Transition Ashtead

We hope you can come to The Brewery 8pm Monday 14th June for Transition drinks.

Find out about Transition Ashtead Garden Share, how to save money on home energy and all things Sustainable!

An informal evening – a glass of wine, a few beers… no presentations, no agenda, just a drink or two and a chat!

Hope to see you there.

We hold Transition Drinks on the second and forth Mondays of every month – so make a note in your diaries!

Under the campaign slogan ‘Spring into composting at home’ all councils in Surrey are promoting composting and providing subsidised plastic compost bins.  The remainder of this blog is based on material provided by the Surrey Waste Partnership, slightly edited by me

Derek Smith

Did you know that 1/3 of your household waste can be composted? Composting is a natural process that transforms your kitchen and garden waste into valuable and nutrient rich food for your garden, for free.  Anyone with outside space can compost at home, and it’s easy to make and use.

All you need to do is provide the right ingredients and let nature do the rest.  The Surrey Waste Partnership (which is made up of Surrey County Council and the 11 district and borough councils in the county) is offering home composting bins at fantastic prices, starting from £14.00 (RRP £39.00), to encourage more residents to compost at home.

Even if you do compost already, there may be a few extra things you could put in. For example: empty cereal packets and egg boxes; fruit scraps and vegetable peelings; tea bags and coffee grounds; vacuum bag contents and even vegetarian pet bedding, are in fact great ingredients to make compost. Mix this in with garden waste such as old flowers and nettles; wood chippings and straw; twigs and dried leaves, and you have the perfect recipe. When it is finished the compost will be like a fine soil, ready to use.

Use it on your flower beds and vegetable plots, patio planters, hanging baskets and even window boxes.  Compost keeps your plants growing healthily, by improving soil structure and fertility, maintaining moisture levels and keeping your soil’s PH balance in place.

Composting is good for the environment.  By putting less household waste out for collection, less energy is required as there are fewer vehicle movements, waste handling and industrial processes involved, and less waste going to landfill.  And composting means you are putting carbon back into the soil, making it more fertile and helping tackle climate change too.

Spring into composting at home and make the most of the waste you throw away.

To buy a bin or get more advice on how to turn your table scraps and garden waste into compost, visit www.surreycc.gov.uk/getcomposting or call 0844 571 4444.

We hope you can come to The Brewery 8pm tonight Monday 24th May for Transition drinks.

Find out about Transition Ashtead Garden Share, how to save money on home energy and all things Sustainable!

An informal evening – a glass of wine, a few beers… no presentations, no agenda, just a drink or two and a chat! Hope to see you there.

We hold Transition Drinks on the second and forth Mondays of every month – so make a note in your diaries!

Olympic Asparagus.

new asparagus shoot...

Tall and willowy...

The asparagus has survived the recent cold nights without incident…hurrah!

All the plants have now emerged from the soil and I’ve back-filled the trenches, so they are growing away now at their final level.

One has been tunneling along underground and has come up right next to it’s neighbour, about 20cm from where I had planted it but it has come up! The plants are now quite tall and willowy, but when they first come up there are quite hard to spot – see the pic with my finger pointing to the newly-emerged tip.

This is a crop for the long haul – they can’t be cut for the first two years, it’s a game of hoeing, watering and mulching, the reward coming in the third season…it should be ready for the London Olympics!

Browned off spuds!

...how potatoes should look ie green not brown!

When is Spring really going to arrive? Today is a lot warmer but this week’s frost has had a bit of a go at my potatoes…they are well up and have out-grown the heaping-up several times but their heads were well above soil level when the frost struck. Imagine my dismay when I saw the green leaves had gone droopy and brown. I was as browned off as the spuds! I am being a bit of a drama queen here, cos they are not completely dead, there are green leaves around the base of the plants and I think they will rally and survive. But I should have raced down and heaped up more earth when I heard the weather forecast. (Mind you, I would have needed search lights or night vision goggles, as I had watched the half past ten weather…very poor forward planning!) I didn’t have the camera with me, so next time I’m down there, I’ll record, hopefully, the Potato Revival. It seems the frost has caught a lot of gardeners on the hop, so I’m not alone. But you live and learn…

Transition Ashtead will be having a stall at the Barnett Wood School Plant sale on Sunday 16th May between 1pm and 3pm.

It is held in the school playground.  You can buy fruit, vegetables, annuals and perennials at the sale.

We will have some plants for sale and information about Transition Ashtead Garden Share.

Come for a chat and a browse!

Ashtead Garden Share

Come and ask us about Garden Sharing at Ashtead Park Garden Centre, on Saturday 1st May, 12-4pm

Have you got a large garden with space to spare?

Do you want to grow your own food but have no garden?

Ashtead Garden Share aims to put people who have spare garden space in touch with people who want to grow their own food. The idea is very simple – people with gardens they cannot manage, offer to share them with people who would like to grow food but have nowhere to grow.

The grower gets a free allotment, and the owner gets a share of the tasty produce grown in their garden.

Come along to Ashtead Park Garden Centre on May 1st and ask us all about Garden Sharing!

We hope to see you there!

phone: Derek Smith on 01372 378914  for more details

Donkey Aid

Donkey mulched raspberries...

The long-awaited delivery of donkey manure, courtesy of Judith and Don, has happened at last! Many thanks, J & D, for your patience – it seemed like every time we planned to meet at the allotment, something stopped it happening – if it wasn’t rain, it was holes dug in the access road to lay the new water pipes. And when the rendez-vous finally came, the Donkey Lorry (containing the 2 donkeys as well – they are so cute!) was too tall to go under the height barrier! I don’t believe it! Don ended up wheel-barrowing the bags of manure quite a long way…Molte grazie, Don! So the soft fruit (raspberries, gooseberries and blackcurrants) has had a good mulching of donkey doo manure (very special…), so they should do very well this year…Oops, forgot to put any on the rhubarb, but there is plenty left……

Cowboy asparagus…

Cowboy asparagus in the saddle...

Spring is such a busy time for veg growing – it’s all happening “down on the farm”! Since I last blogged, there’s been much activity on the allotment, both by me and the sun-energy-converting-food-producers (aka veg…)

The thing I’m most excited about is the arrival of my asparagus plants. I had mail-ordered them ages ago but they are only dispatched at planting time. Having not grown it before, I consulted my veg growing bible, which recommended digging a trench then creating a “saddle” (ie a ridge down the middle of the trench) for the long asparagus roots to straddle. It was jolly hard work – 20 plants, 4 trenches (5 to a trench) – it felt like a lot of soil to shift. Handling with care, I settled the roots on their saddles and loosely covered them with soil. And now, every time I visit the allotment, I add a bit more soil as the tips emerge. The trenches are nearly completely refilled now – there are 2 places where the tips are not doing so well, but hopefully they will catch up soon…

I have also planted garlic (doing well!), red onions (smaller than the garlic but sprouting well), 2 potato varieties (Cara and Charlotte, both now pushing up leaves and in need of earthing up). The inherited blackcurrants are showing signs of life, as are the gooseberries. I have butter nut squashes and celeriac in pots at home, all germinated. The carrots and beetroot Kim planted are up too.

Last years leeks still looking good and I take some home most days I visit the allotment – I may have to invest in a bigger rucksack to take my produce home in this summer, I’m hoping for bumper crops!

We hope you can come to The Brewery 8pm tonight Monday 10th May for Transition drinks.

Find out about Transition Ashtead Garden Share, how to save money on home energy and all things Sustainable!

An informal evening – a glass of wine, a few beers… no presentations, no agenda, just a drink or two and a chat!

Hope to see you there.