Could this be the patter of tiny feet on the horizon?!

Our urban semi detached garden farm is 4.7 miles from Canary Warf and 9.2 miles from the Shard, thanks to google maps for the details, yet when I set up in the garden room for a morning of online work I can hear the birds singing their little wake up chirp songs, the chooks in our garden and those nearby scratching round for food fallen from their feeders and the lady four doors down sweeping her patio, a morning ritual in our street.
We read all the time of the overcrowding and congestion of London and its suburbs, of the poor air quality and noise pollution so we must be on the lucky list here because we can be in Soho for dinner within 25 minutes courtesy of Southeastern trains or walking in ancient Oxleas woods within a hundred strides of our doorstep. Never before have we taken such advantage of our location until now when we have the time to enjoy it.  Don't hang in there until retirement, make it a reality to enjoy your surroundings more now.  Build it into your daily life...easier said than done I know having spent 20 years rushing out the house into the car through the busy south circular routes to rush into a school building only to emerge into daylight again after 5pm and perhaps enjoy an hour or two of down time before the whole process repeats itself again the next day. Anyway off on a tangent there for a mo...the real purpose this morning is to catch up for the record the events of past few days and to celebrate the countryside within the city that is Londoninium.
Whence last you read this blog...if indeed any one is reading it as the stats only show us how many people visit the page, google is yet to be able to report on what you are each doing whilst visiting any web page, that is probably a good thing...anyway it was last week and we had just finished building our room with no walls.  We can say it has been well used since it's creation and is my place of choice for writing, blogging, tweeting, facebooking, online shopping and my latest hobby online scavenging.  Thanks to www.scavenger.org.uk I am hard on the trail of some willow whips for weaving an edge to our new salad bed design and offering some excess tomato plants to anyone who can pop in and take them.  This alongside preloved.com and freecycle are my new places of pleasure looking out for items in need of want that can be put to good use in our urban farm.
Success so far has been in the shape of a great oak table for 99p (eBay), 2 hanging baskets rescued from an outlet shop in the high street, willow withies cut from a local allotment with an overgrown patch and bamboo shared by a good friend from her Greenwich garden when we lunched there yesterday. All this style for £7 is an achievement we are proud of and using daily as an outdoor office and garden room breathing in the fresh morning air that wakes my brain these days rather than the treacle resembling substance I used to rely on called espresso!
And in other news...
Also over the past few days the self sufficiency ways have kicked in with all salad, parsnips and beetroot now being grown at home and strawberries fresh every day from the greenhouse. With regular sowing rotations we should be in stock now throughout the summer, and are working on ways of extending the growing season into winter. Also midnight one of our Japanese Bantam hens has gone broody, so we have worked out the days and are going to let her have a go at hatching some chicks naturally starting early next week so they should hatch when we get back from France...could this be a patter of tiny feet on the horizon?

This is Midnight, the proud father to be Dr Horacio and hiding in the background is lady the egg donor!

A space with no walls...

Of course the best place to be in any weather is outside in the garden, but when your work requires 17 inches of high def screen and a keyboard it is a bit tricky in the sunshine to get a clear view of the finer details of your work, and of course in rain its a tad dangerous trying to retain composure on your blog whilst the non-waterproof extension lead fizzes with every rain drop that passes within a metre of its solder points.  So to this end and inspired many months ago when wine tasting in Totnes of all places we began sketching out our ideas for a shelter on the back of our London semi to provide just such a space.  We had a number of priorities, 1. this was definitely not to be a conservatory of any type. 2. it must provide shelter from rain, snow and some of the heat of the midday sun, although the house provides some shade at this end of the garden. 3. It must meet our ethos of supporting local traders. 4. It was be constructed from sustainable or recycled materials, and I am sure our wish list extended way beyond this but they were the key design drivers.
I love being inspired when out visiting and then coming home and developing the ideas to work for us and our space, then researching the how to of projects
that we have no prior experience of and finally actually getting our hands dirty and our every muscle achy from the graft of turning it into a reality.
We sourced the timber locally in Welling from sustainable resources and the roofing sheets are recycled water bottles turned into 80% UV efficient polycarbonate sheets and I am sure the nails and other fixings began life as a Cortina estate.
With lots of support from Pops who brings tools, brute strength, an enviable degree of energy for a  70 something chap and just a fair amount of construction know how we set about the measuring, drilling, cutting, bolting and nailing at 10am yesterday. Despite my juvenile cries of enough lets finish it tomorrow at about 5pm we soldiered on and had supper under our shiny new garden room canopy.  Whatever the weather this will be a space with no walls where we can be found creating new features and products for our business. But for now I think a reclined garden chair and a well deserved beer will allow it to have a long slow coat of looking at whilst we ponder the plants and grasses we would like to turn it into a covered garden...see creating again already...

The country breathes a collective sigh of relief...

The country breathes a collective sigh of relief this morning, thoughts that the recession being double dip meant not only a hosepipe ban in flood hit areas but that summer had truly been taxed out of existence...but no Mrs Sunshine has chosen her best bonnet for the occasion and thrown open the shutters to her shiny world...the lettuces already have 3 more leaves and the corn have grown an inch and a half just since 9am...but it is not all fun and frolics of course as we have to work.

Yesterday in anticipation of the arrival of the rays we rearranged the patio area to incorporate power supply, desk and comfy bench in the sunniest part of the garden, aimed the wireless router directly at the spot and now we are working our little fingers down to the meta-carpal whilst soaking up as much Vit D as we can. Its a tough job but we will struggle on with our to do list for today during which we are taking delivery of building supplies to create our outdoor room shelter whilst finalising the designs for product labels and keeping abreast of the 'tweetdom'...happy sunny day everyone.

Could not resist a bag of the white stuff...

Now we have covered more than our fair share of the Kent countryside, in fact we often joke we are studying the knowledge of Kent rather than the urban version pawed over by every Black Cab driver, but today we stumbled upon a real gem, Sandgate...more of that in a mo.
The purpose of our adventure today was to get down to Crabble Corn Water Mill and take a look at the stone grinding in action and sample some of their product to see if it can add to our artisan bread flavours. As usual we avoided motorways and headed across the Kent Downs into River, just outside Dover.  A beautiful spot on the river, with a mill pond and the most stately looking of Mill houses right on the road with its majestic water wheel turning at a fair old lick when we arrived.

Not only can you explore all 6 floors without interruption from school parties or a mass of overseas tourists pushing to the front, but they have also provided a really comprehensive soundtrack on each floor which you can listen to at the press of a button whilst you stumble around trying to avoid falling through the multitude of hatches cut into the floors for a range of reasons known only to the master miller.  This we thought was brilliant, informative and full of quaint antique tools and machines of the day, but then to our surprise the guy that works the place who I mistakenly called "Windy Miller" when helping him into his milling coat...soon corrected to "Walter Miller"...wanted to show us the mill grinding and the flour being made.  Having crawled on all fours through the smallest door in the land to the gear house he clunked and chocked a few things into place then crawled back out to crank the sluice gate open once again and the Mill rocked groaned and rolled with the turning of time as we were swept back to 1870 and the dust rose and flour poured down the chute into the rather too modern paper sack tied to the bottom.  The smell, taste and feel of this wholemeal product was a triumph to this old guy keeping part of yesteryear alive and kicking today.  Well done him.


We could not resist a bag of the white stuff, which whilst assured they no longer cut it with chalk as they did to bulk it out and make more profit in the 1870s, we were advised that if you make your bread with it using tap water you will create a bowling ball, but use lemonade and its a good tasty loaf you'll be rewarded with.  Tomorrow we will test that theory and be sure to let you know the outcome.

Anyway after having given the Mill a considerable coat of looking at we went off in search of lunch and in our usual follow your nose to the coast style we headed to the sea in search of great fish food.  This is where we not only discovered that Folkestone has a rather splendid side to it which can rival any foreign riviera but we also chanced upon Sandgate which has a lovely "Little Fish Shop", great name serving up tasty straight form the sea dishes and offering a beach walk right across the road.

   

streetgrowers first quiz...will you make history?

Click the image to go to the first ever streetgrowers quick quiz.  See if you are eco enough to be the proud winner of our first flavoured oils gift pack... Good Luck.

A lunchtime chat full of ideas...

www.twistedorigination.co.uk

Its been a pretty full on week of varied activities and meeting really lovely people who are keen to help us in our quest to set up our retail business. We have now secured a superb printing company, Twisted Origination who can meet all our printing needs, from produce labels, to marketing, merchandise and business paperwork and business cards.  They fit perfectly with our ethos, local, green, friendly and equally supportive of other local businesses as we are.  A real pleasure to work with already. That has kept us very busy finalising the artwork for our first printing order.
Alongside this the arrival of sunshine, brief though it has been has brought about a splurge of garden tasks that will wait not a minute more.  Spraying the fruit trees with a watered down mix of linseed oil to prevent the fluff spores and keep leaf curl away as well as giving them the most healthy glow ever, we have been using it for 3 years now and it truly does take care of your fruit trees and the fruit, and its chemical free. Sowing yet more rounds of seeds to keep the supply of salad for the kitchen, and getting the summer veg planted out now the threat of frost seems to have finally abated.
Of course in the kitchen we have been experimenting with pâté flavours and rye crispbreads, following our purchase of rye flour during our windmill tour of the weekend.  So given the supply of tasty trinkets it was time to invite mum over as she holds responsibility for initiating my love of both gardening and cooking, she does indeed deserve to benefit from the spoils.  Well mum never travels light and today she arrived bearing our repaired honey spinner, thanks Pops, and a full mobile garden centre of plants.
Well all of this was shaping up nicely for a lazy sunshine lunch in the garden and the chatter turned to the business and plans for the layout of the shop in which we would now also like to include a seasonal section in the deli for in season foods, but also in the home/garden-ware section for in season plants.  For some years mum has had a small scale market garden hobby going on at her place in Essex and is now fully on board with the idea of being our main supplier for plants to feature alongside our planned home grown herbs and veggies.
This new lifestyle is fitting us really well and business meetings are great fun with good company and so far very successful outcomes...roll on tomorrows target...to decide on the home for our business banking.!

The wetter the better...

Sorry if that title has brought you here expecting something very adult, it refers to top tips for baking, but now you are here I hope it is worth the click.
This week we have been back in the kitchen, well given the temporary (we hope) return of the wet stuff to the garden it seemed like a nice warm place to be and it is a secret avoidance of the editing awaiting our attention following a weekend of video shooting...more on that later.
So this week we have been playing with the bread recipes we know and love and have found yeast types truly do affect success rates.  We have for a long time now been fans of the convenience of fast acting dried yeast and the way other bread making types suggest just throwing it in with the dry ingredients then slap in some warm water to mix to a soft dough...a soft dough...what is one of those?
Ok so no complaining we have had a range of successes with different bread types using this quick cook method...but the truth of it is you cannot expect to take an age old craft that requires love attention and time and crush it into a one hour slot without expecting to lose something in the process...and you do lose texture, taste and quality.
So re-enthused by the Hairy bikers tour of Europe and memories of the aromas of French, Spanish and Austrian villages during the morning bake we went back to the old recipe book, creaked open the pages still dusted in flour and set about re-examining our practice here.  The motto "the wetter the dough the better the bread" ringing in our ears from European bakers repeating it to two Hairy northern blokes (thanks Hairy Bikers, loving your work), we decided to apply the rustic style to all our breads by mixing the dried yeast with 40 degree water (warm is such a wide margin for error) letting it bubble away for 10 mins or so before we add it to the mix.  Kneading in our house is done courtesy of Kitchen Aid and again we employ a little trick suggested on French bakery of needing for 10 mins, then let the dough rest for 3 mins, then need again for 5 mins.  Something to do with allowing the gluten to rest then stretching it again...not entirely sure but it works.
Now this seems to be the crucial bit, the dough when it starts being kneaded is wet, really wet, sticky and almost sloppy, but as the machine does its magic the dough holds together, starts to stretch out and become a smooth elastic consistency.  Sometimes you will even think no way is this ever going to pull together, just have faith, be patient and keep watching it will get there.  Of course there is the outside chance that if a real novice you have supplied a swimming pool of flour batter to your mixer and yes maybe too wet is not best, but panic not as you can always add a little flour at a time until it does start to hold.
My final addition as seen on Lorrain Pascale is to spray 3 shots of water from the flower sprayer into the oven just prior to baking your bread to ensure a top crust...make sure you dont have insecticide in the sprayer though first...just clean water.
Now I am not about to regurgitate a list of our favourite bread recipes here, I am sure everyone has their own of those, but these key tips will see you right in the bread making kitchen and give you the pleasure of hot fresh bread for any occasion.  Oh and here is my final tip from Mrs Ingles on Little house on the Prairie, storage of bread once cooled is best kept wrapped in a clean tea towel. If you have never heard of Mrs Ingles you are a young baker which is brilliant but check her out on youtube search LHOTP and I'm sure she will be baking in any episode you choose.

Sunday lunch prep..

The gorgeous sunshine and spending an hour with the bees has inspired us to start thinking about food again..!! So wheatgerm and honey bread is proving and will be heading towards the feta and sun-dried tom stuffed portobellos..just because we didn't get quite enough mushrooms at that beautiful restaurant yesterday...

Bees bringing in the pollen

Been playing with the bees this morning. They look really well with lots of larvae and one frame full of drone cells on one side, that'll help the local queens!!
They have cleared out the super of honey we left then to over winter and have some stores on brood frames but we will need to keep an eye on them as the drought seems to have left them short on nectar again.
They are bringing in bright yellow pollen this morning from nearby forsythia I think.
Anyway thanks to their Über pollination techniques I need to get on with shooting the spring garden footage for streetgrowers website

Where to from here...?

So that is pretty much the potted history of streetgrowers to this point in time, well almost..
The markets took off and we enjoyed the feedback and challenges of creating our own varieties of deli type foods to show people how they could use our oils, sauces and other produce. I then arranged to go for a drink with a mate form work to moan about the boss and call all the kids names, well we did moan a lot about the boss but name calling would just be wrong. Anyway I gave her a lift to my house from where we planned to walk to the pub, a good hearty 2 min stroll away.  But on this occasion my gorgeous girlfriend had decided to cook for us all and open the beer cellar for action.  We tucked into some scrummy home made lamb burgers with one of our delicious sauces and my mate Shaz was blown away with a moment of inspiration.  Fed up of moaning about our jobs and knowing we had been thinking of changing our lifestyle, that's what they call it when you get the hell out of the classroom. She suggested a taste night for all our mates to be able to give critical opinion of our foods and especially our new creative take on vegetarian and home made deli foods, most of which it has to be said have an alcohol content in them somewhere so I could see her theory behind the suggestion.

A date was agreed and invites sent out, to which all were excited to come and try, drink and being mostly a bunch of teachers opinion was going to be free flowing for sure.  The pressure was on. We had to produce a range of tastes which would suit a group of vegetarians, pescitarians and carnivores and at this stage we had not got much more than the oils jams jellies and chutney range to work with.  But not to be put off we went for it, got great feedback which we immediately put into action adapting our recipes and testing our products further.
Since then there have been 3 taste nights whilst the wheels of commercial business purchase grind slowly away and now the range has developed into artisan breads, patês, scotch eggs, terrines, mini pies, filo parcels and many many more.  We constantly listen hard to the people that eat our foods and are proudly producing a range with great taste quality where the ingredients are either home grown or locally produced where they can be.  This ethos is a passion of ours and continues into our future plans...

Along came our other passion...

The urban farm in our Welling based semi detached garden has grown year on year and with the pollination of the bees and superb west Kent climate supported by our careful rain harvesting we have a regular abundance of produce. Our elderly neighbour donates her apples from a huge old tree every year and other friends are sharing seeds and excess fruit harvests on an annual basis. So along came our other great passion of cooking and baking in a way that gets the best out of every flavour combination to bring about great taste experiences. We developed a range of flavoured oils, jams, jellies and chutneys and packed our boxes and set off to markets. Easier said than done with some of the more picky places who want to fleece you of registration fees and samples in abundance for no purpose other than to line their own larders. However there are also those genuine market holders who are in it for all the right reasons and we have a whale of a time at Kent farmers markets and at Brighton North lane. It has to be said we have received superb feedback from so many people who taste and buy at our stall.

and then along came the chicken...

OK the urban farm truly was in action both at the school, but more so at the Welling base of streetgrowers.  So the natural next step was chickens and eggs, and yes I can resist the temptation for the obvious...
Having kept chooks as a youngster I was no stranger to this job but we felt the garden shed approach was not best use of space so initially went for a modern all plastic eglu from those lovely people at omlet...in fact we got ours off ebay at a knock down price.  A quick trip to Faversham to the wonderful Churchmans farm and we were armed with our first 3 point of lay chooks and their story can be found on our streetchicks page, just click this link. Over the following years we have added to the flock, changed our minds about the benefits of the eglu, all plastic might keep the mites away but they dont offer flexibility and being so low to the floor everything gets wet and muddy. So we sold the lovely eglu, back on ebay for a profit, love it when that happens, and now we have 2 wooden coops with a large run offering a choice of setups and the opportunity to expand into bantams and we hope a future of breeding.
So the question I am asked all the time, do you need a cockerel to get eggs? And trust me its not just kids that ask that one. No you dont but we have ventured now into bantam breeding and have acquired a beautiful cockerel and his lovely ladies, so introducing Dr Horacio Abbchamp and his girls, Lady Akoya and Midnight...watch out for updates of their progress..already laying well and midnight is just a little bit broody already. Their smaller eggs are just perfect for our scotched eggs, in salmon and sausage meat varieties.

the buzz of excitement...

So we had a garden at school and a team of young healthy students keen to learn more about the self sufficiency way of life, we Ok they were enjoying every minute spent using real tools and digging holes for all sorts of uses.  This enthusiasm boosted the growing range at home and our garden in Welling was looking really lush and bursting with the blossom of crab apples, plum, pear, apple, blackberry, raspberry and a wide range of seedlings now coming up and reaching for the sunlight to grow into healthy strong vegetables and salad crops.  The students began asking questions, as they do with their juvenile spongelike brains desire for details, can we have some chickens? Can Simon fit his head inside the watering can and still speak? How will we get the flowers (blossom) to turn into apples? Can i go to the toilet with my wellies on?  The usual range of deep thinking was evident.
The answer to the first took up 3 lessons in attempts to gain a team understanding of the needs of chicken keeping and working out a rota for who was going to pop in at the weekends to feed, water and collect their eggs.  Can't they just stop laying at weekends?
So we still had a way to go with the farm part of urban farming but we certainly had the green fingered touch and were sprouting veg all over the place.  So we set about helping the group understand how the blossom becomes fruit and veg.  Following the most amazing beekeeping course for staff which you can see all the video diaries for by clicking this link, we homed our first swarm of bees in a hive in a roughly constructed apiary.  Yes that took a bit of explaining that bees not apes live in an apiary, anyway we had them in situ and had the training to look after them and draw off the annual honey harvest. Soon after a second colony followed which was a swarm we gathered from the nearby allotments and these were homed in the streetgrowers garden in Welling.

so what does any of this have to do with streetgrowers...?

Yes you would be very justified in wondering at this point what all this boring edu-babble (that's another thing you do in schools) has to do with the exciting venture that is www.streetgrowers.com
Well in order to deliver a course on Urban Farming we needed a farm... well OK a garden to start with and great ambition that we would be able to grow.!! We had a piece of land just past the cricket nets (thats probably trade description libellous as they had no nets and hadn't seen a googly for some years) and there was evidence of some leftovers from a previous life when another member of staff had done some growing with small groups of students and even built a poly-tunnel whilst they watched and made the tea.!! What we needed was some money to make it a reality and it only took a week or so to fill in the million page funding request forms for the government to support such a scheme off the back fo the great Jamie Oliver revolution.
Soon we had 2 greenhouses thanks to www.littlegreenfingers.com and began the hard labour of getting young people to work out how to push a barrow, dig holes, move compost and water without drowning.  Before much longer we had seeds becoming plants and plants bearing fruit and veg and the question of what do we do with it now? Suggestions from the staffroom included, give it to the kitchen but include instructions as cook might not recognise a fresh vegetable un-diced and not in a plastic freezer bag, sell it at a market and let the kids take them home (again concerns about the parents knowing what to do with fresh veg were voiced).  Well with this level of confidence there was obviously a need for some further research so I began asking other staff, parents and students what they thought would be best to do with the produce and our community links manager Lisa gave birth (in fact she is about to right this month for real) to the concept of streetgrowers.  Her thought process is not entirely clear but then thinking was not a required skill on her person specification, but the reasoning given was that the kids were growing produce in the town and could take it to farmers markets to sell to people in the country... beautiful.

the birth or Urban Farming GCSE...

Lady Luck was definitely on my side when we started the Urban Farming course for keystage 4 students because i had on our staff one of the most successful and experienced people in the world of ASDAN learning.  This system allows young people to achieve challenges based around learning new skills, working with others, communications and the like but the focus of each challenge can be anything you like (within reason).  So in Feb that year I teamed up with Jacci and we set about fitting challenges that count for GCSE equivalent points to the demands of a school garden/farm.  By March we had advertised the course to the up and coming year group and already had keen interest from them and their parents full of the enthusiasm we had shared that meant they could learn to grow their own vegetables or work as a team keeping chickens or bees and gain real life qualifications at the same time. In September 2010 our first cohort of 12 year 10 students took on the course and by October 3 others had transferred in from other courses as well...Urban Farming was born

the story so far...

5 years ago I was working in a massive secondary school in Greenwich, having a great time exploring exciting new ways of learning with young people.   One of my responsibilities was for the curriculum so I formed a working party (that's what you do in schools) of really passionate staff who gave a damn big time not just about the diet of learning our kids were getting but also that all our youngsters could access learning and gain qualifications for their skills at all levels.

We had spent months sorting out the breadth of subjects on offer, tested out pilot groups in exciting new courses which included challenge based learning rather than exams and really looked creatively at how we could offer genuine choice to the most able yet make sure they had all the boxes ticked for the universities who were ramping up the entry requirements by the minute.  But our biggest sticking point for some time had been the less able of dis-engaged young people in our school.  we had explored BTEC courses and found they fitted the bill for some, but the ones who just enjoy learning new skills, love the outdoors and can be successful with the support of a team around them were leaving us with a problem.  We could find plenty of courses targeted at this group but none that offered genuine competitive GCSE equivalent qualifications to recognise the learning of these young people. So the decision was made to create our own bespoke course (that's what you did at our school).

from small acorns...

Streetgrowers has been a passion of ours over the past 5 years and here I plan to make my best efforts to bring you up to speed with the story so far and then my ambitious plan is to add regular info about the exciting adventure we are embarking on to make it our lifestyle rather than a hobby...
read more at www.streetgrowers.com