Location: Stamford Street, London, SE1
Guerrilla Gardening: Sunday 19 April 2009
This central London patch has been guerrilla gardened for two years now. Sunflowers have been the primary crop and a few strawberries but we’ve been keen to grow more food here for a while. The impetus to get going came from my visit to the National Vegetable Society in Canterbury. I talked about guerrilla gardening and afterwards Brian gave me trays of young veg seedlings. So Andrew 1679, Sunny 1600, Susannah 2877 and I gathered at 6.30pm to weed, plant and sow our veg and mulch a bit. Who gets the eat the veg is the big question? Us or passers by? To be frank we’d rather passers by didn’t harvest the cabbages, mangetout, spring onions, green beans and strawberries, which is why we’ve hidden them amongst our snap dragons, pot marigolds (good for deterring bugs) and small (but growing) clumps of montbretia. As for their nutritional value… well there is the issue of pollution to reconcile. Two years of growing sunflowers here should have taken some of the possible lead out of the soil and we believe a good wash should suffice - all part of a well balanced diet of poisons.