Troop recruitment

  

For all those interested in helping out or developing your own guerrilla team. This is the main patch I have been working on, now fully recovered from the summer's drought and beautifully green, if full of weeds. The pics are from October. It runs up Dog Kennel Hill adjacent to Sainsburys in East Dulwich. In the middle of a busy road with Night Bus traffic and getting full sunshine, it is a warm patch that can protect vulnerable plants in winter but also seriously dries out and the soil quality is pretty dire. Hence the plants that the council apparently once planted here mostly died and now they only properly manage about 4 long rectangles of land with seasonal bedding (the kind of stuff that is colourful year-round but is nectar-lite and utterly pointless if you are an insect or a bird). The stuff I plant must be tough, ideally self-seeding (e.g. California Poppies) or invasive (e.g. Euphorbia) in ordinary gardens and have flowers that contain pollen. I am much more weed tolerant here - unless it is smothering other plants I let them be (things like dandelions are full of pollen anyway). I haven't planted any veg because of the quality of the soil - it would need serious improvement (bags of compost dug in), and due to the time available I have to tend it. However Giovanni (from Antennae) has given me a wonderful artichoke and I do want to try that in this patch (they always succumb to snails in my garden - but this dry patch is virtually mollusc free).

  

My ambition for Dog Kennel Hill is to plant the entire strip that the council neglect - about 3/5ths done! I have a whole load of plants waiting to get planted here so any help would be grand. I can supply a few extra pairs of gloves and waste bags, though I only have one trowel now (unless anyone wants to wield a spade...).

I've also started adding stuff in to the raised pits near the bus stops near Reyna restaurant in New Cross Road, so very near Goldsmiths, piggy-backing on the stupendous sunflower project run by New-Xing and Artmongers. This is necessary - I hate empty/neglected plant pits plus the bee crisis continues unabated, but it is more vulnerable to theft and damage than DKH. Hence I'm thinking thistle type plants like Echinops and teasels.

Future-wise, everytime I go past Peckham Fire Station on the 171 or 436 I look at the 5 or so concrete planters outside it that are empty! I'd love to plant stuff there - like some of the Hollyhocks that selfseed wildly on DKH. That would need some donated compost however, and probably someone with a car!

As long as the ground is not frozen or covered in snow, we can still plant...

American Graffiti

...a must-share video from this lovely man, Ron Finley, guerrilla gardening fruit and veg in South Central Los Angeles...: "gardening is my graffiti"

Wet Wet Dry

September, and a rude autumnal awakening. Its raining a lot. I decided to plant a few more geraniums, euphorbia and michaelmas daisies in Stories Road as its technically ideal planting weather. Such is the strength of the tree in the pit that digging small holes for these new plants soon found dry soil. But its looking pretty good. Talked to by one mad woman complaining about hating Shakespeare and one elderly good burgher who said "well done".

Storied Road

Stories Road doing pretty well given the heat and the tree dominating this pit. I added another clump of michaelmas daisies, an alchemilla and a hardy geranium.

 

and McNeil Road - revived by Nick with some unmissable plants and shorn by the council. This time they only dealt with the brambles and the stuff growing on the bridge. Shame really as brambles are very wildlife friendly...

Patch worked

Well. The Dog Kennel Hill patch was fried in the 4 weeks of 30degrees and no rain. In spite of 2 mad dashes with buckets and assembled friends a lot of the plants really suffered. However in the last couple of weeks there has been regular rain so I risked planting some more stuff - the usual suspects, lychnis, alchemilla, leucanthemum. More excitingly, I met up with a very sweet young man doing an anthropology degree and interested in guerrilla gardening and together we planted in 4 Verbena Bonariensis next to the irises and chopped down all the browned stems of the hollyhocks, daisies and everything else singed and burnt. A lovely middle-aged Asian man simply said 'thank you' when he was waiting by the traffic lights.
It looks a bit desecrated but give it a few weeks and this patch will rock again.

 

...and here is the petit pit in Camberwell Grove - the one place that was close enough to maintain through the heat. Plus the people from the Vineyard have helped out. Subsequently some vile person [a plague on them] pulled out one of the verbenas by the roots and just left it there. I've replaced it with small ones.  

New New Cross

I passed through New Cross today and added in another Verbena Bonariensis [and was relieved to see the others were surviving thanks to the sudden rain we have at last had],  and another Mexican Sunflower (Tithonia 'Torch') to the pit immediately opposite the Launderette.

 

Here's the Mexican peeping through in the first pit to which I contributed. It will emerge above the yellow ones in a few weeks... I also added a 3rd Leucanthemum daisy here - they should bed in as strong evergreen perennials...

 

And here's a nasturtium. Its not one of the most rampant types but should self-seed for next year. You can still see some of the rubbish in these pics but I ended up clearing about 20 cans and bottles... At some point I'll bring my teasel seedlings here - they have toothed edges on every surface and might possibly slightly help a bit with dissuading people from littering the pits.
I would love to sort out the massively overgrown and congested irises in these beds. They are very easy to propagate [dig up; divide the rhizome into pieces about 4" long and replant, cutting down the dead foliage and trimming the green to 4" to allow all the energy to go into the rhizome for next year]. The existing clumps are so big they could be re-distributed through every bed in this strip of New Cross Rd.

Holy heliotrope!

Artmonger, Patricio Forrester and New X-ing have collaborated on a brilliant project to cheer up New Cross Road, SE14, and help the bees. '1000 Sunflowers for New Cross' has lived up to its name and planted sunflowers everywhere - in the neglected raised beds and in makeshift planters outside shops. These are Patricio's pics - witness the bee!
I've added some Mexican Sunflowers (Tithonia) and a few perennials too - Crocosmia, Verbena Bonariensis,  and Leucanthemum daisies. Huzzah! I've had my eye on these neglected pits for months...