What Will The Harvest Be? - Urban Seed Days

Project: Abbey Gardens

On Saturday August 16th and September 27th we held two URBAN SEED DAYS at Abbey Gardens encouraging folk to get involved with What Will The Harvest Be?

The idea was to gather or sow some seeds for next year's Harvest Garden and to talk more about our long term proposals for this unique historic site. Botanist Roy Vickery (of South London Botanical Institute) joined us for the first afternoon and led a great walk around the garden looking at wildflowers that have been imported, blown onto or deliberately planted on the site. Besides just identifying an amazing range of plants from Mugwort & Corn Cockle to tomatoes & Physalis (!) Roy was also able to reveal some fascinating folklore about the different plants. Karen then gave a master-class on seed propagation, with some hands on volunteers sewing seeds of plants to be used next year.

On the second day we focussed on collecting seeds from the wild flowers planted on the site this year, these included: White Campion, Corn Cockle, Cornflower, Corn Chamomile, Corn Marigold, Field Poppy and Scentless Mayweed.

The events were supported by Newham Council & Friends of Abbey Gardens, with additional free seeds from the wonderful Chiltern Seeds. We still have some left so if you'd like to bring on some plants for next year's Harvest Garden in your own backyard or a sunny windowsill contact us and we'll send you some out.

You can see our photos from both days on Flickr here.