OxGrow Oxford's Edible Community Garden

Alpine strawberries bedding in nicely

Even though our late-planted tulips are the only green shoots (now with flower buds emerging!) to be seen down at the patch, the place is starting to look more garden-like by the week as more beds get dug and sown.  A flurry of labels written on cut-up plastic bottle bits is for now marking where our crops will start springing out later in the season.

This Sunday we added a few unusual specimens to our collection.  The scorzonera comes from the daisy family Asteraceae and has yellow flowers up top, sending off long, black edible roots below ground, hence its name: ‘scorza’ = bark and ‘nera’ = black in Italian.  Like its relative the salsify, it’s relatively unknown in the UK and likely to have arrived here from southern Europe in the 16th century.  Apparently it tastes something like oysters.  We also put in some spicy black radishes, also called Spanish radishes although they’re more common in eastern Europe.  Finally some more lettuce, alpine strawberries rescued unloved from an Oxford college garden, silverbeet and rainbow chard, and a small row of raspberries, the planting of which to the amazement of a novice like myself requires no more than the upending of what appears to be a stick into some fertile ground.

While a small but dedicated team continued scraping back grass patches for our not so wild wildflower meadow (see last week’s posting), some serious geometry was taking place in the far corner of the site to create the groundplan for a small field of wheat that will be planted in the next couple of weeks.  With the studied use of string and pegs and some judicious eyeing-in, an area of some 9x9m was marked out with a diagonal path across its centre.  Counting out the path area and at the rate of a loaf per metre squared, this should yield 60-70 loaves of bread come harvest time, maybe even baked in our on-site oven if we get one constructed in time.  The soil over this side felt a bit dried out, and digging out the turf was a hard task that will take several more weeks to complete.

Julian