LVIG mtg tonight - community garden in Church Grove on Agenda

Ladywell Village Improvement Group is holding a meeting at the St Mary's Centre, Ladywell Road, TONIGHT (Tuesday November 23 at 7.30pm.) On the agenda are: Ladywell Christmas Market, an update on the streetscape plans, help organise a tree sponsorship campaign in the high street, and find out the latest on the Playtower.

The item that caught my eye is the proposal for a community garden scheme on the former Watergate School in Church Grove. My understanding is that residents are working with the council to get a short-term (12-months) lease on the site, pending a decision about its longer term future, and the tentative plan is to use builders bags, or similar to grow fruit and veg, a bit like has been done in Hackney and elsewhere with temporary lots. It sounds like a great idea, and if it works well, I can think of at least one other site in Ladywell that would be ideally suited to doing something similar. There is certainly local demand for more space to grow fruit and veg, and a long waiting list for local allotments, and this seems like a pragmatic way to help bridge that gap.

Leaf Mould and Frogs!

I spent a few hours yesterday tidying the back garden - long overdue and good to switch off from other things for a few hours. I have a large London Plane tree in my garden which produces bags and bags of leaves every year. I've been dutifully collecting and shredding them for about the past 7 years and putting them in a wire mesh container and hoping they would turn into leaf mould.

London Plane tree leaves are infamously slow to decompose, so I was inordinately proud, after 7 years of my efforts, to have something roughly approaching leaf mould when I emptied one of the wire bins yesterday. I've spread it over the fruit and veg bed and it is supposed to condition the soil, add nutrients and help retain moisture. We will see. I may need to dig it in a bit before it blows all around the garden again.

I also disturbed one or two little frogs, which must be from last year's frog spawn, and tried to persuade them to go into the pond out of harm's way while I was using the shredder. This one seemed strangely reluctant and was quite happy sitting in this upturned shell next to the pond instead! I have lots of frog spawn in the pond again this year, so envisage another summer of using froglets in the grass as an excuse not to cut the lawn. I may just scatter some wildflower seed and call it a wildflower meadow and done with it!

South London Garden Organic

The South London Garden Organic group I mentioned a few weeks back has now been set up. Their first meeting (which unfortunately clashes with Lewisham Green Drinks) is on Monday 3rd November 7.30pm, at Devonshire road Nature Reserve. E-mail them for further info or take a look at their blog. Among other things, they hope to be able to obtain organic seeds at a reduced price from Garden Organic.

Interested in setting up a South London Garden Organic Group?

Another plug from Ian (who wears many hats).

Are you a member of Garden Organic (previously known as the Henry Doubleday Association ) Or are you interested in gardening/growing vegetables organically?

I am a member of Garden Organic and I contacted them recently asking if there was a local group in South London I could join. They answered me to say there were such groups in North, East and West London but nothing in South London so would I like to set such a group up?

So I said I would if enough people are interested. So here goes:-

Garden Organic said that for the first year there would be no fees but after that the group would need to pay a fee of £30. Advantages are being able to put in group seed orders so we can obtain organic seeds at a reduced rate, extra copies of Garden Organic which would benefit those who are not members already , a mention on the website and being able to join in in various Garden Organic activities e.g. the Master Composters scheme.

However it is basically up to the group to decide what activities to pursue. For instance, we could use the group to swop useful information or excess organic produce/seeds.

If you are interested would you like to let me know and if enough South Londoners are interested I can set about setting up the group.You do not have to be a member of Garden Organic to join the group. Nor do you have to have a garden or an allotment- window box growers will be very welcome!

E-mail Anne S if you are interested.

Guest Post from Tim Lund: Landfit

Somehow, the longer you go without posting to your blog, the bigger the task of getting back into it seems, so apologies for the lack of posts recently. However, stand by for a veritable flurry of posts as I catch up with what we've been up to over the last few weeks. However, to kick things off I'm delighted to have a guest post from Tim Lund, Sydenham resident, who has been working with others residents to set up Landfit. At the same time that Tim in Sydenham was thinking about the wasted opportunity that many front gardens are, a couple of Brockley residents visited Ute at surgery with a similar idea. The two were put in touch with each other and the result is Landfit. I think this is Green Ladywell's first ever guest post, although I am happy to consider more if you would like to e-mail them to me. Anyway, over to Tim:

‘Landfit’ is a concept - the concept of matching people who want to do some gardening with some garden that wants a gardener. For me the idea goes back a few years to when:

1. I saw a friend looking after a bit of ground in front of Penge East railway station. She wanted to put some plants in it, and the station operators were happy to give her a space to leave some tools
2. I read or saw something about Guerrilla Gardeners
3. I was managing the waiting list for my allotments

I’ve always found untended gardens distressing - a combination of thinking that whoever is responsible for them is missing out, and seeing them as somewhere I could put in things I’ve grown in my own garden. In economic language, supply and demand aren’t matching, and the challenge is how to break down the barriers so that they can. In other words, how to get permission for gardener A to cultivate / look after B’s garden. Or rather B’s garden, but taking into account any number of other parties - neighbours, residents, managers, etc.

Thinking like an economist here gets you to identifying two essential requirements:

• Information about people wanting to garden, and gardens wanting gardening
• A flexible and robust contractual arrangement for the parties to a ‘Landfit’ arrangement

Thinking like someone who’s been involved in managing allotments adds another requirement if you want to help such arrangements stick, which is

• Access to training for would-be gardeners

My experience is that many new gardeners - maybe most - don’t have a very good idea of what gardening involves.

In response to a couple of people from my allotments telling me earlier this year about grants for Local Food growing, I started trying to work up the ideas more fully, and discussing them with other people. This has led to an informal group of ‘Landfitters’ and a web site www.landfit.org. There’s more going on than is up on the site at the time of writing (Aug 9th), since thanks to the networking we have done, we have been approached by a local Housing Association, Hexagon, with the idea of using the Landfit concept with them.

It’s important for me that Landfit should not be seen as an organisation, and that it doesn’t get bogged down in the business of applying for grants, and then demonstrating that it has met various bureaucratic criteria. When I finished my first attempt to explain the concept, I felt I had to test immediately how it would work at the simplest (grassroots?) level, so what better way of finding out than to go three doors down my street and pitch the idea to the occupiers of a house with such an untended garden. And I really did want to find somewhere to put a dessert gooseberry I’d just been given, and they do have a nice south facing wall it should appreciate … I wasn’t exactly surprised by the cautious reaction, since this was the sort of thing I had been thinking about - how to present the idea, address likely concerns. But we came to an agreement, and it’s all going very happily

It’s hardly surprising that the idea can work as this sort of simple level - and in fact, as I knock the idea around, I discover other people who’ve done exactly the same sort of thing. I also learned of a group in North America, ‘Sharing Backyards‘, that is trying to develop the concept in the same way that we are.

But making the concept work at a local level really requires very little more than having the idea. We had a meeting a while back at which someone told us of a neighbour’s garden that was neglected … and what could be done about it? Well, you just go and ring the bell, introduce yourself, and take it from there! At which point the amateur sociologist in me emerges, and wonders what on earth it is that makes this so difficult. Thanks to making this approach to my neighbours - who I’d never met - I now have that many more friends on my street. I also get into conversation with people passing, and residents of the sheltered housing block overlooking the garden.

For us, working with with Hexagon Housing is going to be a test of the concept at a more complex level. One challenge will be keeping records of gardeners and gardens, and the matches between them. Sometimes the IT developer in me would like to be able to focus simply on this, since it’s not hard to imagine a really cool web site in which gardeners enter their details, garden stakeholders enter theirs, and through the magic of an interactive Web 2.0 site, everyone lives happily ever after. ‘Sharing Backyards’ is already doing this sort of thing, and I have been in contact with them to discuss how their model could be exported to London. However, I think we’ll be able to handle the IT requirements at this stage with an Access database - which is something I can manage.

The main challenge, I think, will be working out what gardening training is required, and delivering it. It would be nice if this could happen informally, in the same way that most people who enjoy gardening have learned what to do - learning from their parents, trial and error and a few books. But this is probably not the best way of learning, and where there are requirements to deliver qualifications that will help people get back into work, as with a Housing Association, something more formal will be required. This is not the time to go into all this, since I’m still developing ideas, and un-thought through thoughts are that interesting to read. I’m going to have to get down to thinking about where funding will come from, and how what we do meets others’ requirements, which will be a learning experience.

That’s just a part of it. We’re always interested to hear from people who are interested, and tell them about what we are doing. If you want to do some Landfitting yourself, what is stopping you? As to the word ‘Landfit’ - it has three ideas to it:

• Fitting people to bits of land, and vice versa
• Getting fit by working on a bit of land
• The slogan a ‘Land fit for heroes’, which was around when allotments where at the peak immediately post the first World War