The growing garden is a small allottment size piece of land beside my garden in Highgate. Once filled with beds and flowers, during the three years that I was working on the house it was abandoned to the builders – and then to the brambles. The brambles couldn’t believe their luck and made full use of my focus on the house and the main garden next door. They grew shoulder high with branches as thick as small tree branches smothering anything and everything that had got left in the garden.
Once I had contacted Paula and the Urban Forest Tribe and we had decided to turn this wilderness into a ‘growing garden’ for the children that she looks after, the writing was on the wall for the brambles. Two splendid groups of corporate volunteers joined us, the first one to hack the brambles back, the second to dig them out. Obviously, the brambles were not going to give up that easily and six months later I am still digging them out as they poke hopeful shoots through the soil. But they are a mere whimper of their former selves. In their place we have a serious rash of green alakanet but that is much easier to dig out.
So here we are now, the week before Christmas – and next Monday the whole Urban Forest Tribe team is coming:
• To finish the weeding
• To dig out the brick edging of the old flower beds
• To flatten the ground ready for the raised beds (to grow our vegetables) and the paths to run through the garden
• To dig out our new water feature
• And to plan benches, archway trellis to grow vines or hops, a mirrored trellis on the back wall, and lots of fruit fruit bushes and small trees….
Plenty of time you might think…
Not really because…
Our Growing Garden (in development) and my garden next door have been accepted for the National Gardens Scheme 2025. This means that on JUNE 22nd (a mere six months away…) we will be welcoming visitors in to drink tea and to view our gardens!
While my garden has now had a couple of years to settle in, the Growing Garden will still be very new. But we hope that we wil have some vegetables established in our raised beds and the bones of its future development will be in place.
More to come as we work on it.
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