Here you can read about how our research is developing. People we meet, places we visit.
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www.landshare.net
is a great idea!
With allotment waiting lists massively over-subscribed and people right across the country keener than ever to grow their own fruit and veg, the aim for Landshare is to become a UK wide initiative to make British land more productive and fresh local produce more accessible to all.
Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall is supporting it (I wonder if he's sharing his land...!) and it looks to launch early next year. You can register online for updates.
Posted 2008/12/05 18:01 by Karen : 0 comments : leave a comment
Yesterday with some kind help (and safety guidance) from Newham Homes I got to go and stand on the top of the tower block that you normally see in the background of all our images of Abbey Gardens. I wanted to see if the garden layout we marked at the weekend was visible from up there ... at the time I couldn't really make it out but when I downloaded the photos later I could just see the outlines, here I've enhanced them a bit so you get the full effect!
Posted 2008/11/12 19:23 by Nina : 0 comments : leave a comment
Near my hometown Largs in Ayrshire, I was really pleased to read about Fairlie village's community organic garden, a fantastic 40 large raised beds and counting.
See some images and info here. Darn it, they have even invented a special wormcast (i.e plant food) producing box which I for one will be trying out.
Their website also includes pictures of the filming of the Beechgrove Garden TV show on their lovely seaside site. To readers from south of the border, this will mean nothing, but to any Scottish gardener born in the last 80 years this level of acclaim is up there with appearing on X factor or Strictly. To this iconic show - shot in farflung Aberdeen- I owe the early appearance of my green fingers, it being one of the two TV shows I remember watching only with my mum, the rest of the family must have lost the will to live at what I found to be gripping explanations of gooseberry pruning techniques.
BTW The other show was Come Dancing.
En route for home after the Abbey Gardens laying-out day I was amazed to find myself next to Carol Klein, presenter of BBC Gardener's World, on the London tube. Being quite a fan, I tried to remain casual and respect her privacy for all of 90 seconds before realising this was the opportunity of a lifetime. She was charm personified as I screeched over the train racket about how my garden had been pipped to the post for the NGS Open Garden TV series that she presented (my opener, it's true, it had), my recent project on Exmoor, near her home and nursery (profuse apologies for not having visited, trains and plants being incompatible), and this really exciting garden project in London.....
Themes : Beechgrove Garden, Carol Klein, Fairlie
Nina had spent quite some time calculating just how long this particular piece of high-visibility string should be, the answer coming out as 1.83km. I think.
However, the technique eventually "selected" (or fallen upon ;-)) for marking out the grid of beds meant we had to string across paths, not just around them.
So we probably should have had another kilometer for this massive cats-cradle-on-the-ground, but in the eventuality we reused string after spraying the lines with road-marking paint...
The only comparable experience I have had was the laying out of my raised bed vegetable garden at home at Lawson Park, where the weather was even worse than on Saturday, and the terrain a good deal less flat. However I do recall the propensity for string to get very tangled, my inability to tie a reliable knot and the dawning realisation of the vastness of the job ahead. I seemed to have failed to learn from any of this and even forgot to bring a waterproof for the Abbey Gardens laying-out. (A nice FOAG sorted me out with one when my ponyskin coat began to smell of wet dog)
After a few false starts caused by erratic rainbursts Nina and I and the many FAOG settled into not unchaotic (but still productive) teams who marked, measured and sprayed with some urgency in the darkening afternoon light. The session brought to light some of the mistakes in the Council’s measurements on plan, and also some significant issues with soil levels and the crooked south facing wall, all of which inform the next stages.
Themes : string theory
Andreas, Gordon and I have all now added our images from the Mark Up day into the Flickr Group ...
The Friends of Abbey Gardens & Somewhere invite you to two weekend events as part of
On Saturday the 8th of November we will be leading a 'layout day' at the Abbey Gardens site. Working with string, tapes and spray paint we will be literally marking out the design for next years Harvest Garden onto the grass at Baker's Row.
It should be a fun afternoon outdoors with lots of potential for measuring and string mistakes! Liberal tea brakes will be programmed into the schedule.
We will be meeting at Abbey Gardens at 12.30 for the all-afternoon project, please wear suitable clothing and footwear, and do bring along any coloured string you have to help us mark out the beds. Children are welcome but must be supervised.
Following on from this we will also be meeting on Saturday the 15th of November to build some compost bins and a test raised bed on the site ... again all welcome. Meet at the gardens from 12.30 onwards.
Posted 2008/11/07 13:47 by Nina : 0 comments : leave a comment
During the summer we visited the nearby St Mary's allotment and I spotted pods like these in the 'show' they were holding alongside their barbeque. I tracked them to an Asian family who told me that they are the fruit of radish plants allowed to flower.
So when mine ran to seed a few months ago I thought I'd leave them in the ground and see what I got. These plentiful pods are indeed very good to eat, briefly stirfried or steamed, and they couldn't be easier to grow.
Themes : Lawson Park, radish pods
I saw an image (in art monthly) of this great project at PS1 called Pf1 .
Public Farm 1 is a project designed by WORK Architecture Company for P.S.1's Young Architects Program. I loved the way they've used the cardboard tubes to create the bed shapes, and embed all sorts of other features in the structure. There's lots more information and a good timelapse movie of the construction on this website: www.publicfarm1.org
If you are interested in getting involved with Abbey Gardens and What Will The Harvest Be? come along to the Friends of Abbey Gardens AGM this coming Saturday ...
Please join the Friends of Abbey Gardens (FOAG) at our Annual General Meeting on Saturday the 18th of October 2008 from 11:00am at the Salvation Army, Paul Street, E15.
Abbey Gardens is a new green space opposite Bakers Row, E15. The Friends of Abbey Gardens are a voluntary group of local residents. Our aim is to improve Abbey Gardens and turn it into a thriving community garden.
We would like to invite everyone who is interested in improving our local area and is curious about gardening to come along to the Annual General Meeting. We will be talking about recent developments, giving an update on the arts commission for the garden and recruiting new members for next year’s gardening season.
In particular we would like to invite new “friends” to join our Management Committee. New members of the Management Committee will be voted into their posts at the Annual General Meeting.
The artists Nina Pope & Karen Guthrie from Somewhere.org.uk will be present to introduce their ideas for the site. Their project is called What Will The Harvest Be? and next year will focus on a ‘Harvest Garden’ designed to encourage local people to get involved – from total beginners to experienced gardeners. We are already looking for anyone who wants to get involved in hands preparation for the Harvest Garden.
We will have wild flower seeds from the garden to ditribute as well as Abbey Gardens produce, Light refreshments, tea and coffee will be provided. There will also be a play area for small children.
If you have any questions before the meeting please feel free to contact us via email on mail 'at' abbeygardens.org
It's in ...
With the Friends of Abbey Gardens we've submitted our first funding application for the Harvest Garden ... it's to the Community Spaces Scheme managed by Groundworks. There's a slightly odd first stage procedure where you email the form but then have to post your signature on the final page within 5 days or it doesn't go forward. I nagged Andreas about it so much he emailed this photo as proof of postage!
Posted 2008/10/13 11:07 by Nina : 0 comments : leave a comment
The Abbey Gardens Apples have been identified:
Dear Ms Pope
Your Fruit has been examined with the following result:
"The sample is a dark red form of JONAGOLD and probably the form known as
JONAGORED. This is a modern apple and the tree would have been planted
comparatively recently. It is a vigorous variety, usually crops well and would have
become weeping under the weight of crops."
Thank you for using our service.
Posted 2008/10/13 10:57 by Nina : 0 comments : leave a comment
We had a very successful wildflower seed harvest on Saturday with unseasonal warm weather. We gathered so many that we weren't able to process them all on the day, although we did make a start. The stamping kit we use for the the plant names on the packets proved very popular with the kids there ...
The photos are up on Flickr here
Posted 2008/10/01 16:28 by Nina : 0 comments : leave a comment
Before the seed collecting day at the weekend I asked Sharon Swift (from Urban Design who managed the site this year) to send us the list of plants that had been sown to see if we could locate them all ... Here's what we have:
An annual mix (approx. 40%) of White Campion, Corn Cockle, Cornflower, Corn
Chamomile, Corn Marigold, Field Poppy and Scentless Mayweed.
Along with a 'Butterfly' meadow mix consisting of 80% grass and 20% perennial
wildflowers (approx. 60%) including Birds foot trefoil, Red and white
campion, Chicory, Red Clover, Oxeye Daisy, Dandelion, Hemp-agrimony,
Common and greater Knapweed, Wild Marjoram, Black Medick, Yellow
Melilot, Wild Mignonette, Garlic mustard, Devil-bit Scabious, Selfheal,
Soapwort, Wild Teasel, Red valerian, Common vetch and vipers bugloss.
The annuals were sown to create an instant show this summer and are mainly
the ones that flowered this year. The meadow mix is there to create grassland and a more long term meadow just in case site remains undeveloped for anther year.
I think we'll be able to keep wild flowers at either end of the site alongside the Harvest Garden next year. We managed to find almost all the annuals to collect seed from - although I only found one lone White Campion.
Posted 2008/09/30 19:57 by Nina : 0 comments : leave a commentThemes : harvest, abbey, seeds
This is one of the many orchards at Brogdale farm which I visited on Sunday - as you can see Abbey Gardens isn't the only place with an excess of fruit problem!
I left the apples from our tree to be identified (to my slight disappointment as it was a 'modern' variety they were unable to do an 'on the spot' positive ID!) and went to a really interesting talk on grafting. We're hoping to perhaps run a grafting workshop at Abbey Gardens this spring, so that if we do finally loose our apple tree it may live on through new trees grafted from the existing one. I found the whole business of grafting different tree 'tops' onto a variety of root stocks fascinating, I was so eagerly taking notes on the 'whip & tongue' method, cleft & saddle grafts etc. that the odd phrases written in haste looked really odd afterwards - "essential must have good hygiene to avoid canker". To my surprise you can even graft yourself a 'family' apple tree with many varieties on the one truck - that way you can have early and late varieties, cookers & eating apples all on the one tree.
Themes : Abbey Gardens, garden, harvest, fruit
Anyone who travels through Stratford station (East London) may have already seen the feature about Abbey Gardens in the 'Stratford Grapevine' last week ... if you missed it you can read about it here. The newspaper is a project by artist Lucy Harrison who's become a 'friend of' the project through our shared research into the area. The sort of spider drawing on the front shows how all the people who have contributed to the paper are linked together, and is a nice map of the connections made, it's interesting to see how the 'spider' grows each issue and who else we know in common.
Having 'illegally' pruned and cared for the lonesome apple tree on the site (before we had official access), the Friends of Abbey Gardens are now enjoying the fruits of their labours with an amazing harvest of eating apples from a tree we once thought to be crab apple!
You can see some photos of their labours and the produce they've made on our Flickr group.
In the meantime we sent off some fruit to the amazing service at Brogdale to try and identify the tree. In our enthusiasm we sent the apples too soon, but this Sunday I'm going there in person for the cider open day and taking three new examples along ...
ID to follow.
Posted 2008/09/18 13:50 by Nina : 0 comments : leave a commentThemes : Abbey Gardens, garden, harvest, fruit
One of the things we want to try with the garden is making some links between the real space and the website via links embedded in the final 'signage' and plant labels. The idea is to try and collect recent history and record how the the garden (literally) grows rather than just focussing on its medieval past. While I was away on holiday Dasha (from Baker's Row) sent me this first story ...
... As you may know we have a garden full of oversized plants. I have been dreaming of offloading them to Abbey Gardens for some time. I know we that are not meant to dig and that there are future design plans. But I thought it would be OK to move just one plant in a pot. It was the Buddleia. Coincidentally there used to be a lot of these on site in the wilderness days and I thought it might be symbolic to bring one back.
Poor plant did not like the move from our shady garden to the sunny patch across the road very much. It's leaves withered but I thought if I keep it watered it would survive and come back in full bloom next year.
However ... the contractors that came to cut the grass on Monday must have thought that somebody just dumped the old, dead plant there. So they tipped it out and took my ceramic pot away!
Nevermind the pot... I decided I had to rescue the plant. So I pruned it quite a lot and planted in fresh soil back in our garden. I hope it will come back. It is a symbolic plant that Tom got from his great grandparents when he was born. They did not know that
Buddleia is a weed of East London.
20.8.2008
The Urban Seed Day went really well, and a big thanks goes out to Roy Vickery for his excellent contribution. The idea was to gather or sow some seeds for next year's Harvest Garden and to talk more about our long term proposals for the garden. Botanist Roy (of South London Botanical Institute) joined us for the afternoon and led a great walk around the garden looking at wildflowers that have been imported, blown onto or deliberately planted on the site. Besides just identifying an amazing range of plants from Mugwort & Corn Cockle to tomatoes & Physalis (!) Roy was also able to reveal some fascinating folklore about the different plants. Karen then gave a master-class on seed propagation, with some hands on volunteers sewing seeds of plants to be used next year.
Posted 2008/08/21 13:00 by Nina : 0 comments : leave a comment
We had a good time at the St Mary's allotments open day on Saturday and we hope met some potential new recruits for the Harvest Garden. When you see what they can do with squash you know why we want to sign them up!
More images over on Flickr
Posted 2008/08/21 12:55 by Nina : 0 comments : leave a comment
Come & join us on Saturday August 16th for an URBAN SEED DAY at Abbey Gardens ...
We will be gathering and sowing some seeds for next year's Harvest Garden and talking more about our long term proposals for the site. Joining us for the afternoon will be botanist ROY VICKERY (of South London Botanical Institute) for an informal afternoon of WILD FLOWER SPOTTING, FOLKLORE, SEED GATHERING & SEED SOWING.
We will be at the garden, which is opposite Baker's Row in East London (Near West Ham or Stratford tube) from 3pm-5.30pm. The event is free but booking is advised via our contact page.
The event is supported by Newham Council & Friends of Abbey Gardens, we will also have some exciting seeds from the wonderful Chiltern Seeds to give away. If you have seeds gathered from your own gardens do bring some along to swap - Louise has already given me loads of poppy seeds from her West Ham allotment.
Refreshments, materials & equipment provided. Sorry, no unaccompanied children under 14.
