Urban gardening
Growing a vegetable!
As this pings into your inbox on Friday morning, I will hopefully be on the train to Manchester. I am going to the RHS first-ever Urban Show which is being held in a venue very different to the usual RHS garden show venues. Depot Mayfield ‘is a 10,000 capacity venue in Manchester’s historic former railway station. Built in 1910 as a railway yard for Mayfield station, and used by the Royal Mail as a distribution centre until the 1980s, the site lay dormant for almost three decades. The building’s industrial heritage has been retained as fully as possible, with original raw concrete floors, exposed brick and metalwork and huge iron struts supporting the underground vaults.The site was transformed in 2019 into a multi-use space for arts, music, industry and culture in the city centre’. So it sounds like the perfect place to hold this new event.
There are the promises of Nathan Webster’s Urban Forest where ‘visitors can wander through while listening to the sounds of the city and the distant buzz of traffic intermingled with birdsong’. Meanwhile; Jack’s Patch takes over a content cube to demonstrate how urban farming could be accessible to all. Embracing two key themes of the RHS Urban Show – recycling and technology, old crisp tubs are repurposed into containers for sprouting mushrooms in moisture-regulated cabinets, while trays of microgreens thrive under grow-lit shelving units. And ‘throwing down the gauntlet to the developers and city planners, Jason Williams, aka the Cloud Gardener, is bringing solutions to how we green our urban spaces. The cloudscapes project recognises that if we want to have a sustainable plan for the future of city living, urban gardening needs to be more than a tomato plant on a balcony. It also acknowledges the issue with how developers meet environmental obligations, and presents an achievable alternative.
It sounds very exciting and I’ll let you know more about it in next weeks blog! The picture above is of my own small venture into growing a vegetable inspired by next month’s plant story. I am sure some of you will recognise the seedling. I know we have had trees and shrubs and flowers and herbs and even plant tattoos but we have never had a vegetable story so I am quite excited and I was certainly inspired to start growing the plant. There’s a bonus to this vegetable story too because we also get some great suggestions of how to eat and cook it, as well as grow it!
Meanwhile I have had the first confirmation of the purchase of a Silver Birch tree following on from last week’s episode: Judith’s Silver Birch. I have also had some reports of people eyeing up their garden spaces to see if they can fit one in. So if you haven’t yet listened to Judith’s plant story, I do urge you to take it with you on a walk, or on your commute or perhaps it could accompany your cooking this evening. As with all these plant stories, the significance of the plant is often surprising and beautiful and this one is both.
I am also hoping to gather some recordings during my time in Manchester, there’s a plant story and an Offshoot in the offering, so plenty to be doing!
Have a lovely weekend.
Sally