Crouchended
Life in Crouch End, bikes, trying to be green and other randomnessAfter the rains
According to the RHS vegetable growing blog the hard part of the growing season – now its just maintenance and reaping the rewards. So it seems like an appropriate place to take stock of what has worked and what hasn’t. It is still raining and its still way too cold for August <grump grump>
Things in pots
Ok – this is more of a general thing than a specific crop – but this is one area where the hard work will be on going, with daily watering and regular feeds needed to keep the crops going. The heavy rains leached away alot of nutrients from the soil, so some of the hungrier plants have suffered a bit and are needing regular feeds.
Things that have worked
1. Garlic – wow – really easy, stick in it the ground in October – it loves being amongst the roses, and then pull it up when it is ready, it even tells you when – because it falls over and then turns brown – perfect. I’m going to get even more next year, so that my crop is spread through the year a bit more evenly. The Garlic farm on the Isle of Wight do a fantastic garlic lovers growing kit that contains no less than 8 varieties for £25. Considering i grew 500g from just 3 heads this year, thats alot of garlic potential!
2. Swiss Chard – lots of it and grown like a weed
Potatoes in buckets – really easy
Things with promise
3 Tomatoes – lots of them but only just ripening
4 – Courgettes, at least the ones in a big barrel are starting to fruit like mad
5 – cucumber – i started them late but there are lots of fruit on the vine i did put in
Things that didn’t work
6 Beans – mostly my bean plants have become slug food – the snails get past the copper tape with ease in this weather.
7 Broccoli – slug food!
8 Basil – been to cold
9 Aubergines – too cold – need to be under glass really
10 – chillis – ditto with aubergines – lots of slug food, rubbish in hanging baskets!
Gormet Burger Kitchen/Wild Berry Cafe
June has been horrible, july not much better.
I noticed as i was walking down Topsfield Parade that the Wild Berry Cafe has closed, and in its place will be a branch of the Gormet Burger Kitchen.
I’m not convinced that Crouch End needs another chain restaurant, but then i never stepped foot in the Wild Berry Cafe either.
There seems to be some work happening at the Creamery (shut since I can remember) which would be interesting – as it seems a shame for such an ideal location to be left derelict.
Staying alive at Glastonbury
Not me – my phone. Despite falling in the mud, my four year old nokia 8310 clung on to dear life despite some wonky text messages from the bits of Worthy Farm that I couldn’t quite get out of the keypad straight away. Better still, the battery is still reliable if given a full charge after being completely drained. It lasted 4 days of heavy texting (“we are at the pyramid stage etc”) – and I topped it up with the Freeloader that had collected about 7 days of solar trickle charge, enough to give a half charge. It may have even been enough for the entire rest of the festival had we not got stuck in one of the car parks for 12 hours whilst everyone ahead of us was towed off site by tractors.
Green N8
It’s taken me a year to find this site – but here it is. It certainly didn’t come up when i searched for Green and Crouch End in google. Instead i found it because of an article on Parkland Walk in the local paper. Green N8 seems to be a forum for local green discussion – it is hard to tell how many people use it as most of the discussion board postings date from the last week or two.
Solar Power
Recently I’ve been experimenting with 3 different bits of Solar Kit. Solar power seems to have become very affordable very quickly over the last few years ….this has led to some really interesting items.
Firstly, some LED fairy lights designed to be used outside that have a solar charged battery attached to them. They are similar to the types of solar garden lights that have been around for some time. They charge up during the day, and then when the light falls to a low enough level this switches the circuit to turn the lights on. LED lights are very low powered, and only an hour of decent sun gave these a decent display in the twilight. I have the cord wrapped around a tree branch in the garden – and the effect is lovely. I got these off ebay, shipped from China, they are very impressive, and should have a decent lifespan.
The second is the “Freeloader” – as advertised in the Guardian Readers Offers, which is where I got mine. July is the peak month in the UK for solar radiation, so it is getting near the the optimum time for solar devices. The Freeloader works on the basis that a pair of panels trickle charge a lithium battery, which can then be discharged into another device- in my case my trusty Nokia 8310. Because i’m not sure how waterproof the freeloader is -(and it doesn’t look very) I’ve not been tempted to leave it outside over night or get up at dawn to set it up. Instead, the best two runs have come these last 2 weekends when I’ve remembered to put it outside the back door at midday, for half a day’s charge. The results are ok, half a day gives between 6-10 minutes of phone charge, depending on whether partial shade obscured the device or not. That’s enough to have kept the phone on 3/4 power all day today – with little use. It remains to be seen if there is any practical benefit of using it at one of the summer festivals.
Thirdly, there is a solar battery charger from Maplin that charges a number of different “A” size batteries. I had this in a window during the winter and it did a decent job or topping up the AAA batteries for my bike lights – but seems much less good at the AAs i have. This isn’t helped by the different capacities of the batteries I have, but the AAA’s are all the same type of high capacity battery so that’s no excuse really!
May Harvest
It’s June, and all of a sudden the weather has gone from almost wintery, to distinctly summery. About time too. What’s more the increased day length and fall of solar radiation means that everything is suddenly growing at a rate of knots – keeping everything under control is a challenge.
Now that things are coming on apace i thought I’d summarize what I managed to harvest during May – not very much as most of the things I am growing either become fully mature in July/August, or I gave away the plants that had made the best progress as presents……
Still – we managed
20 radish (French breakfast)
4 rather mangy “January King” cabbages that didn’t really form heads.
2 bowls mixed salad leafs
3/4 swiss chard leaves
1 Artichoke Globe head
Project 104 Mountview
Finally I have tracked down the Myspace site for Project 104, i was doing some digging for a friend who is interested in the project – here’s the myspace page
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=181079872
And there’s a flickr page with lots of photos of what’s inside -
http://www.flickr.com/photos/micheeky/sets/72157600060228076/
There doesn’t seem to have been much more info past what was going on April 29th.
Thanks to Micheeky for the photo
Crouch Hill Squatters
For a while I wondered why there were regular car boot sales at the Mountview theatre, and why there were continuous vans going in and out of the building that I’d not seen open since I moved to the area….. the answer is that the building is now occupied by an arts collective called Project 104.
Despite being open for 3 weeks I’d fail to twig until I started getting traffic finding this blog by looking for “Crouch End Squat” on Google. That picked up a separate story from my RSS feed about squatters at the TUC centre on CrouchEnd Hill, that also mentioned the Mountview Squat.
I can’t find any information about why the original building was left empty for so long. It is due to be turned into a school for autistic children, and Project 104 are quoted as saying “we’re not obstructing plans for the redevelopment. We don’t mind leaving when it’s time.”
The Mountview Academy moved to Wood Green some time ago – but I did find an obituary of the founder Peter Coxhead.
Container Vegetables
A challenge in a small urban space is to make the most of the area you have available for growing. This means growing things up walls, on widow sills, or improvising something else completely. Hanging baskets hang from the most suprising places, and they have the added advantage of not getting too cold – at my last flat we had no outside space, but there was a dead satellite dish that was adept at carrying 2 hanging baskets without breaking sweat.
Here’s some of the things i’ve been trying:
This is a basket with a big bush tomato (Smadar i think – although annoyingly Garden organic don’t list them at the moment so i can’t link), a Hungarian Hot Wax pepper, severely nibbled by a slug the somehow managed to get into the mini bottle clotch (there’s a little shoot or recovery but it is slow progress). There’s also a little Cinnamon Basil seedling, this should help add some flavour to the tomato, and the three plants together are complimentary.
This Butternut squash seedling in a patio pot is protected from snails with the copper tape around the base of the pot. The canes are for training the plant up. Amazingly butternut squashes are supposed to be good climbers, I only realised this last year when in a fit of boredom i had a look at the types of squash you can grow to eat…. last year the plants went in the soil, snaking between flower beds. The slugs and snails had a field day.
This is a window box of salad. Quite excited about this because last year just a tiny pot of cut and come again salads produced loads of leaves, and this year we have about 3 of these on the go – plus some odds and sods elsewhere. The leaves in this one are Rocket, Miznou, Corn Salad, and Giant Red Mustard. The thing that impressed me is how much more flavour the leaves have than shop or grocer bought.
Lastly the potatoes, they have come along somewht since the last picture – i’m now having to remove flower buds from the top of the ones in the black bucket, so that they work more on producing tubers than flowers… not long until the first new potatoes – <fingers crossed very tight> 
Hornsey Road Baths
I was inspired to dig a bit deeper after seeing this picture come up on my Flickr feed of the Haringey Flikr picture pool (which has some severe reflection on it if you look closely!). It’s a photo of a painting that has been sat in a painting shop in Crouch End for about a year, and i’ve often stopped to look at it. The actual state of Hornsey baths is less impressive, in fact the painting alludes to the bath’s heyday whereas now they look much like this shot from Derelict London, and if you sit on the top deck of the 91 bus coming north you can get a good look at the site on the right hand side of the road as you begin the climb up Hornsey Rise.
A bit more digging reveals that the baths are due to be turned into flats – despite some campaigning to keep them as a leisure facility.
