Mulberry Close, Chingford
Our beautiful hillside allotment site of wonder, where we are growing a range of different herbs for our remedies and developing the medicinal forest garden as well as other areas of diverse habitat and ecosystem support. Inductions are first Thursday of each month. It’s a brilliant spot. We welcome you! Facilitated by Jayne and Jonny.
Garden days at Mulberry
Weekly Thursdays all year round, 10am-4pm (summer) / 10am-3pm (winter)
Herbal healthcare theme: Multiple! Lots of space for trying out different herbs and growing stocks to supply seeds and plants to other gardens. Ecosystem health. Forest gardening for biodiversity and beauty. Food growing. Habitats. Sociality and beautiful, colourful lunches.
Background
This is our largest site and the one with most potential for substantial herb growing but also land care activity and learning. It is a Waltham Forest council allotment site that had lain abandoned for some decades with occasional scrub-clearing, and lots of flytipping, but also great wildness of ecosystem with animals finding homeland, so many birds (one of the great joys of this garden) and a richness of blackthorn, bramble, hawthorn and elder - wild pioneers of wasteland.
We took it on in early 2020 with the support of Organiclea who had got Pocket Parks funding and had planned to develop it as another community food growing site allied with their Hawkwood Nursery a mile away, supplementing their fruit growing capacity. However there is one quirk to this spot - there is no water source. Having explored many options they decided it would not be possible to cultivate it as planned without this crucial resource, at which point they said to us, ‘Do you lot want to take it on for your herbs?’ To which, after coming to visit it and falling in love with the stunning views and magical wildness, we said YES! Which led us into a year-long journey of bramble-clearing, root-digging, wasp-evading fun as we cleared years worth of overgrowth and uncovered decades of junk. In great company, soothing our lost souls with all the fellow lost souls of the pandemic year. It was healing!
We also made friends with the neighbours of the site, whose houses lining the edge of it have access to allotment plots that they have rented for many years.
It has become a loved spot and through 2021 we realised we had actually cleared enough space - with great and mighty efforts from many people - and now we have planted circular herb beds (vision of Ximena) and started off a forest garden area.
The water situation meant that we had to bring water through the warmer days of spring and hot days of summer 2021, with some supplementing from neighbour Mike. The herbs survived and thrived. But we started installing butts to harvest rainwater and there is now a plan to build a shelter for rainy days and workshop days - with the expertise of Shannon from Organiclea - that will have large water collecting ‘IBC’ containers around to gather the rainwater from its roof. Necessity makes us seek more circular systems ecology and more generative solutions.
2024 update: the shelter is built, the 6 x 1000 litre IBC stores are full with the rain of the year, this is our first summer refreshing and soaking the land and plants with the water of the skies! What a thrill :)