Tag: #community gardening

When things are a bit harder than usual

On By jesskikuIn Life2 Comments

It has been a bad week. Normally I love sharing pictures of my garden but I’ve been struggling with other areas of my life and I didn’t feel like I had the time to go outside and look after my plants. When I did go outside, I found that a lot of the containers I had used for potting had flooded and the plants inside were struggling. The pots came with the house and I had been in such a rush to get stuff in that I hadn’t taken the time to make sure they had good drainage. Gardening is an aid for my mental health, but this week it felt like another pressure on it.

My tomatoes which had been doing so well now looked awful and so instead of being somewhere that rejuvenated me and made me feel better, my garden now was another area of life that was struggling. I didn’t want to be outside and I didn’t feel like I had the energy to sort it out.

Sometimes you put something out there and it doesn’t work out. Sometimes through your own carelessness, something you hadn’t even been aware of circles round and sets you back. Or you weren’t as good as you thought you were and you have to deal with the realities of your own incompetence. It can’t be summer all of the time. Life is always teaching you, and if you don’t pick the lessons up fast enough there can be consequences. Some people are shielded from these more than others, I personally have a lot of privillege compared to most people in the world and I’m trying to remember that right now while I’m finding things a bit harder to deal with than usual.

I’ve been working on a community gardening project with some neighbours that formed out of a neighbourhood whatsapp group. We’ve been putting raised beds into a church. The person who has been leading on this asked yesterday if any of us could come with him to meet the group that tends the church grounds. I knew this would be a bit tense because we had accidentally used their compost that they had been working on for years, so I decided to go with him so he wouldn’t have to bear the brunt of this by himself. It was the best thing I could have done. We spoke with the group who come in once a month to tend the grounds, and one of them was very angry at us, but we managed to resolve a lot of the tension. I met a lady called Yvonne who is a member of the church and also has her own allotment nearby. She was lovely and really into what we had done so far. She showed us pictures of her allotment and all of the things she liked to grow. In particular sprawling pumpkins and pots of bamboo, because they reminded her of Jamaica. I left the church feeling more fortified, even though we were laid into a bit, and much more able to get back on with my own garden. I am always learning from my garden and the people that this interest connects me to. People from all over the world, a lot of them with a much deeper understanding than myself of the land and of how things work. There are so many patterns you see played out in a garden setting that play out in a larger form on life.

Guess I need to get off my laptop, give myself a nudge and get my hands back in the ground again.

5 Tips for Seed Security

On By jesskikuIn GardeningLeave a comment

Those of us who are regular gardeners were in for a bit of a surprise a couple of months back. 

Seed companies throughout the UK reported they were having such a high amount of orders they couldn’t cope with them. Either the company was so large that they struggled getting stock out because of social distancing, or they had such a mass of orders that they couldn’t meet demand. It seems Covid19 can leave no area of regular life untouched, growing tomatoes has never been so fraught! I saw a bit of backlash online against fairweather growers but I think it is more important than ever before that we release some of the pressure on our food supply chains. The more people gardening the better no matter what the initial cause. Hopefully it will lead to people being more environmentally conscious as well as getting more flowers out there for our struggling pollinators. Once you start to grow your own vegetables you realise how worthwhile it is.

One of the things the great seed grab of 2020 highlights to me is the importance of saving seeds and growing varieties of plants that enable us to do this. Should we only be relying on companies to provide our seeds for us when we have now seen first hand how fragile the supply chain is? 

A lot of people grow food to become self sufficient but don’t realise that by relying upon businesses for their seeds, their self sufficiency is at the mercy of market forces. You can gain some security from this by doing the following:

  1. Research what varieties of plants you can grow again

At some point I will write about the fascinating world of seed law and biology (no sarcasm) but this isn’t the space. It’s enough to say that for many common varieties of vegetables and fruits you will struggle to produce healthy plants from the saved seed. If this is news to you, I recommend looking at this. When you’re planning your garden try to think long term and get varieties that will create strong offspring. 

  1. Save your seeds

This is definitely easier for some plants than others! But like with anything you can start small, you don’t need to go from gardening noob to carrot essence siphoning magician overnight. The journey between those two points is going to be full of trial and error. Start with the easier plants, like peas, beans and peppers. Seed saving is one of those things you can start doing immediately and you can always do better. Have a look here for a little guide. Once you have your seed, make sure store them safely so your hard work doesn’t go to waste!

  1. Set up community seed swaps

Have a look around and see what seed swaps are happening locally to you, if there aren’t any – start one. Swapping seeds with local growers is a great way of meeting people with similar interests and a free way of diversifying your own seed supply. It also means that the seeds that you will be acquiring have had a trial run in similar conditions to the ones you’ll be growing in. Community gardening is a wicked concept and can grow from such meetings. If you want to start a seed swap but don’t know how to start going about it feel free to get in touch, my day job is events and I’d be really happy to give any advice. 

  1. Buy from independent companies

Smaller companies have less staff and a less lengthy supply chain so are able to react quickly to changing environments. Vitalseeds had a system during the mad seed rush where they would accept orders until a certain time and then stop accepting them once they got to a certain limit. Supporting these companies is important for the landscape of our seed sources, many of them with higher ethical standards than larger companies, but also they have the added benefit of being able to react quickly to rapidly changing situations.

  1. Get social

Social media is a tool, a lot of the time wielded by powerful people with different interests to myself, that most of us have access to. In that medium we don’t just consume media, we also create it. Which gives us a good opportunity not only to put out onto the platform more of what we see in the world, but also use it to serve our interests. Follow other gardeners. You will get a lot of advice and support as well as the opportunity for online seed swaps. You might find other people in your area and be able to trade vegetables when you have a glut. It will help you build an online community of other growers as well as helping you connect to growers local to you that you otherwise wouldn’t have discovered. Then if something like this happens again you can put a shout out for excess seeds, or cuttings and maybe find yourself in the position where you can support someone else. 

In the wake of coronavirus there has been a large increase in mutual aid groups and communities reaching out to each other. This is brilliant, and hopefully some of this increased community connection and gardening interest will result in more planned community growing. 

I’m not saying stop buying from companies altogether, but we can use this as an opportunity to spread awareness about the merits of seed saving and swapping. Not just for the benefit of our individual gardens, but also those of our local and online communities. By diversifying our seed sources we will strengthen food security with the added bonus of saving ourselves some money.