harvesting chamomile

Hello!

Where on earth have I been? Summer has flown by, and for the herb garden it’s been a good one, though a little wet.

One Thursday saw me stubbornly gardening alone in a downpour, not wise at all. Currently coming up with a list of indoor activites for the rainy days of the future, whilst I’m happy enough gardening in the rain, it seems not most people aren’t, and I’ll have few friends if I try and make them!

In general we’ve had some good gardening days and so far this year we’ve picked for harvest: lime blossom (particularly fun), chamomile, lavender, hyssop, calendula, comfrey, lovage, peppermint, sage, chives, rosemary, lemon balm, milk thistle, southernwood, rue, marigolds, mullein, hops, chickweed, and dandlilion! Many are still coming.

We’ve sucessfully dried most of them, an have been infusing others in oils. Now we’ve just got to work out what to to with them!

• Turn of your tv
• Look up when you’re walking
• Garden together
• Have pot lucks
• Start a tradition
• Learn from new and uncomfortable angles
• Share your skills

The list is way longer but you get the idea. Start a tradition is my favourite, but I’m still trying to think of a tradition worth making. They are all things that are good to do, the idea that these days we need a checklist is a little depressing, but it comes from the fact that we no longer have a common understanding of what community is and how we should behave in one.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this so I’ll stop, I’m a little scared that I’m supposed to be a community gardener and I’m pretty much a community virgin. We try to build community at GMM, and me particularly at the herb garden, doing a lot of the sort of things found on Ali Mac’s check list. Sometimes I think I see glimpes of it, but it feels far away still.

I also learnt a new skill whilst on Muck, to make a rug on a peg loom. Mine was made from mainly wool from a black sheep and two stripes of a white sheep. It’s very easy but looks pretty good, you don’t need to card or spin the wool, just tease it straight from the sheep. When I find the relevant cable I’ll put a picture on here but it’s still in a box! I’m ready to share this skill if any of you want to make such a rug, all we need is a peg loom and a sheep fleece!

I also went around to a complete strangers house and was invited in for tea, the first time this has happened to me in Scotland I think. The lady who ran our b and b told me to go around as she was interested in herbs, we sat chatting for about an hour in her kitchen, towards the end of this I remembered to talk about herbs…

I’m going to try and make lip balm, I’ll let you know how it goes.

Hmm well lets start with my first ever gardening show, my loving husband bought us two tickets and nice lunch at ‘Gardening Scotland’, this is Scotland’s answer to shows like Chelsea Flower Show. They have show gardens, floral exhibits, speakers about gardening stuff and lots of stalls! They have a competition for school children called pallet gardens, which is a garden in a metre square space. Some were very impressive, some less so. The best one was a city garden, the kids had made some sky scraper buildings from polystyrene, and given each building window boxes, roof gardens and backgreens, brilliant!

There was an eco-friendly bit sponsored by Earthy Foods. It had lots of recycled garden materials, different groups encouraging people to grow their own fruit and veg, community gardens, native plants etc. I chatted to lots of people about this, bought a few plants we were missing in the herb garden, and learned about bee keeping, this is my new dream for the herb garden. First we need to join Edinburgh beekeepers association (done), then spend the winter going to lectures on beekeeping, then classes in the summer.

Anyway I digress, dwarfing this lovely little ecofriendly but was a huge area with shops, urging us all to buy unneccessary stuff for out garden (usually plastic), special clothes to garden in, stuff for out house. Even my beloved composters were at it, giving me an superfluous plastic stick to stir my compost with, eek! At leat it was free though.

Here I am trying out two methods of drying – hanging in bunches and spread out on a wire rack. I have two herbs found in my garden, geranium leaf and rosemary. Both will make a tasty and refreshing tea and have reputed medicinal benefits. Geranium is soothing and good for PMS (I’m drinking it right now and will let you know if it works). Rosemary is stimulating and and good for the digestion.

They should be done in around a week, I expect the rosemary will take longer than the geranium as the leaf is more rubust. They must be completely dry before storing or they might go moldy. You know if a herb is dry when it is brittle and breaks up in your fingers.

Guerrilla Gardening is when an individual or group of people starts to work a piece of common land, with or without (and usually without) permission from the land owner. I find it very exciting, as I think that regaining common land is very important. Council land, for instance, is owned by all of us, and the council of that town is paid to look after it for us. Sometimes this is done well and sometimes it isn’t but its important to remember that they are not the land owner.

So anyways, one of the things I like best about this plot is that in a place that people walk past all the time. As the gardening is done most often on a Saturday afternoon, there is the opportunity for people to stop t ask us what we’re doing, and often ask if they can join. When it started most of those there were not local to the area, now most of them are, which is quite a good example of local people taking ownership of a project started by outsiders.

Guerrilla Gardening is not a long term solution, but is an interesting method of protesting, of pushing the council and other relevant bodies towards including the community in the use and maintenance of common land.

Quite a lot’s happened since I last wrote to you, the biggest one being a big change in direction for my Saturday morning class. As the first term was pretty successful. The council asked to add a second class, one for adults. Which we did but for whatever reason there wasn’t people coming, after a the third week there was a few people , but no-one at the classes running alongside it (cookery, excerise), so the community centre couldn’t open for just an hour.

So te course lots its venue, I’ve kept going with it, turned it into a club of roving venue. The first one was last Saturday and we wen’t to one guy who was also a Master Composter and did a composting workshop and ate muffins and talked about growing things, local food, the economy etc. There was 8 people and it seemed to go pretty well. Forgot to take  a picture for you, sorry.

Next week we’re in another backyard, and planting climbers in pots.

A lot of my time at Greyfriars seems to be taken up lugging stuff about, stuff bought and stuff donated, luckily my flat and Greyfriars has quite good bus routes. Some stuff is just too heavy, for me at least. Just one bag of sand was quite traumatic to try and get to the bus stop. Paving etc is just not possible.

At Greyfriars we’ve decided to line our beds with monobricks (these look just like bricks but much denser and withstand frost better), we have one lot donated (and delivered) to us by Forth Resource Management. This lined one and a half beds (we have three). Then there was a man in Trinity with more on free-cycle, to be picked up. None of the volunteers had cars either, one heroically volunteered to take some on his bicycle trailer yesterday. I was very excited about this fossil fuel-less option. Unfortunately, the trailer broke under the weight of the bricks and we spent the next couple of hours carrying them across town.

I don’t like the thought that one needs a car to try and grow things. Will we just have to start doing without such things? I suppose there must be stronger bike trailers, but I don’t think I would be strong enough to bike long distances with heavy loads. At the moment a horse, or even a donkey is not a credible option for me as I have nowhere to keep it, but I’m seriously thinking of getting one in the future! I think for now it would be good to get more creative about making do.

Gardening, like so much of our society , is extremely commercialised. There are so many things that we are convinced that we need. It can be extremely expensive, even when doing it to save money, eg growing your own veg. That’s one of the reasons with the course at St Brides we are trying to use re-used items as much as possible, most of which have just been picked up (or rather, scavenged in some cases).

On Thursday we’re also hoping to have some friends round to share some of the things we’ve been learning and eat some hopefully tasty local food. I’ve learnt some new skills, such as how to make oatcakes and my bread is improving. We’ve learnt to appretiate a lot more certain foods, mainly spices and tomatoes. I’m not yet sick of porridge (how could anyone be?).

A fortnight ago I went to see Fife Diet Founder Mike Small give a talk for a local food group that’s recently started in Shandon. I was both encouraged and challenged. Encouraged that the Fifer’s seem to be healthy and happy with their food after a year, with a much narrower area than me and Josiah have given ourselves. Also that nearly all of them made exceptions of foreign foods they couldn’t live without, something I think we’d definately do if we were to carry on after Easter.

I was challenged in that Mike didn’t feel at all that Supermarkets were part of the solution to local eating, as the way that they are set up doesn’t allow for it. Even if a food is grown in Fife it will be sent to Devon to be processed and Manchester to be packed etc. I must admit that since moving to Gorgie my attendance at Sainsburys and Scotmid has increased manifoldly, I see them as a more ethical choice than Tesco or Asda, but still I would like to be going less. We get our veg from the veg box and most of our meat from the farmers market so I think we should be able to get by without going to often. Must do better…

So just in case you’re worried, it’s actually been a pretty good few weeks in community gardening world, I’ve just been quite busy running round trying to get everything done.

We’ve been improving on our first family class and have a bit of a better structure now. We try to have a project for half the class and a discussion / game the rest.

Week 2 we learnt about composting and played a game about what things should and shouldn’t go on the compost heap, then we made plant pots from newspaper and planted runner bean seeds in them, to be planted outside next month. Week 3 we made a container from tyres, and planted carrot and onion seeds in it, then had some discussion and a game about what vegetables can and can’t be grown in Scotland, as we’d like the families to start deciding what we’ll be planting in the classes each week instead of me. Yesterday the community centre was taken up with another event, so we had a trip out to Gorgie City Farm, where we were given a tour of the vegetable garden, compost heaps and greenhouse. I live just round the corner from te farm so have been a few times before, its much more fun with kids though, and more interesting to have it explained by someone who works there.