Garden Plans

Current Plans

We are currently redeveloping the food growing area of raised beds around the polytunnel. The site has looked a little like a construction site over the winter as our volunteers carried out this heavy work, preparing new scaffold board raised beds and installing hugelbeds.

Former usage

The history of the site is quite varied over the years but other than farmland, the area was used as playing fields, partly allotments (now the current meadow area) and tennis courts. In the 1900’s – 1950’s the site was lawn tennis courts and as the site is very heavy London clay soil a large volume of clinker was originally added at some point as a drainage layer, under the shallow topsoil in order the provide drainage for the grass courts.

Preparing the beds

Clinker is a waste product from burning coal, it’s all the non-combustible trace elements that remain after burning. Although it’s eventually bio-degradable and permeable to some extent it does make a rather impenetrable barrier for soil life and along with the shallow topsoil, it’s impossible to grow most annual crops in. We decided to break up this clinker layer and dig in around 8 tonnes of soil conditioner and well rotted horse manure to start building soil, along with a regular collection of brewery waste and woodchip to build up the beds, in order to create a fertile Kitchen Garden area.

The Great Christmas tree hunt of 2023!

As the current plans include generous width, accessible paths around the beds, we chose to dig up as much of the decent topsoil from these areas to raise the planting depth in the new beds and backfilled paths with a large number of Xmas trees sourced from local streets following a shout out on social media! A big thankyou to Park Road North who really came up trumps and must have a good local residents group as many trees were collected from there!

Ongoing plans

We decided to edge the new semi- raised beds with reclaimed scaffold boards sourced from Connect Scaffolding in Bishop’s Stortford. This is a particularly large scaffolding yard and has provided boards and services to other garden projects, including a structure by Diarmuid Gavin at the Chelsea Flower Show. The construction of these beds is now largely complete (just the areas around tree stumps and existing Mulberry trees) with twelve of the sixteen beds completed and planted or ready for planting.

In addition to the raised beds we have plans for a Lightroot bed, a cone bed or keyhole bed, hotbeds, nursery planting area, straw-bale beds and herb spirals, to be included at a later date.