One of the problems with putting fresh fruit and veg in our street pantry is that it works better for some produce than others. For robust stuff like citrus and other fruits, chokoes, caulis, root veg it works well but for leaf crops, they do not put up with sitting around in the pantry for any length of time and tend to look pretty second hand after only a few hours. It can take some time (days) before items get removed by passers-by.
Cleaned, cleared and ready to go!
At the same time that I was pondering this problem, I was also looking at a couple of bathtubs that were already in the front yard and set up as wicking beds. They were not in use and had been taken over by weeds. It seemed a shame to have that growing space and not have it in a productive condition.
Also in the same area (ie the northeast corner of the front yard) there is our well grown (6 metres) bay tree (laurus nobilis). I am pretty sure it would keep all of St Clair in bay leaves if people could identify it. Unfortunately, most of the people around here don’t seem to pick up that it is a useful tree.
Lauris Nobilis (our bay tree!)
Eureka! This would be a great place to start a garden where by-passers could harvest their own fresh veggies themselves.
The first part was to rehabilitate the wicking beds (how I put them together originally can be found here). I pulled out all the weeds, added some potting mix and then applied a layer of sugar cane mulch. To make it a little mor obvious, I also installed a couple of stepping stones at the front of the beds for access. The next question, was what to plant?
In summer the beds doesn’t get much full sun due to the shade from the mulberry tree, but In winter the area gets about four hours of full sun a day due to the mulberry losing its leaves and the lower angle of the sun. Due to the lack of sunlight for part of the year it seemed sensible to grow leaf crops. Seeing as we were moving into winter, one bed received broccoli, the other got silver beet.
Getting the seedlings was easy, I was able to use seedlings that were not needed for our normal annual veggie patches. I normally sow more than I need to ensure I get enough and then I can pass unneeded seedlings on to others. In this case I just potted them on into newspaper pots and when they were big enough they went into the bath tubs.
It has been several months (it is late winter now) and the silver beet seedlings have grown enough to be harvested, but the broccoli have not headed yet. I wondered for a short while how to make it easy for by-passers to cut some leaves without needing to pull up the entire plant (providing a knife seemed like a bad idea), and came up with the idea of providing an old pair of secateurs. I affixed them to the baths with some chain and bolts, mainly to prevent any local kids from pinching them and using them to prune their mum’s roses down to a stub. We will have to see how that goes.
Last of all, I put together a sign and telling them to ‘Help themselves’ to veggies and bay leaves which has now gone into place. I am awaiting to see if anybody will take advantage of the free fresh produce that we want to share!
