The Belleville Summer fair was blessed with fine weather today and a big crowd turned up to enjoy the many attractions on offer. The plant stall was really well supported and we sold most of the tomatoes, peppers and courgettes, some of the Italian pumpkins and aubergines and a fair few marigolds, busy lizzies, violas, begonias and geraniums. Half of the of the flowers were donated by Homebase - we just had to pot them up, so many thanks to them.
Many thanks to Peter Holland who proved an excellent, and almost knowledgeable, salesman.
If you have any photos of the fete please email them to jd@motionrecords.com

Carnival - and excercise amongst the tomatoes...

Belleville School carnival brightened up the streets of Battersea this afternoon as it paraded up Northcote Rd. The vegetable growing department managed to sell twenty four bags of swiss chard, little gem lettuce, spinach and salad to a captive audience of parents during the fine festival of dance and music that was put on afterwards in the school playground.
(Right: Italian Ridged Pumpkin - just starting to grow)
(Below: Marmande. Below that: Courgette - a few days from being ready to eat)
The mass harvesting of salads resulted in a major thinning out, leaving the year three and four beds looking a little bare; but they'll regrow soon enough, with a bit of luck.
There was also a major pruning of tomato plants (cordon varieties often having forked into two main stems when I wasn't looking, you know the sort of thing!) which has allowed more light to get to the tomatoes, and also revealed a couple of ladbirds trying to play leapfrog amongst the leaves, I think ( click on the image above right).


Above from left to right: Carrots with parsnips in the background, the flower of a french climbing bean, and and onion.

The vegetable growers union would like to congratulate headmaster John Grove, the teachers and the assistants, all of whom put in so much work to make the carnival such a success!

And the winners are....

The first tomatoes have appeared already and, for those interested in this sort of thing, the varieties that have fruited well ahead of their rivals are 'Marmande' followed by Tornado F1. 'Marmande' is an heirloom beefsteak variety which produces large, ribbed tomatoes of a very deep red colour.
They taste great and have few seeds.'Tornado F1' were specially bred for British summer conditions. They are very early and produce a compact bushy plant that carries a heavy crop of round fruits showing up well through sparse foliage. An RHS 'Award of Garden Merit' winner.
(Above: Marmande)
(Below: Tornado F1)
You won't see either of these varieties in the supermarkets because they are thin skinned and don't travel well (i.e. sit in lorries and storerooms for weeks being exposed to ripening gasses). These are very sweet flavoured and perfectly illustrate the advantages of growing your own!
The others varieties have plenty of flowers but no tomatoes as yet.


The strawberries are also doing well. We need some straw though, as this photo reminded me.

It's all gone bananas

Wow, the recent rain and sprinkling of sunshine has resulted in massive growth of many of the crops, the salads in particular. Unfortunately this co-incided with half term, so haven't been able to sell produce to the parents. Hopefully will arrange this for Tuesday......also have loads of cougette and pumpkin plants - and the tomatoes are massive, with flowers - all ready for some serious tomato action in other words! A couple of videos follow:








Tried the swiss chard yesterday and it was delicious. Treat it like spinach - my mother-in-law, who knows about these things, steamed it with a little nutmeg. Start with the stems and add the leaves for the last couple of minutes. Yum.

Gardening club and born again tomatoes!

Lets hope the change in the weather doesn't mean we'll have a summer like last year i.e. a couple of weeks of summer when it should be spring, followed by four months of rain. Not good for vegetables, worse for tomatoes (which are technically fruit rather than veg). Even worse for people.

The next stage for the garden is to increase the involvement of the children, so that they can follow the growth and harvesting of the produce. I'd also like to start a veg gardening club so that children who want to increase their gardening skills and knowledge can do so. And so that they can be used as slave labour (just kidding PTA).

Watering is a proving a problem as the raised beds dry out very quickly - so I'm looking for volunteer parents who could keep an eye on things at pick-up or drop-off. Plus, plants in the greenhouse may need watering every day, certainly when it's very sunny. Please send me an email me if you can help.

During the mega planting day earlier this week (Monday), I kept meaning to check on the tomatoes still in the 'greenhouse' at Honeywell School, as they were in small pots and it was very hot. On Tuesday morning I realised that I had completely forgotten, and whizzed over to find ten 'dead' tomato plants. I should have taken a photo because two hours later, amazingly, all but one had recovered completely after being given a good drink. I've seen revivals before, but these really did look very dead. I'm thinking of filming the process - taking a plant and starving it of water, letting it 'die' and then filming the revival, time lapse style - and adding it to the blog.
We've grown over 100 tomato plants from seed; varieties include Tornado F1, Alicante, Gardener's Delight, Tres Cantos, Dutchman, Radiator Charlie's Mortgage Lifter, Brandywine, Marmande, Cream Sausage, Mr Stripey Denar & Oregon Spring. You'll see in the photos the progress from tiny seedlings through to decent sized plants in pots. Last year I ended up with tons of green tomatoes, but hopefully there'll be plenty of time for ripening this year as they're so much earlier - sun willing. We've already sold quite a few plants to parents, to grow in their own gardens. Battersea, the natural home of the tomato!

Planting completed!

Took advantage of the early summer heatwave today and managed to get all the beds planted up ahead of schedule. Seedlings that would normally be ready for planting out in June were bursting out of their pots, so I couldn't resist -- especially as it's my last day off for a while. And if the weather suddenly turns nasty and the more tender plants (courgettes, squash and aubergine) die - well there's plenty more where they came from in the greenhouse at home.

Planted in Year Six's bed:
Five dwarf french beans
Nine peppers (various types)
Planted in Year Five's bed:
Three aubergines
Six tomatoes (various types)
Six clumps of wild garlic donated by the Hopkins family.

Baki turned up with a massive tube of industrial adhesive and stuck the
greenhouse together, so with a bit of luck it won't fall part the next time it
has a close encounter with a football.


Speaking of balls, the veg was getting massacred by flying basketballs during the lunchtime break, but after a round of negotiations it's been agreed that the goals don't need to be quite so close to the veg garden.
Finished off the day potting up about twenty or thirty tomato plants, from small pots to quite large pots. I'm hoping to sell them at our plant/veg stall at the summer fair on 28th June, but with all this sunshine they are way ahead, and might be enormous by the end of June - and many will be be fruiting by then. So if you want to eat delicious, freshly picked, organic tomatoes at home, now's your chance. And it's all for a good cause!

Belleville Garden - Story so far.

There wasn't an obvious place to situate a vegetable garden at Belleville School. Word had got out that I had built a vegetable garden at Honeywell Nursery while my son Lucas was a pupil there the previous year. John Grove, head teacher Belleville, asked me if it might be feasible to try something similar at his school, now that Lucas had a place in the Reception class. I was pretty keen to try, but after a look round decided that the only suitable 'green' area (the beds alongside Webbs Road) was hampered by the almost total absence of direct sunlight.
I reported back that the area most suitable was the main playground which had the drawback of being er, the main playground. There was also the possibility of siting a couple of large planters outside the Reception classes facing Belleville Road, enough to maybe grow some tomatoes and beans in. Having thought that would be the end of it, I was gobsmacked when caretaker Baki Gashi sidled up to me in the playground at drop-off one morning and said he had something to show me. A fence had been built around the 'quiet area' bordering the main playground, and Baki wondered if the enclosed area might be suitable for the vegetable garden. It seemed they don't hang about at Belleville! I said yes, especially if the tarmac could be dug up. This not being possible we went down the deep raised beds route. I thought that if we could built a separate bed for each year group it would encourge the children and teachers to get involved; so we ordered the seven raised bed kits from a company called 'link-a-bord, and the fun began!