End of the season

It is definitely Autumn. The trees in the woodland wildlife area are looking bare, most of their leaves on the ground below, or scattered around the community garden. Something I had not thought about before now, before being more aware of biodiversity and climate change, was that this shedding of leaves is very beneficial. These leaves will break down, rot and feed the soil below, feeding the trees and surrounding plants. Its a way of self-feeding really, when you think about it. When we as gardeners make compost, we look for a mix of green materials and brown materials, leaves are classed as brown. Its often hard to come by brown, which is actually ideally the material you should aim to have more of in your compost bin, but this is hard as we tent to put a lot of green into our compost bins, such as weeds, grass clippings and of course vegetable foliage. Find out more about the art of composting here.

I got some inspiration from Huw, a YouTuber, gardener and author, who I have mentioned before in previous blogs, who talks about using what you already have in your garden to improve your soil. In one of his recent videos, (watch here) he uses the foliage from vegetables he has harvested to place on the top of his soil in his raised beds, as this will rot into the soil and only improve it. He also does the same with weeds, where when weeding, he simply digs up the weed, then leaves it where it is to rot back into the soil. It was this idea that made me approach the volunteers about collecting the leaves from our woodland wildlife floor (not them all, considering the trees very much need them to rot into their soil) to lay on our raised bed soil before we cover them over for the winter. This is known as mulching. Covering them over is something new for us, we have previously just left them over winter, but then this allows some weeds and such to grown (even in winter). Covering them will allow no sunlight in and therefore nothing will grow, meaning we just have to uncover them in the spring and get started planting for the new season and year. The leaves under coverage will rot down into the soil faster (and of course won't blow away). We also have obtained some well-rotted manure for our beds, which we will dig into the beds before covering them over with our leaves mulch and then tarpaulin.

Two of us headed out to the garden yesterday, along with my youngest son, and we harvested most of the remaining vegetables in the beds, in the aim of getting the beds ready to prepare for the winter, as mentioned above. We managed to clear 5 of the beds and 3 are left with some veg in them. One is full, with parsley, purple kale, regular kale and leeks. Another bed is half-filled with beetroot and the last bed is half full of leeks. We are going to leave these over the winter, as the kale and leeks will do ok over the cold months are come back to life in the spring, with the parsley probably dying down over the next few months, but we didn't want to lift it all as it would be such a waste. Please do help yourself. The beetroot is still a bit small (they did get planted late) so we wanted to leave these to see if they come on any before the cold really hits.

The vegetables we did harvest included red cabbage, turnip, swede, radish and pak choi, which we took home to wash and prepare to be donated to the Fintry Church Food Larder, a great new initiative offering food to the locals of Fintry during these pressured times we find ourselves in. It has been great collaborating with the church and being able to provide fresh, locally grown vegetables to locals of the area. We prepackaged these to prevent lots of people touching them and provided them in bags (paper of course) along with our new leaflet and some ideas/recipes for the vegetables. Something we might want to consider moving forward for next season is the audience we are aiming at/catering for and might be worth having a brainstorming session with community involvement to see what vegetables (and hopefully fruits) they would want to see in the garden, they would want to get from the garden and that they would eat/use. I don't even really know what to do with pak choi for example! ON that note, I think its also important we do introduce people to new and unknown fruits and vegetables as we all are aware of the benefit of these on our health. I wrote about this in a previous blog, but also see this YouTube video on why fruit and vegetables are vital for health.

As this slow down (even slower than possible due to COVID19 restrictions) it was great to receive an email yesterday from RHS Britain in Bloom to suggest we had been awarded a certificate of recognition for our hard work, efforts and determination of the year during this pandemic.