Bath City Farm update

Good evening!

The students are back in town, and we're inviting them to come and get their hands dirty. This is a quick update about the going on at Bath City Farm, which will tell you what has been achieved so far, and what's on offer.

If you take a look at the previous post, you'll see that we covered up the space with a weed suppressant cover. Now we're at the stage of turning the space--which is essentially just grass and thistles--into fertile soil. We've gone about this in a couple of ways. To begin with, we asked the advice of two experienced local gardeners from Transition Bath, who pointed and gestured a bit. Here they are.

They suggested a couple of lazy ways to turn the grass into fertile soil without too much digging. Here are the 2 lazy ways to turn grass into soil:

1) Cut the soil in bricks a spade's width on each side, not too deep. Pile your bricks up (with the grass on the bottom) around the outside of the bed you're digging. You've made a raised bed. Easy. Here's a picture.

If you look closely you can see one wall of the raised bed on the right, and a line of bare soil running up the length of the bed. That stuff growing on the left hand side of the bed is white mustard. White mustard is a 'green manure'. A green manure is basically a non-edible plant which is really easy to grow, and which is beneficial to the soil. It's a great way to improve the quality of the soil over winter: just chuck a load of green manure in, it'll grow like mad, and then in spring you chop it all down and bury it, so that it rots down and makes the soil really great. On the right hand side of the bed there's some rye grass, which is another sort of green manure. Different green manures have different benefits to the soil: I can explain all this stuff in detail to volunteers who come and visit. For now, let's hear about the second really lazy way to turn grass into fertile soil.

2) Cut out bricks of the soil as above, but take particular care to cut the bricks as shallow as possible. You basically want to just take away the layer of grass. Pile these bricks out of the way for a minute. Run a rake over it. Done. Here's one we did earlier:

So now we've got two complete beds. In the raised bed, we're planting green manures. In spring, we'll plant some vegetables. In the non-raised bed (above), we've got nothing. That's where you come in. There's plenty of vegetables that can be grown over winter and there's the space, tools, and expert advice available to make it happen. Get in touch at samdrewapicture@gmail.com and you can grow food for free.

Finally, what can be done with the spare bricks of soil? Here's one idea: make a compost bin out of pallets and line it with your bricks. All the worms inside the soil will get stuck into your food waste, helping to turn it into decent compost. Ace. Here's a picture. That's some cosy looking food waste.

Okay, enough from me. If you'd like to grow your own food, or have a day getting sweaty and dirty in the fresh air, or meet new people, or whatever, then get in touch with me at samdrewapicture@gmail.com.

Bath City Farm Update

Exciting news: we've joined up with the lovely people at Growing Together to kick off the work at the new Bath City Farm allotment, and they've given us £200 to help buy some tools and stuff. For anybody who doesn't know what Growing Together is, it's a project very similar to Student Community Allotments. Growing Together is based in Oldfield Park, where they work to convert disused student gardens into working allotment spaces for use by local residents. In this way, they bring together the students and the residents in Oldfield Park. Good stuff! We're hoping to get more involved with Growing Together in the future, and there may come a point where our projects join together in a very solid way, rather like a custard cream biscuit (the custard is obviously symbolic of our joint goals). I'll post more about our relationship with Growing Together as it develops, for now let me show you what we've bought with their money.
To begin with, we wanted to get a weed suppressant cover over the top of the allotment . Weed suppressant cover is basically a sort of posh tarpaulin which lets rain through but keeps sunlight out. It does what its name suggests: by stopping the light getting through, the weeds start to die off, which makes them a bit easier to tackle. The cover is also useful for that stage when you've prepared a bit of land, but aren't yet ready to plant anything in: if you put the cover over the top of the freshly-dug bit of land then it should stop the weeds springing up again.

So, do you want to see a stage-by-stage description of how we laid the weed suppressant cover? Do you really? Are you sure you haven't got anything better to do? Okay, here you go.

 

Stage 1: Get youself a big roll of weed suppressant cover.

 

Stage 2: Unroll your big roll of weed suppressant cover.

Stage 3: Realise that you haven't brought a hammer, and use a rock to knock in some pegs.

Stage 4: Lay on top of it. This is the final and most important stage.

After this was done, I spent a little time imagining myself as a weed beneath the weed suppressant cover. I was all like "Where's the sun gone? There's no sun! How am I supposed to grow with no sun? The rain can get through, and that's great, but I need sun as well. Hello? Hello? Can anybody hear me? Oh well, I guess I'll just die."

Following this act of genocide we decided to cheer ourselves up by buying some tools and a big lock-up box to keep them in. The lock-up box was very heavy, but luckily it was a sentient lock-up box and wandered down the hill to the allotment all by itself.

"Good afternoon. Lovely day for a stroll."

"Pardon me, goats. I am a sentient lock-up box. Please show some respect."

Once it reached the allotment, it unpacked itself. Then it built itself. It was really amazing to watch. You should have been there.

"Pardon me, I haven't got my lid on. Could you look the other way?"

"Hello. I'm Shirley, the sentient lock-up box. I'm very hungry."

We decided to feed Shirley some tools, before her hunger drove her to eat us. She was very happy with this.

"Yum!"

We fed Shirley the following tools:

1 shovel

1 fork

1 hoe

1 trowel

1 hand fork

1 pair of shears

1 pair of secateurs

1 pair of gloves

2 screwdrivers, which were used to construct Shirley. I know that I just said Shirley constructed herself, but that was really just a joke. It was actually me, I constructed Shirley. You can even see the instructions in the box. I am sorry if you are disappointed, but there is really no such thing as a sentient lock-up box... Or is there?

Shirley has a padlock which requires a combination code to unlock: if you get in touch then I will be happy to give you the code. If you would like to get involved with our efforts at Bath City Farm, then please e-mail me at samdrewapicture@gmail.com and I will be happy to help you. We need all sorts of volunteers: if you'd like to help out for a couple of hours doing some weeding, or if you'd like to grow food in one of our allotments, or if you'd like to give Shirley a colourful paint job, then please get in touch. 

Thank you to Anna Boneham and all at Growing Together for supporting the new allotment at Bath City Farm. If you would like to know more about Growing Together, then follow the link here.