the PowerPoint presentation which goes with it (Funding and finance = fun). All our attempts at applying for grants etc. are found on this site under Documents.

A particularly useful site on generating income for community gardens is https://www.growingtogether.community/resources