Lessons learned, and signing off for this year...

We're being very unlucky with the weather at the moment, and it highlights the difficulty of trying to keep the garden productive and tidy on this kind of course. Marcus and any other volunteers - and we have one or two willing souls at present - can only work in the garden if it's not pouring down. For us this means that the dry weather has to coincide with a time when they're not studying literacy or numeracy or any of the other important things we cover. And it has to be Mon-Wednesday because those are the days the students and I are around. It's a bit limiting in terms of the love and care we can lavish on our potential crops.

The plan now is to sort out as much as we can next week - get rid of the waterlogged veggies that never quite made it, dump the terracotta pot that mysteriously got smashed, weed and tidy, then plant the over-wintering onions and garlic (hoping they've survived the period they've spent in the shed), and then we'll retire the garden for the winter.

Roll on next spring! A lesson learned, I think, is that we need more flowers and fewer veggies next year. The raised bed was a great idea, but needs more attention than we can give it and less rain than it suffered. It's been, as they say, a learning curve. Meanwhile though, the hanging baskets are still in bloom in October, so they must've brought a small amount of joy to a few rail passengers, and the three clematis are rambling all over the fence and should be stunning by next spring.

The photos I've dotted around here represent The Way We Were. It's good to look at them now and then to realise that actually we've come quite a way in quite a short time.

That's all for now - we'll be back in spring.

Meet Marcus...

...who's on the P2S course and has volunteered to do some work in the garden. Thanks Marcus!

In a lull

It's been a long time between posts - sorry! - this was mainly due to holidays but also due to the dreaded rain, which comes at the most inconvenient times. On the other hand, it's kept the baskets looking pretty for a good while, so all is not lost.

We have a lot of work to catch up on - many weeds to pull; many tomatoes to water; even a couple of cabbages to harvest. We're thinking jacket potatoes and home-made coleslaw for lunch next week? - should be both tasty and healthy.

We've been plotting what we can do gardening-wise during the winter months and we think maybe we'll plant up a few hyacinths to sell at the main desk, just starting in a small way, and seeing how far our entrepreneurial skills get us...

Playtime!!

Thanks to Carl and Ryan for permission to upload this great picture of them enjoying swingball in the new garden space. It's proving popular so Julie and I will just have to have our turn sometime when they've all gone home...

Raised veggie bed, featuring particularly rampant tomatoes, in the background. Beyond that is the back area, which we kid ourselves we're leaving wild for the sake of the local birds and butterflies, but if we're honest we just haven't managed to tackle it yet. Top priority for next year.

Salad days

Rainbow radish, grown by our own fair Platform hands and shortly to feature in a very small, supporting role on the Café Jaxx menus...

Sadly, the lettuces were rotted by the rain before we could get to them - and just don't mention the peas - but the tomatoes are looking healthy. Tomato pasta's looking a distinct possibility on the healthy eating front.

Have been giving a lot of thought to the whole garden operation. We can use it for the PSD modules as we'd planned, but the regular watering, deadheading, weeding, etc, needed would maybe also suit a half-day work placement for an E2E student - preferably one of our own! Students happy to garden come and go here but there aren't usually more than two of them at the same time, so a work placement type system might be more workable? Worth a try anyway.

Phase Two

Our latest enthusiastic gardening student has left us for pastures new - a quick turnover's an occupational hazard with a tier 1 E2E provision - and it seems like a good time to stop making the less enthusiastic ones take part in planting, digging and weeding.

Alongside that tho' we're bringing in a new qualification which most, if not all, of our students will be expected to take. Two of the modules, Making the Most of Your Leisure Time and Healthy Living, can easily incorporate a gardening/garden produce element so the changes we've managed to make in the garden will continue to benefit future students.

We have a little of the YOF cash left so we're ordering some onion sets - I have visions of steaming bowls of French Onion Soup for the students we have over the winter - and a few windchimes to counteract the constant rattle of the nearby trains and drone of the railway announcements.

A touch of colour

We have 4 big tubs, a cwt or so of compost, trellis on the fence and some stunningly healthy clematis to plant up, but will it stop raining long enough to allow us to get on with it? Nope.

So, in the absence of climbing plants to photograph, here's a shot of one of the hanging baskets. Won't that look pretty from the railway platform at the other side of the fence?