Tag: manchester

After 3 years – we have cucumbers

On By jesskikuIn GardeningLeave a comment

There are a few ideas popular amongst gardeners that help to make gardening so beneficial for my mental health. These valuable concepts are experienced by engaging directly with the natural world, so instead of just reading something and holding it in abstract in your mind – you witness and experience it. The activities you perform in your garden are not just connecting you to nature, they are teaching you mentally beneficial ideas with repeated practical demonstrations. Embracing change and it’s cyclical nature, and viewing failures as lessons. Learning more from what goes wrong than what goes right.

Since we moved to Manchester, I’ve been unable to grow a cucumber. For a while I felt discouraged, and a bit rubbish about not being able to do something that I can see from social media many other people do well.

When I was living in Cornwall I grew BEAUTIFUL cucumbers, of course I did. I had a massive greenhouse on a large vegetable plot. I lived with my family (mum, dad and siblings) in an isolated place where gardening was my main activity outside of caring for my newborn daughter. We grew so many cucumbers I couldn’t give them away fast enough, strong and healthy plants that were astonishingly productive.

Cucumbers from our Cornish Garden

When I moved back to Manchester our flat didn’t even have a balcony. I loved being back in the city around the different creative communities here but I missed having a garden, a personal creative outlet. I tried but – despite viewing many gorgeous Instagram accounts of indoor growing – it didn’t work for me. When we moved into our house in Whalley Range I was so excited for the yard out the back. The entire space is probably the size of one of my old greenhouses, but just having space to grow after being in a flat felt amazing. I sowed many seeds, including cucumbers. After my success in Cornwall with them, over productive if anything, I was really confident about it.

My lifestyle here is very different. Working full time, enjoying an active social life and running around after my daughter. The seeds germinated fine and I had some great looking plants, but I left them outside overnight in April after taking them out to start hardening them off. A few glasses of wine and I forgot they were out there, they died slowly over the next week. That felt like writing a confession out, so I also want to add that I felt guilty about it – if you couldn’t tell by the fact I’ve mentioned it. I then bought a cucumber plant from Unicorn Grocery in Chorlton and put it in the greenhouse but I didn’t get a single fruit from it.

Change and learning. The seasons predictably move through each other, after every autumn we all get a fresh start. A chance to put into practice what we’ve learnt from our mistakes, with no hang ups or judgements – because nature is change. This year, I thought about it more. I read up on different varieties and tried to be more considerate of the environment that I am in now, not the one I had last time I was trying to do this.

I decided on a variety with much smaller fruit, which means not only are the plants themselves smaller – which is important in my limited space but they will take less time to grow and ripen. Which is important when you have no guarantee of sunshine and a relatively sheltered space. As I knew they needed less time to grow and ripen the fruit I could wait later to sow them, so there wasn’t the same urgency to get them outside. When hardening them off I guarded them like a mother hen.

Proudly holding this year’s Crystal Lemon variety

This year, we are in June and we’re eating from the plants. Homegrown cucumbers, from the small yard of a terrace in Manchester. They are not perfect. They are beautifully imperfect. Very helpfully for myself next year, I’ve made a lot of mistakes I can learn from. My plants with their damaged leaves and thin stems would probably make most allotmenteers blush, but for me adapting to this environment it is a massive improvement. Rather than compare my plants to other people’s I’m just buzzing with my own progress. The challenges of growing fresh vegetables and fruits in this particular environment, especially varieties that love the sun is really exciting to me. So for today, I want to celebrate this success.

Today’s cucumber plants

The benefits of going through this process for my mental health are massive. Removing shame from failure, seeing a change in circumstance or environment as a challenge to be adapted to instead of a personal shortcoming and actively learning or upskilling to learn from things that haven’t gone well, are all things that can help me. The thrill of improving compared to myself, rather than comparing myself to others through the lens of social media – is something that I can never learn enough times.

Damaged but fruiting

Seasons

On By jesskikuIn LifeLeave a comment

What I learn from my garden is that you can always begin again, and when you do you’ll have learnt from the last time. As summer has turned into autumn there is a natural break and space to rest. There is relief in the inevitability of winter.

One of my best germs of advice is to never be afraid of the end of the party. I work in events, so this gets dished out a lot. I’m realising now that this applies to many situations. We’re often frightened of endings. As a species we use stories to make sense of the world, we build narratives and have developed archetypes. For us the end of a story is a drop into the unknown. The anticipation of the end of a relationship, a job or a living situation can cause huge amount of anxieties in a person. Often the anticipation is far worse than the experience itself. Maybe this is a deep feeling stretching back from our fear of our own ending, the biggest unknown.

The weather has turned here in Manchester, there is a bite in the air. Outside the sunlight lights up my bricks brightly, but I know that I will need my coat. The leaves that rise behind my brick wall, from a tree in the park across the road, are a pale golden colour, mixed with weak olive and a smattering of very light brown. In the sunlight they look like they are meant to be that way, just as healthy as when they were a deep rich green. Their time is coming to an end and soon they will fall across the road and be swept along the park. Sinking into the ground below and becoming part of the earth there.

My garden has grown and become something outside of what I had planned. I didn’t care for it as much as I should and now the cold air stinging my face and my breath rising as I talk is gently letting me know that it is time to wind it down for this year. This season is over but that’s okay. I’m going to harvest the last of my fruits and then gently plan next year. Consolidate what I have learnt and maybe even start thinking about some sowings I can get in before Christmas.

Endings allow us to begin again.

Let’s Keep Growing

On By jesskikuIn GardeningLeave a comment

Sow the City have started a series of weekly webinars ‘Growing Manchester’ and I caught the latest one which introduced us to Longsight’s Let’s Keep Growing.

As I look across the sprawling sea of skyscrapers that is becoming Manchester’s skyline it is comforting to know that even now under lockdown different groups across the city are still actively working on making the place greener. As one of (if not the first) industrialised cities Manchester is not somewhere that you would normally associate with local produce and allotments. Sow the City are working to change that by working with local people to encourage growing vegetables and urban gardening. To grow your own in Manchester, with our limited space and lack of gardening heritage takes resourcefulness and tenacity – something we have in spades.

Mo and Juliet from Let’s Keep Growing gave us a clear, comprehensive and accessible presentation of how they made their idea a reality. Mo has lived in Longsight for 40 years and met Juliet through a housing co-op. After enrolling in the ‘Making a Difference’ programme through Amity CIC they started working on their plan to turn the alleyways between Slade Lane, Hamilton Road, Hector Road and Palm Street into a community garden. Let’s Keep Growing was born.

Manchester has many alleyways and reclaiming them as a shared community space that incorporates food production, homes for wildlife and socialising is brilliant. There is so much underused space in cities that could be used to grow vegetables and help increase city food security. They were keen to emphasise how much research and hard work is involved in getting this project off the ground.

Mo and Juliet found during their research that there were a lot of gardeners and a lack of green spaces, so the idea to bring people’s backyards out into the alleyways fit with resident’s needs. One of the things I really liked about their presentation was how they kept coming back to speaking to the people in the community, whether it is through knocking on doors or handing out questionnaires. They asked a lot of questions of people who were already there to ensure they were creating something the whole community could feel part of.

Longsight is a diverse area and part of the goal of this project is to promote social cohesion. One piece of advice they gave that really stuck with me was to create as many different ways for people to get involved as possible. Residents came out and shared food with volunteers on the project, shared seeds and plants from their back gardens and helped to spread the word. A lot of the time people want to be more engaged with their communities but they don’t have a channel for it, a reason to communicate it. Let’s Keep Growing helped give participants a shared goal with their neighbours, something to work together on and bond over. To encourage as many local people as they can there is an active effort to make the project as visible and accessible as possible.

Give the webinar a listen if you are interested in setting up your own community gardening project, especially if you are in Manchester because they deliver a really comprehensive plan to help other budding community groups. The webinars are every Friday so do get involved.

Reading the comments in the chat box it looked as if Mo and Juliet had sown the seed for quite a few listeners and I hope we’ll see a flurry of urban gardening projects happening in Manchester soon.