Seaford Community Garden

Take a large quantity of coffee grounds, several buckets of tomato plant trimmings, lots of unseeded annual weeds, myriad dead-headed blooms and several buckets of kitchen vegetable waste, mix all together and what do you get? Amazingly rich compost of course!

As the week’s chief compost chef, James said that the coffee grounds, saved by Nemeir and Sarah at Baca’s café in Dane Road, made brilliant compost when forked into the other ingredients. The tomatoes and cucumbers were fed by a mixture of this compost and commercial compost, lately generously contributed by Morrisons, he said.

Volunteers including James, Katie and Veronica had a big job on their hands, contributed to by the success of the compost: harvesting said salad stuffs and cutting off the tomatoes’ lower

foliage in order to let the light in to ripen the burgeoning trusses.

Some of the produce, including French beans being picked by Neill and other volunteers, courgettes and marrows, was being sold on Maggie’s sales table, while more produce and plants were being earmarked for the garden’s stand at Seaford Horticultural Show, for which volunteers were eager to not only sell it but also to demonstrate what a great place Seaford Community Garden in the Crouch is. what could be immediately boxed up and what should be left for the actual day, other volunteers were hard at work reducing apples to allow more room for growth, dividing irises, gathering Melianthus seed pods for germination and lavender for bunching and drying, and potting up oleander cuttings, these no longer being imported due to disease.

Meanwhile, on that early August Wednesday, on the classroom table Steph had placed one of her legendary cakes. Could life get better? To lepidopterists the sighting of a Jersey tiger moth on the garden’s very successful Macmillan Trail day might equal, it but it would be a close run thing. Thanks to Phil and his camera we have it on record that this daytime flyer alighted in Seaford, miles away from its more usual Hampshire to Devon territory. And that’s typical of this garden of surprises.

The Garden Team

Photos from top: Lesley with Oleander cuttings; First passion flower on the rose arbour; James spreads a mulch of compost on one of the raised beds; This Jersey tiger moth, captured on camera by Phil, visited the garden on Macmillan Trail day; Neill picks French beans; Maggie’s grandson Mark helping out with the apples; The courgette that got away… and grew into a marrow.

THE SHED MAN

ALL YOUR GARDEN BUILDING NEEDS BASEWORK, ERECTION, REPAIRS, REFELTING

Bill Henderson

hendersonpjy@aol.com 01323 891597