London Road Station Partnership Blog

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

It has been remarkably warm this December. We’ve only rarely hit single figures apart from a brief overnight frost back in November. But it has been wet … very, very wet. And wet’s not good for getting out and about.

Despite that, we managed a session last Tuesday December 1st at the station – the latest we’ve ever continued into the winter. Marlene and I cleared leaves and rowan berries from the station forecourt, removed the sad bits of cyclamen and the summer’s lobelia from the platform planters, and put in some more pansies and primula in the shadier tree pit. But wet and dark, even if it is warm, really is not at all motivating. Winter’s not meant for gardening, though I tell myself pansies, primula and cyclamen will brighten things up. I still have several waiting to be planted up into my winter window boxes but still haven’t got around to it …

There’s a hint today of blue sky out there but I shan’t be venturing out into the sodden garden as I recover from a wet winter bug.  Next week, we’ll have our LRSP Xmas tea, a spur to plant up those bright flowers and get the gardens cleared.

Our fifth harvest supper! Like last year, our harvest was relatively early and much of our produce was finished by the end of September. But this year we did have leeks – funny little green wisps in March, huge fat stems by September.

We started with two great leek soups: a smooth leek and potato soup followed by a spicy leek and sweet corn soup. We would have used the sweet corn from the garden, but that was finished by early September. Then a tasty vegetarian moussaka, made using our courgettes rather than aubergines, a salad of home grown tomatoes and lettuce and to finish, a lovely pear and apple crumble with our wonderfully aromatic fruit and a verbena water ice. Again Chris’ pinwheel wholemeal bread with a filling of basil (from the garden of course) and cheese was a delicious accompaniment.

Sweet corn and leeks – two things we tried this year for the first time and which were really successful. Our raspberries weren’t great this year – they probably got too dry – and the tomatoes outside in the station garden just didn’t ripen, though the greenhouse tomatoes were good. Courgettes were OK, but they went spongy pretty quickly. Pears were very good, but the apples and plums were a little disappointing: maybe it was the aphids. No two years have been the same …

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