Green Capital Gardening Blog:
Part 1 (Jobs for December)

This is your guide to all things gardening related throughout the Green Capital year. Each month our resident blogger will share tips on how to get started with food growing, and where to find projects and community gardens in your area. You'll discover that gardening isn’t just a summer time hobby but something that can be done 52 weeks of the year!

Gardening in the city is a great thing to do and even if you don’t have a garden it can still be something you can do, whether you end up growing in pots on a balcony or joining in a community garden.

We are immensely lucky in Bristol that we have a lot of community gardens from large and exciting projects such as Feed Bristol and Trinity Community Garden to much smaller gardens like Plant at St Agnes Park or one of several community orchards such as Southmead Community Orchard.

All these gardens, along with around 60 more are constantly looking for volunteers to come along and join in, meet new people and learn new skills as well as taking a share of a bounteous harvest.

As founder of Incredible Edible Bristol, I work with lots of community groups to bring food growing to spaces that are unloved around the city, making small pockets of urban food production that are there for everyone to harvest.

We would like to see this become the norm, with small projects on every street corner and, perhaps, larger projects in every area of the city.

In each of these blogs we will tell you about a community garden somewhere in the city and we will also post a recipe for something that is seasonal at that point in the year.

What we’d really like to do is encourage everyone to go out and get involved in a community project, learn a few new skills and meet some new people.

Jobs for December

So I hear you ask, what can we be doing now?

Well now is the ideal time to tidy up the garden and put a good mulch of well rotted manure on all your beds and borders, for either food or flowers, in order to feed it and prepare it for the growing season ahead.

Put a good 3-4 inches on now and leave it for the worms to do their job and pull it down into the earth so that your newly panted out specimens have plenty of nutrients to give them a good start in life.

It’s also a good time to cut back herbaceous perennials but make sure you leave seed heads of things like teasels that will feed the birds over winter.

It’s also time to sow onion sets and garlic into the garden or allotment as traditionally they are sown on the shortest day and harvested on the longest!!
And as for a recipe? Well there are a lot of locally grown pumpkins and squashes available right now so here’s a recipe for pumpkin/squash soup!!