Roots and Shoots - crops above and below the ground!

This week we continued to harvest crops from the garden. Here we are digging up parsnips and carrots from the buckets.

As you can see, they have grown into a variety of interesting shapes!
We also welcomed Conorhan, our new member this week who immediately got stuck into the hard work.

This is how they looked after washing - we decided the parsnips look like aliens and the carrots like cartoon characters! Miss Swallow has par-boiled some and put them in the freezer for our Christmas dinner. Hopefully we can sell some more to the school staff.

There was too much lettuce for us to eat, so we'll try selling that too. Everyone has taken some home and there's still more left.

Meanwhile, Rob has been busy. Here you can the "wash station"...

...and this week, he built this "cardboard storage point" so that we can encourage people in school to collect old cardboard boxes. They can sit here in the rain so they get soft before putting them into the compost.

Here you can see one of the compost bins and the blue one behind is for "stewing" weeds that we don't want to put in the compost - it has a tap on it so we can drain off the water once the weeds have soaked in it. That way, we get the nutrients out of them without getting pernicious weeds in the compost.

We also dug up all our garlic and weeded the raised bed - photos to follow so watch this space! The shed now reeks of tasty garlic! Next week we plan to make garlic bread and soup to enjoy the fruits of our labour.

Also, the path was looking rather messy, so we have raked it - just need to continue down to the railings now ready for the new gate which hopefully will be installed in a couple of weeks.