Today was the launch of our OxGrow collaborative classroom, in which there was much discussion of plant families and crop rotations, and at which we learnt that radishes are in the brassica family alongside cauliflowers and cabbages, despite deceptively dissimilar appearances.
Today was also marked by much carting stuff from around and about the city back to our small slice of greenery. This reflects an interesting aside to the crop planning conundrum. When deciding what to plant, it’s important to take into account how much nutrient-rich organic matter will be required. Plants like tomatoes, brassicas and courgettes for example need lots of the stuff as the base material to transform into healthy glowing vegetables.
For many organic gardeners, their compost heap is their prime source of nutrients – taking their garden and kitchen waste and rotting it down into lovely rich material to dig in. At OxGrow, however, because we’re only a year old, we haven’t got enough compost to fulfil our needs over the whole garden… and, we admit it, we haven’t been quite as assiduous as we should have been in feeding and nurturing our heap to date (master composters – attention! would you like to come and help us out?). The University Parks kindly helped give us a kick start last year with the delivery of a skip-load of compost. This year we’d like to diversify our sources of organic matter, and it was with this in mind that we went out today on a search and rescue mission to source a lovely pile of horse poo kindly donated by local horses and their owner up the Abingdon Road.
Our other adventure was a two-trip wheelbarrow expedition through the centre of Oxford to bring back six lonely bales of straw in need of re-homing. What use is straw? 1) It can be added in layers to the compost heap to create a good carbon-nitrogen balance (straw is carbon heavy). 2) It can be used as a mulch, winter covering to protect the soil and aid moisture retention. 3) you can use it as a ‘pee-bale‘ to kickstart decomposition (adds nitrogen). 4) you can build a straw-bale house out of it. 5) you can sit on it (see above). 6) you can sleep on it. …Good night!
OxGrow 