Month in the life of an urban gardener: November.
Stephanie Steele
Textiles Sustainability Specialist | Organic Food Growing | Food-Fibre-Fashion Communicator
The tasks, problem solving, wildlife spots, learnings and reflections from an organic food grower in a North London kitchen garden.
Welcome to this separate reflection on what it’s like to be an urban organic food grower. I started sharing these insights in March 2023 with snappy videos that condensed moments from across a month, but realise that there’s an opportunity to more deeply share learnings and mistakes with you, rather than just funny little tidbits with no context.
Watch reels of previous months here →
November 2023. / October 2023. / September 2023. / August 2023. / July 2023. / June 2023. / May 2023. / April 2023. / March 2023.
As this is part of the Food-Fibre-Fashion publication, there will be stories and musings to raise your awareness of how interconnected these systems (food, fibre, fashion) are, even when we’re looking in small scale, such as an urban garden.
As this is the first in this series of articles — A Month in the Life of an Urban Gardener — I’ll give some context to the space and place I work in.
Over 5 years ago now I had left a job as a fabric shop manager (or rather, I was fired after yet another Islington customer couldn’t deal with my oftentimes brash Northerness). I became a freelancer and so was flexible not only with discovering new pathways, but with my time too. In my local area was a climbing centre that had a garden, and I thought I could kill two metaphorical birds with two metaphorical stones by becoming a garden volunteer. You received a climbing credit per session worked, plus some food, and that felt like a much better deal than working for real money in something where I wasn’t learning. I also had the ulterior motive (or I guess, frank motive) to understand how to grow my own flax for fibre, getting deeper into awareness of where our stuff comes from.
I became oversubscribed with freelance work; running an online textile shop, working e-commerce for a jeans brand, doing operations for a fashion marketplace. But giving up that one day a week going to a garden made me feel empty. It had become a need. So I applied for one of the traineeship spots, got in, and started on my horticultural journey properly. Not too long after my traineeship finished, I was able to glean some paid freelance shifts while real staff went away?… and then the pandemic hit. I stuck around unpaid for, I think, 1.5 years, before my colleagues won their fight to have me cast as a fully-fledged team member.
It’s a permaculture-designed space in the grounds of a now-converted Victorian water pumping station. Surveys show it previously as agricultural land. Wrapping around this fake castle, there are pockets for vegetable, herb and fruit growing nestled alongside outdoor and indoor climbing. The space is there for climbers to rest in, and for locals too (those who are able to embrace the intimidating building anyway). Pre-pandemic, all produce grown was given to the on-site kitchen for hearty organic dishes, but things shifted, and recently, there have been more extreme changes to the business that have seen us as a team needing to reassemble and adapt.
This means that our November tasks today are somewhat different to what they were last year, and will likely be in 2024. However, we still have an urban garden space to maintain no matter what food produce we’re growing, and so I hope over the course of these articles to provide insight into what seasonal stuff an urban kitchen gardener gets up to.
First up are the general autumn-winter tasks.
I should say that there tends to be a “summer” season and a “winter season”, with growers and gardeners not particularly following the in-betweens (or at least I reckon it’s that way across the board). Farming may operate differently — because springtime brings with it lambing for instance — but in a small site you either have your summer crops or winter crops, and with them the corresponding tasks. And as the weather shifts so rapidly, we rarely feel those distinct four seasons anyway.
General winter tasks then are:
On top of this are all the projects that were started but scuppered by the intensity of planting and harvesting. During winter you make dents in each of these, do the usual maintenance stuff, struggle to stay warm and do everything in the dwindling daylight/lack of volunteers, and then before you know it the crocuses have come up and you realise you haven’t done enough prep for the summer.
Teamwork makes the projects work.
In our space we host volunteers, which is handy to help us get through tasks that either a) we can’t be bothered to do ourselves or b) require more bodies. We do also teach, and encourage knowledge exchange and wisdom sharing, especially for our horticultural trainees. But managing volunteers becomes a battle of will, particularly in the very hot or the very cold or the very wet, because you’ve got yourself to deal with, and often your colleagues too. To add these people to the mix, means sometimes you simply don’t get around to any other job but the managing. You need to trust volunteers with jobs that are often misunderstood (because you don’t communicate clearly enough thinking it’s an obvious solution, or because they say they hear but they don’t, or because another one jumps in while you’re trying to explain and it all gets jumbled up). Therefore, you can’t establish yourself into something as you have to check on the other thing.
Sometimes then, you need to forego any time to yourself doing a nice gardening task and get stuck in with others. And you remember that this teamwork makes projects move more quickly, though you still really want to go and do that nice gardening task on your own another time. Frankly, in November, I did manage to scurry myself away to work alone on some maintenance things, and grateful for that time. I felt that I needed to do some sorting and consolidation amidst what otherwise was change and confusion, and thankful that colleagues were around (for some of the time) to take the brunt. I still had to attend meetings I don’t normally attend though.
What the team did/started doing in November.
→ The Raspberry Net came off. It’s capitalised because it is a thing unto itself. A massive nylon net that sits over the rows of raspberry/hybrid berries/grapes in what is known as Raspberry Row. It’s a hassle to get on and off because the posts are rotting and of different sizes; the plants entwine themselves in the holes; it induces claustrophobia; there’s an apple tree branch in the way; brambles and the creeping virginia by the fence at the edge get caught up in it too; often there’s dead frogs caught. The net is sausage-rolled up after de-debrising it, with gaffer tape positioned at the corners ready for unrolling in May, and we sigh in relief/shrug shoulder tension off.
→ Scaffolding boards on beds started to be fixed. We managed to repair a large quantity last year in the main veg space, but this time around we’re tidying up the Miniplots (community allotment) section and Herbistan. When you’re doing “no-dig” style gardening, scaffolding boards aren’t required and aren’t useful. Though sometimes the soil needs structure against paths or slopes, or beds need to be defined. The moisture in soil causes the wood to rot, and because they’re untreated boards (so synthetic chemicals don’t leach into the soil) they eventually need replacing. Fortunately it’s not too big a deal, as it’s just a couple screws drilled in to make corners, and usually a stirrup piece of wood for strength, but there is the worry that the whole amount of soil will collapse if for instance you’re on a slope. Or that the drill runs out of battery in the middle of a screw.
→ Along with the continued layering, turning and sieving of the compost, we’ve also been working away at the leaf mould bay that was established two years ago. Leaves are left to rot in a specific section, and after two years (sometimes quicker if the conditions are good for fungi) there is left a lightweight soil. This leaf mould is sieved to remove any contaminants such as rocks, and then it can be used as an amendment in planting to provide drainage. We plan to use it as part of the mix in our seed compost, rather than buying in coconut fibre; it’s low nutrition so doesn’t overly boost the seed, but provides a cosy matter for it to germinate. The leaf mould bay is emptied of the decomposed leaves, and topped up with fresh leaves that have been raked and stored since August when the season started shifting.
→ There are always unusual materials being discarded due to the nature of the business we are part of. This time around it was a set of metal lockers that my colleague ingeniously decided could be transformed into a smoker for garlic. It needs some work (locks had to be stripped off, paint may need to be sanded off) but was positioned in an area of the garden we reserve for our mushroom growing. Already requiring some work over here since many mushroom logs had rotted, this area is getting a revamp. I reckon it’ll be given a bijou (biouxjie? boojie?) name for the products it’ll create.
→ Strawberry bed love. As strawberries put out runners that then create new roots, there’s all these strawberry babies to cut off and store until spring. We don’t have the space, nor do we need more strawberries, so they were planted into a thin layer of compost in the plastic mushroom trays. Some fabric weed suppressant — that was found all manky in the shed I cleaned — was utilised on the bottom so the plants could still drain and breathe, but the soil wouldn’t fall through. These will be overwintered until we have a spring sale.
What I personally did in November.
→ Harvesting.
This dropped off because of a) less sun = less photosynthesis, b) less produce (some crops won’t show until spring/summer, such as garlic and broad beans) and c) our produce customer has changed. However, we have many beds of salad leaves and they will still grow, especially indoors in a glasshouse or polytunnel. Harvesting them prevents the leaves from going over (becoming bitter e.g. chicory or too hot e.g. mustards) and slows any chance of the plant “bolting” (starting to flower and then seed). With no customer this time around to take our salad, we simply had to take it ourselves!
→ Kiwi fondling.
Yes, kiwis do (or can) grow in London. Jenny is a small-fruited variety that puts out a lot of growth. The last couple of years she has been pruned “properly”, which means she didn’t have as many fruiting buds and therefore less fruit, but that’s ok because like with the salad, we don’t have a customer. Kiwis ripen off the vine and are stored in our polytunnel where the temperature is a bit regulated. They’re “fondled” to check for ripeness and sorted into grades. Some of them were taken by us to make jams, and some experimented with on pizza instead of pineapple…
→ Digging up horseradish.
If you leave even a small fragment of a root in the ground, this plant will grow a new root from it. Our horseradish plot has been getting bigger, eeking into the rhubarb section; there’s now this strange amalgamation of roots, however because rhubarb dies off come late September and horseradish is just about ready, they sort of make way for each other. Nevertheless, horseradish is niche and we don’t need this much of it. It was unfortunately dug up on a rainy day and then and washed of mud by a colleague who isn’t familiar with it, so the roots didn’t store well, got soft and went mouldy (someone took a handful of the better ones to infuse in oil for what I can only imagine being a firey herbal remedy). The remainder was left in the ground until a customer wanted some, and lo and behold I was able to dig up another small section. My experiment of leaving roots unwashed on a bed of straw in the polytunnel has so far seen them continue to be fresh hard roots.
→ Shed sorting.
With the need to start collecting and storing cardboard for tree mulching, we needed to reclaim a cupboard lost over the years to unwanted stashed stuff. Like something out of a cabin-in-the-woods horror, I went into this under-the-stairs cupboard (complete with stairs of its own) masked and goggled with brush in hand to clear out the cobwebs, and remove boxes of discarded crockery and kitchen equipment. It was very satisfying, but also very gross. Now housing crates of unusable climbing rope (that we repurpose around the garden such as with repairing furniture), a dedicated space for our event blackboards, a dedicated space for our extra apple storage crates, and a dedicated space for all the cardboard, with probably still some spiders but no cobwebs, this was one consolidation I’m stupidly proud of. All the stashed stuff was then washed and put on Freegle.
→ Area tidying / path clearing.
Last year I attempted to fix the area in front of our main glasshouse door. It gets muddy, there’s gravel, the rubber matting slips. So I sat down and started digging out gravelly clay from the square in front of it, removing a couple inches of mud to create a flat section. Finding some Crazy Golf-esque green matting with velcro in the horror cupboard, I cut this into segments to repurpose it as matting by the door. I can’t tell you how satisfied I was that this works, and is still working. The door is warped so doesn’t bolt shut still, but we can enter and exit without slipping.
I’d also discovered some of that classic jute matting in our skip (I had words with our builders for discarding such a useful material). The strips were placed by our staff room entrance and by the main garden entrance where our cast iron boot scraper is. The tiniest of additions and yet a quick problem solve for muddy shoes.
Our paths were switched in 2019 to have a grounding of Mypex (a black plastic sheeting that suppresses weeds) rather than wood chip. Every season (so summer and winter), because fungi eats wood and so it decomposes, the wood chip needs to be shovelled up and replaced causing a load of additional work (on top of hassle already caused due to the logistics accessing our wood chip storage area). Wood chip also gets onto the no-dig beds, making the boundaries of bed/path blurry and annoying. The Mypex reduces some work, but the soil underneath is worn into trenches allowing puddles to form or for leaves to accumulate; as the soil underneath is compacted or already full of clay, it doesn’t drain rainwater. Puddles and decomposing leaves = slippiness and discomfort. So one task is to quite frequently scrape away any mud from the paths to avoid this hazard. Despite it being a weed suppressant, some weeds manage to make their way through and these also then need squaring away. All goes to the compost! Circularity!
One volunteer even took it so far as to brush the paths (not my idea; I’d be too concerned that the broom would subsequently get mucky).
→ Worm feeding.
The worms can often be forgotten about in their vermicompost prison. It’s in a dark corner behind our shed, in what perhaps could be named the Soil Amendment Corner (or something snappier). A vermicomposter is a structure of pans with gradiating sieve diameters; the top pan is for veg scraps and cardboard (the green and brown of normal composting) to feed the specific vermicompost worms and all microorganisms before them in the food chain, and as you go down via smaller sieves, the decomposed matter (worm “poo”) also becomes smaller. You can drain off “juice”, or can open the bottom pan to scrape out a very mushy soil, both to dilute in water or put straight onto your veg bed. It is highly nutritious in terms of micronutrients because it’s come straight from the worms and is in a condensed form. But if the worms aren’t fed, they can’t digest it and make the castings (poo).
Over winter as the temperature drops, so too will the compost-making (like in any normal compost bay). I think the microorganisms sort of go into hibernation; they create heat through their decomposition process, though they also require hot temperatures (from carbon burning) to remain active. You need the greens to feed them, but the browns to keep the heat — which is why composting is like a lasagne. If the outside temperature is lower, then it’s harder to keep the internal temperature. So we’ll find that the worms stop eating so many scraps and we’ll come back to this in spring.
→ Comfrey barrel.
Also in the Soil Amendment Corner (the SAC?) is the comfrey barrel. Comfrey is a common plant with lovely purple or white flowers that bumblebees love. It acts as a mineral accumulator, drawing up minerals from one place and storing them, presumably to distribute them via mycelial networks to other plants that need specific nutrients. Gardeners utilise this by making a “comfrey tea”. Comfrey — and other mineral accumulating plants such as stinging nettle — are ripped or chopped up and placed with water in an airtight barrel (or at least a lid to prevent insects and debris from falling in). The intention is to encourage oxygen-loving bacteria that will eat away at the plant matter, decomposing it and releasing those accumulated macro- and micronutrients into the water. You drain this off as “tea” and use it on veg beds to amend the nutrients in the soil.
However, comfrey tends to have a smelliness associated with it, and that’s because most of the time you unwittingly create an anaerobic environment (without oxygen). What you really want — according to a soil scientist I did a course with — is an aerobic environment, and then the smell should be more like cow manure and palatable enough. The contents of the barrel need to be frequently aerated to encourage the oxygen-loving bacteria and prevent the smell that wafts over the garden exclaiming to everyone that you’re amending the soil. Importantly, encouraging oxygen-hating bacteria can prevent the minerals from breaking down into the water (and killing the oxygen-loving bacteria), so making the amendment and project a little worthless.
As we don’t need to amend soil during winter months, comfrey was added on this occasion because it was pulled up from a path.
→ Sage fleecing.
At the end of the month the temperature dropped and we got our first frost. Frost very quickly debilitates a plant by freezing the moisture content, and the leaves snap off or wilt once they thaw out. There are many frost tender plants that need to be moved inside to prevent frost settling on them, though for those outside in beds, they obviously can’t be moved. Our sage bushes were mostly destroyed last winter when we didn’t fleece them quick enough. We hadn’t anticipated the snow fall, and so there was nothing we could do but prune away all the dead woody bits come spring. We missed the coming of the first frost this year, but are now ready for any snow. It’s a little tricky to not have the sage bushes touching the fleece (a white breathable material made from polyester or the likes), which means frost can still get to those leaves/wood even through the fabric, so I’ll need to figure out another solution alongside the use of metal hoops for this one particularly bushy bush.
→ Yacón trimming.
Yacón is a plant of the daisy family, native to South America. It grows these huge bushy dragon skin-patterned heart-shaped leaves that are super soft, and under the ground are edible tubers. They’re crispy as a kohl rabi is, but coloured like a potato, and shaped like a sweet potato. The glycemic index is high so it’s usually grown as a sugar alternative touted in health food shops, but you can use it as you would a potato or even grate it raw for slaw.
However, it’s unusual and therefore we haven’t had much luck in the past with it being usefully used in our kitchen. While we reach out to new customers, I’ve left the roots in the ground but trimmed off the foliage that was wilted by the frost. They’ll be dug up and separated into tubers and roots; ok, so honestly I get mixed up between what’s what, but if we take the “tuber” as the potato-shaped veg, and the ”root” as the knobbly bit that the foliage grows from, then the tubers are snipped off the roots and stored like the horseradish once we have somewhere for it to go, and the roots are put back in the pots, mulched with straw and left in the polytunnel to overwinter. These potted roots are planted back in the ground in July for another season. I reckon we started with only a handful of roots 5+ years ago, and then over the seasons we’ve been able to divide and multiply; I even gave away many many pots over 2020 to other gardens. Free plants, essentially.
→ Film watching.
I didn’t do this during a garden day, though it was sort of part of my gardener role; to learn and bring back knowledge. SEED: An Untold Story is a new feature film about the impacts of genetic modification, control of seed production, and use of pesticides on our food security. The evening was hosted by a local advocacy group Sustainable Hackney. I didn’t get my hand up quick enough during the panel discussion to remind people that clothing is an agricultural product, and when we consider seeds, we need to look at all the systems, not just food.
→ Researching food.
Again, not done during a garden day (frankly most lunchtime food is leftovers warmed in the microwave and totally unsatisfying). But this involves a treat day visiting a favourite restaurant to explore what seasonal offerings they have. In October it was Brunswick East for the last of the tomatoes (their “seasonal on toast”) so I returned in November for their wild mushrooms version.
→ Community gardening.
I also do freelance garden work for a charity, leading sessions in green spaces and housing estates to engage locals in self-sufficient food growing, collective action, and fun activities like making leaf lanterns.
→ Cataloguing products.
So that we can reach out to new customers, and generally have a better framework of logistics going forward in this uncertain period, I started developing a catalogue spreadsheet. All our products with photos, when they’re grown and any particular notes, how and when we harvest them, and their price per kg. There are sheets for vegetables, fruit, fresh herbs and dried herbs. We grow a lot. Looking at our plot there aren’t that many beds across the 1.4 acre site, and yet there are so many plants for edible and medicinal purposes. What’s exciting about harvesting now for a wider range of customers, is that the weird exotic stuff that would usually not be prioritised can perhaps get some love. It also gives us the opportunity to try plants that may not otherwise have suited our cut-and-come-again model, with more opportunity to focus attention on herbaceous perennials for the forest garden, or strange herbs for our many herby areas. Plus, my dye and fibre garden.
→ Winterising the bee hives.
Earlier this year I trained as a beekeeper to collectively take over the nurturing of our apiary ready for when the original beekeeper was moving away. We’d lost all families (colonies) the winter before last, and so had two new ones delivered. They were moved in and were trying to settle over the summer. We manage them with minimal intervention, letting them do their thing as if they were wild. However, there are steps that need to be taken to help prepare them for winter. We’ve put them in these boxes after all, which aren’t natural (honeybees live normally in hollow logs), and so we do a few things:
Wildlife spotting.
No matter how busy you feel you are, there is always time to pay attention to the wildlife around. Sometimes I do feel guilty for stopping to watch an insect or animal rather than continuing with the task at hand, but realistically, recognising and appreciating what’s around (or what isn’t around) is the best way to understand the ecosystem. All too often gardening is about making everything look tip top, when really we are there as stewards.
→ Mini fox. Our resident fox Roofus has babies. We don’t know how many, but we’ve spotted a healthy little one a couple times. However many we have, they keep digging, they keep pooing, they keep destroying fleeces we put over beds.
→ Local cats and compost mice. I don’t feel I’ve seen ginger tomcat Ginger in the last month, but River has been around a few times (especially when the compost was being turned and the mice were revealed). The Norwegian fluffy and the grey tabby are rarely spotted anyway, seemingly more shy or just scared off by the boys. I think it was also during November that two dead rats were discarded into the Ridan (anaerobic hot composting tube).
→ Toads and frogs. They’re always cropping up when we move logs or weed paths or trim beds. They like damp dark places (don’t ever put them back close to a body of water, they’ve done their spawning and have chosen a spot because they like it!)
→ Caterpillars. It was still fairly temperate at the start of November, so caterpillars were hiding out on the tatsoi and kale in the glasshouse. We plant tatsoi as a sacrificial plant, but the cabbage whites still managed to nibble through them and move onto the rockets. I brought a bunch home for pets, they pooed too much, I kept one, and it cocooned itself. I’ve had a cocooned caterpillar on my desk for a month now just waiting for when it’s warm enough for a cabbage white butterfly to emerge. A funny thin wormy-looking caterpillar was also found on the kale, that would fall over in order to move forward.
→ Deceased bumblebees. All bees will either die or hibernate (only mothers i.e. Queens, to you) by winter comes. Bumblebees will be found in the nook of the last remaining flowers, captured in time, either too tired to continue flying — or perhaps they chose that particular nectar to finish on. I wanted to collect them and pin them, but decided they may in fact be useful food for another creature so let them be.
→ Wolf spider. In the horror shed.
→ Ichneumon parasitic wasp. Technically this was 30th October, but I had to mention her somewhere. The creepiest-looking insect with a very long ovipositor that comes from the abdomen; this goes in and out in a piece of wood to lay eggs. The eggs hatch inside termites in the wood where come spring they then predate and eat the termites.
→ Dogs. Apart from the random dogs visiting the climbing centre with their owners, we have staff dogs that provide all manner of fun during the day — but they’re not very good at gardening, to be frank.
→ Birds. The parakeets enjoy the beans of the Catalpa tree, and sit up there squawking away, chatting about how much they’re enjoying eating their food while the other stands guard. The Roundhouse Robin flutters in every morning when we have our check-in, just to remind us that it’s their territory. Canada Geese fly overhead in v-formations towards the reservoir just over the treeline.
Thank you for reading.
If you have any organic gardening queries, want to know more about something I’ve introduced, or if you live in London and want to come volunteer then do get in touch!
I’ll be back next month for December’s backdated diary post.