London Road Station Partnership Blog

We were delighted that London Road Station’s underpass mosaic was nominated for a national Community Rail Award in the ‘working with young people’ category. As nobody from Albion in the Community could attend, I went along to the Association of Community Rail Partnerships (ACoRP) award ceremony in Torquay to represent London Road Station. The weather was glorious, and the train journey from Exeter to Torquay down the River Exe along the coast at Dawlish and then alongside the River Teigne has got to be one of the most beautiful in the country.

As things turned out, the mosaic project didn’t win an award, but other Southern stations did: Purley got second prize for its mural, Hassocks came second in the most enhanced station buildings category and Southern Railway got third prize for its ‘This is Me’ campaign highlighting passengers’ individual needs.

As part of the evening, we were given some very silly things to do such as standing up with hands on heads (heads) or hands on hips (tails), waiting to be eliminated as our master of ceremonies flipped a coin. Only … I wasn’t eliminated and much to my surprise, ended up on stage winning the game. The bottle of Bollinger was perfect for the next day’s LRSP Harvest Supper and the iPad mini is great for taking garden pictures and updating the blog. It was a lovely evening, spent in great company with others working to enhance stations and bring them back to being focal points in the community – lots of inspiring projects. You can read about the winning ones here.

Thanks to Vanessa Cumber and others for the photos.

We are great fans of BH Food Partnership – they’ve supported us from the beginning, when the garden was created in 2011 and indeed before that when we had an extraordinary street party in Ditchling Rise when we covered Shaftesbury Place with vegetable seedlings which neighbours could take away.

So we’re really pleased to feature in their latest video: well done to all who have worked with BHFP and thank you for the great work you’ve undertaken. It makes a difference!

We’ve cleared the remains of beans and sweet corn in the central raised bed. They seemed to have got very scrappy and didn’t grow brilliantly. Before we do any more planting, I decided to check the ph of the soil.

We are used to very alkaline soil down here near the South Downs and chalky cliffs. Surprisingly, therefore, our soil is rather on the acid side at 5.2. But it’s soil in our raised beds, rather than directly on the ground.

This is too acid to be optimum for most vegetables which like soil to be between 6-7. As an Australian site puts it: “Plant growth and most soil processes, including nutrient availability and microbial activity, are favoured by a soil pH range of 5.5 – 8. Acid soil, particularly in the subsurface, will also restrict root access to water and nutrients.”

I suspect this acidity has built up because we have put a lot of our compost into the soil – maybe too much. We like to think that organic material feeds the soil, but we may have got the balance wrong. We also used a fair amount of manure at the beginning – and we’ve incorporated Growmore at various points.

The obvious solution is to add lime: it seems so odd, since I am constantly dealing with too much alkalinity in my own garden. But it may be that with a summer of drought and deluge, the soil in our raised beds has just leached elements which would have kept the balance.

I’m going to monitor it – so that we can gradually adjust the composition of our soil ready for the next growing season. Useful websites on soil acidity can be found here and here

In August last year, a team of 12 16 year olds from a National Citizen Service scheme led by Albion in the Community were creating a wonderful mural in the underpass at London Road Station.

At the time, the team were uncertain they would ever finish the artwork in time, let alone whether it would last … but it has, and it’s a great addition to our station. And this year, their mosaic has won national recognition. It’s up for a national station award from the Association of Community Rail Partnerships. This is huge credit to the young people involved, to their belief and their energy – and to the massive commitment of their team leader, Ami.

We’re delighted, and wish you all the best at the ACoRP national award ceremony in Torquay.

Meanwhile, we’ll be attending Brighton & Hove’s City in Bloom award ceremony on 22nd September: we’ve been shortlisted again in the Best Community Garden category and have entered for the Edward Furey Cup which recognises community spirit … which leads me to reflect on the fun we’ve had, and continue to have, in the station partnership and on all the wonderful people who’ve contributed in all kinds of different ways to our gardens and events at London Road Station. That’s community spirit! Thank-you!

Squirrels don’t plant sunflowers, I thought to myself as I watered the shady garden this evening. So how did a drooping mini-sunflower come to be sitting in one of our ceramic planters? Well, it’s August – there are mad humans about the station and yes, this weekend, for once, the minor vandalism was human in origin, not attributable to the usual delinquent squirrels.

Two of our newly planted fuchsias in the platform planters have been sat on, some of their stems broken. Inevitable, I suppose, when the planters are at seat height and there are few seats on the platforms. I’ve come over all school-marm-ish and asked people waiting to please not sit on the plants. The response that makes me smile is ‘Oh but I’m only sitting on the wood’. It almost seems like people believe the plants aren’t really there.

But the oddest human intervention this weekend wasn’t careless – quite the contrary – just rather mad. On Saturday night, someone had scrambled into the shady plot, dug a hole in one of the ceramic planters, planted a miniature sunflower, taken the trouble to water it from the water butt using the watering can and chalked on the wall: ‘D + Richie’ with a tree and an arrow pointing to the sunflower.

It was really rather touching – but sadly misguided as the ceramic planter is in deep shade, not at all what sunflowers like. And also sadly, ‘D + Richie’ had managed to uproot two small heucheras from the planter. But all is not lost: I want you to know, D + Richie, that your sunflower has been repotted and is now recovering in my greenhouse. The heucheras have also been repotted and should grow back. And we’ll plant your sunflower in the tree pit where it should enjoy the full sun. Do come back and admire it some time.

Also to appear in the tree pit is a special French marigold, the one with bright jester strips, this time the result of kindness. This is a gift from Miranda @MirandasPlants, who sells beautiful plants at nearby Florence Road Market. She stopped by the garden last year to pick up some seeds from a flower we had growing. In return, this season, she’s donated this pretty marigold which will sway in the wind with our nicotanias and cosmos.

Meanwhile, the water butts have run dry again. It’s been a glorious three days with temperatures here in the mid-twenties, but we’ve had no rain this last week and the soil is parched.  In this dry weather at this point in the season, our fruit trees need 20 litres each a week – and there are seven of them. That’s 140 litres just for the mini-orchard alone. We have water butts storing around 500 litres – probably what we require for a weekly watering. I was counting on downpours this Tuesday but the forecast has changed. Fingers crossed it rains tomorrow.

Our foxgloves in west planter June 2015 (@LondonRdLAT)

Though we tend to focus on our edible growing plot, we love our platform planters and the tree pits outside London Road Station.

The platform planters are quite shady while the tree pits are in full sun, with young trees greedy for moisture: a challenge for planting on both scores. But what’s been chastening – putting us gardeners in our place – is just how joyfully wayward the plants in these areas seem to have been.

First candidate for plant bloodymindedness: our foxgloves. Tolerant of shade, pretty robust and attractive to bees, these were supposed to be the showpiece of our platform planters last year. They did nothing but put on leaf and sulk, though inexplicably one decided to flower in November.  This year, though, they sprung up all ebullient with a lovely show of flowers, as in the photo above tweeted by @LondonRdLAT.

‘Nick’s’ planter with new nicotanias July 2015

We did think about trying to cut back their crazy spires and make them all neat and tidy, but the bees were clearly having a great time in the ‘gloves’, so we left them until all the flowers had disappeared. Philippa and I took them out last Thursday. We replaced them with nicotanias we had grown from seed and hope they’ll survive the strong winds.

Verbena bonariensis August 2014

Next up are the verbena bonariensis in the tree pit on the right side of the station building in Shaftesbury Place. Last year, we planted a lot of verbena – they self-seed in my garden – and they performed beautifully, waving purple heads in the wind.

This year, we counted on self-seeded plants doing the work again for us – but no! Like a cat ignoring the basket thoughtfully purchased by its owner, our verbena

Verbena bonariensis outside treepit and red poppies inside  June 2015

have decided they like growing just outside the tree pit. You can see the line of strong plants just outside the wooden frame in the photo. We’ve left them to grow on, admiring their chutzpah. On Saturday, I teased out a few for taming and have potted them on.

And just look at the colour of those poppies: strong blood red, not the usual orange-red or floaty pink . Neighbours have admired them and asked for seed. But we don’t really know where they came from. I know we’ve scattered odd packets of seed around the tree pits, including some poppy seed. What makes me smile is that had we deliberately set out to grow these poppies, they probably wouldn’t have taken half as well. We took them out last week as they had finished flowering, but shook the seed heads over the tree pits. We’ll see what happens next year.

Marigolds and verbena bonariensis in the ‘traffic calming’ planters

Finally, it’s a relief this summer not to be trying to water the four large black planters at Preston Circus. They’ve been ‘decluttered’ from Preston Circus but set to work on traffic calming in Viaduct Road. When I passed them back in June, I did however feel a certain nostalgia for the evenings of slopping watering cans from Calvary Church across to the islands in the middle of the streams of traffic. What was lovely to see was the amazing growth of colourful flowers in the planters: marigolds, nasturtiums and plenty of … verbena bonariensis. I’ve asked around: nobody is owning up to guerrilla gardening, so I can only conclude that the planters have done their own thing and self-seeded from the plants that grew there last year. Humbling and inspiring!

Obsessing about the weather seems like a feature of gardening life. This has certainly been true these last few weeks. We’ve had beautiful sunshine and warmth for about two weeks: a lovely hot late June. But with that has come the worry about water. We rely on our water butts for watering the gardens at London Road Station and now there are the tree pits and the platform planters that require attention.

The water butts have already run dry once three weeks ago. Last Wednesday on the hottest day ever recorded in the UK for July our water butts ran dry again in the edible plot. And of course July is holiday time, so it’s been tricky coordinating our watering rota. I was in despair. We moved plants that we could (our tomatoes) out of the sun into as much shade as we could get.

This morning I was planning a garden version of a gym workout, moving around 200 litres of water from my water butts into those of the station garden: that’s a short walk with 20 watering cans, one in each hand ten times over. Hey, people do weights for 30 minutes in the gym, so why not a more functional exercise?

I had just finished watering the greenhouse when the rain started. The odd thing was my immediate illogical reaction: oh no! it’s raining just when I need to be out porting water into the station garden! Wet but wiser, I praised the weather for relieving me of my onerous task.

This is often how it is: just when we think there will be no more water for a while and all our plants will die, it rains … hard. I’ve been glued to my weather forecast ap for the last few days, but this fortuitous downpour was not on the horizon. Thank-you weather! Just goes to show: never give up!

Another year figuring out how to construct a bean support

So far it’s been a really wonderful start to the gardening year. Everything is in bloom. We’ve had warmth and some rain. OK, so tomato seedlings are now starting to sulk a bit because the sun hasn’t consistently been shining, but beans and courgettes are growing happily and our fruit trees are looking magnificent.

The edible garden is really filling up. We’ve planted our sweet corn, our courgettes and beans in the central bed. We’ve got lovely chard in the back central bed and we’ll plant some more beans tomorrow. The shady leaf bed now has sorrel, leeks, chives, parsley, variegated sorrel and our replanted mint. Where are we going to put cavalo nero? Probably in the place of the variegated sorrel which all of us find unpalatable and attracts aphids.

Under the far apple tree, our oriental leaves are going strong, despite numerous thinnings. Madeleine’s beetroot seedlings are growing on, as are the leeks. We’ve got dwarf peas in pots and courgettes in the middle orchard bed, and then a new strawberry bed underneath the pears. We’ve planted lettuces in a window box and renewed our herbs.

The new green shoots of our plum tree

Our fruit trees this year seem to be growing very strongly. The pear nearest the gate is covered in fruit; the next one in is a little less vigorous – it’s got a bit of leaf curl and it’s deformed the lower fruitlets. I’ve just taken off the mottled leaves and pinched off the deformed fruitlets.

The apples are far less infested with aphids than last year, though I need to get up a ladder to spray and squidge the infestations at the top of the trees. I’ve been rubbing out the growing tips of new shoots on the plum, and to some extent on the apples and pears, to stop them growing more branches. It looks like we should have good fruit on the apples and pears, but perhaps less on the plums. We’ll see …