Centre News

The Garden at St Augustine's- Rome wasn't built in a day.

Monday 22nd November 2010 1:13 PM

Written by Steve Blacksmith

There was a rectangle of twitch grass and those kinds of prickly suckering shrubs that are so hard to weed among.

Gary and I set to work with pick and spades. Slowly, week by week (we only work Tuesday mornings), we moved a trench along the bed from one end to the other. We got all the twich and shrub roots out down to a depth of about a foot. Luckily, it was deep loam, without the rubble and clay you usally find round modern buildings (like round the new part of St. Augustine's).

The great thing about this bed, outside the dining room, is that it is edged by low stone walls. These are good for laying produce on after it is harvested to stimulate coversation. So not only are the rows of vegetables easy to see and talk about with centre users but we can also talk about different ways of using them, different national cooking methods etc. It is a real conversation stimulator. You make friends with people you talk to, the subject is irrelevant. There may be some benefit for people who are improving their English as well.

This first year we ate from that little patch: radish, carrots, potatoes, bettroot, spinach beet, curly kale, runner beans and French beans. There are still standing rows of kale, spinach beet and parsnips to use in the winer, though the parsnips will be under-sized. They were a bit crowded in by the tomatoes, and sown late, not watered enough at a crucial stage (limits of only being here Tuesdays).

The only failure was the tomatoes. Actually, they produced a good crop but some vandals for the them before thet were quite ripe and threw them at the windows. No damage done, just a nuisance. There have been vandals since the fall of Rome. We will keep building.

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