Month in the life of an urban gardener: April 2025.
The tasks, problem solving, wildlife spots, learnings and reflections from an organic food grower in a North London kitchen garden.
Welcome to this separate reflection — as part of the Food-Fibre-Fashion publication — on what it’s like to be an urban organic food grower. This started as short snappy videos to condense moments across a month, before realising that actually the narrative and context behind them could be useful, whether successes or mistakes.
As this is part of the wider Food-Fibre-Fashion publication that shares essays, articles and resource newsletters, there will be stories and musings to raise your awareness of how interconnected these systems are, even when we’re looking in small scale, such as an urban garden.
Watch reels of previous months here → March 2025. / February 2025. / January 2025. / December 2024. / November 2024. / October 2024. / September 2024. / August 2024. / July 2024. / June 2024. / May 2024. / April 2024. / March 2024. / And previous months also via Instagram.
This is the eighteenth in this series of articles — A Month in the Life of an Urban Gardener. To read about the context of where I work, head to the first article.
Watch April 2025 in the form of a reel here.
You can also listen as a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts — and below →
Images: 1. Workday after running a 75km race, harvesting the first rhubarb; 2. Bought flowers for my home garden from a local shop based on how the honeybees were all over them; 3. Twilight walk in Clissold Park to enjoy the trees with full flower moon.
Harvesting.
With warmth and light comes growth. We started selling produce regularly on our workdays basically because we didn’t have any other customer, a cafe that could present our stuff, and to get people into the garden. And it worked! People picked up some lettuce heads (or came out to cut their own), spring onions, bunches of chard and kale, punnets of chillis, bundles of rhubarb stalks, and bunches of fresh herbs including parsley, mint and lemon balm.
Due to the drought, flowers seemed to come early with elderflower and hawthorn being those that are normally not out until May but appeared in April. This brings the smell of spring forward, harvesting these for herbal teas and cordials, yet know it’ll have a knock-on effect to the berries also coming earlier so disrupting food storage for birds.
The glasshouse and polytunnel were cleared of the giant mustard greens so that tomatoes could go out. These kilos were donated to our local National Food Service hub for redistribution or partly sold to a private customer for their supper club dishes. During winter everything of course slows in growth, or wouldn’t be harvested anyway because the ground is too hard. Some harvesting can happen; this is why we grow mustard greens indoors, and the chilli bush loves life no matter the weather. But come April, when stuff grows, it’s a reminder that as a grower you’re basically going to spend hours now harvesting and processing the crop.
An unhidden aspect of our food culture is the harvesting, with workers (mostly migrant) being paid apallingly for the skilled labourious task of selecting and cutting crops. Do you think about the energy intensivity of say strawberries when you purchase from a supermarket? Or your bag of tiny salad greens? Some mechanisation occurs, but for crops like these two they have to be hand harvested for selection of the best produce.
One of my early learnings as a organic food growing trainee was in reassessing my tolerance for “damage” and understanding how to grade. I think it would be useful for the general public to do this, just so they can assess their personal tolerance, particularly with what they throw away. Unfortunately there is a lot of wastage on site, for instance with salad leaves that are simply too holey and we know a customer wouldn’t accept it, but similarly that certain produce could still be cooked, for example with caterpillar-eaten kale leaves because you’re going to cook them anyway. Teaching the trainees this fine balance between bad, ok and good was something for April, but it’s a skill that comes with practice and is determined specifically by the crop.
Images: 1. Produce for sale with handwritten chalkboard pricelist; 2. Harvesting mustard greens from the polytunnel into cooking greens and salad greens; 3. Harvesting elderflower for the first time this year.
Sowing, potting on and planting out.
March is the big month for sowing spring crops, so April is more about the moving around and potting on of seedlings so that they receive adequate light and warmth before being planted out.
Flowers — the trays and pots of tagetes, scabious, wallflower and violet were moved to the polytunnel to relieve hot property warm sunny propagation bench space. They didn’t have a space to go out just yet, and were all a bit too small to survive any mollusc damage — and I was perhaps being a bit too precious with them, though they’d really taken a lot of effort to get them to a nice rooted leafy stage. I also sowed Japanese indigo, woad, strawflower, cosmos and zinnia now it was a bit warmer.
Lettuce — My thirty trays of thirty seedlings were surviving, mainly because it was dry so there were less molluscs getting into the glasshouse. The trainees planted out some older mustard seedlings that had been sat waiting their turn. The timeline just wasn’t right; the ones I’d potted on were replacement seedlings, but they had nothing yet to replace because we hadn’t got to planting the originals.
Curcubits — our four trainees started this month and an early task was to learn about the delicate art of sowing; from getting the seed sowing medium mix just right for airy drainage, choosing how many seeds to sow and what trays to use, watering from below and a sprinkle from top, to the depth the seeds need to go to use their internal germination magic. Winter squash, courgette and cucumbers were sown. For fun they also did cucumelon, but the old seed didn’t germinate. One day I’d like to try loofah. After only 10 days or so, the seedlings were potted on, being very gentle not to disturb their roots. They’re not a species for being fondled heavily.
Tomatoes — we’d sown around 200 when actually we only need 80 for our space. It’s a “just in case”. And in fact due to a surge in warmth in April all the tomato seedlings became very leggy, so spare plants were useful. We sold a lot of these to customers, with our favourites being planted out in the polytunnel and glasshouse. Prior to this the mustard greens had to be stripped, a good dousing of fresh compost topdressed on the beds, jute twine dropped from the aerial wires to act as plant supports, a very nice water and a little dollop of worm castings for super nutrition. This latter was necessary for the plants showing chlorisis (yellowing) from outgrowing the nutrition in the potting mix of their small pots. They were ready to go in.
Images: 1. Trainees sowing cucumber seeds into module trays; 2. Propagation bench with potted on curcubits and a tray of germinated dyers' coreoposis; 3. Planting out tomatoes into the glasshouse.
Maintenance.
Scything — we have a jaunty site with lots of tussocky bits so we aren’t often able to usefully scythe, but a part of the garden had become “overgrown” with meadow plants such as cow parsley and long grasses so I tried to remember the “low and slow” scything zen mantra and got to work. Unfortunately on one patch I nearly beheaded frogs jumping about so had to stop. I liked the looks from centre customers; it’s not a frequent sight, which someone even remarked upon: “you don’t often see one of those”. It’s a skill I’m happy to have been taught.
Weeding — just about every section of the garden required weeding, from the veg and herb beds, to fully covered paths. Volunteers were very helpful in covering large areas, though one didn’t heed my advice to get a big fork to remove alkanet and instead broke a hand trowel in half. Weeding is satisfying; what is it about getting stuff up and tidying that makes us feel better? With lots of green waste comes lots of compost processing time, which is great because we were needing sieved compost to topdress spring beds with.
Arbour — volunteers and colleagues continued work on their hazel arch, having used rope and weighted contained to keep the hazel bent into position. Eventually it was deemed sturdy enough and so far has remained in place. This needs to be planted with climbing plants, and some more weeding, mulching and path making around it so that it doesn’t become overloaded and hidden. It’s a nice thing to dance down the slope in; or, as I discovered the couple days post-75km race, move slowly down.
Pruning — with the tomatoes having gone into the glasshouse, the chilli needed pruning back hard to allow light and airflow in, while refreshing the plant. Most of the fruit on the bush was ripe anyway, so kilos of chillis were harvested and dried in a dehydrator, and the bush cut back heavy.
Cover crop bed — we had sown a “green manure” or cover crop in a few beds in order to rebuild soil nutrients and structure. They were to be planted with courgette, squash and beans. Ahead of sowing these, the beds were “terminated”, meaning the tall crop mix of grasses, phacelia, vetch and clover (and some other species) were chopped close to their base, dropped onto the bed, and then covered with cardboard and a weed suppressant then weighted down, to be left for a month or so. This would allow some moisture and heat, and consequently encourage bacteria and microbes and inverterbrates to come break down the crop, releasing those nutrients into the soil, creating new soil, and shifting the bed from one that had depleted health to one with lots of life.
Weaving a bench — I’d gotten frustrated about my colleagues doing some creative projects of their own while I stuck to managing all the sowing and potting on to ensure we had crops. So with 40 minutes at the end of a day, I decided to give myself some creative time and started weaving a bench using discontinued climbing rope. Being in a climbing centre, we have access to lots of this material. I’d discovered a discarded metal frame that seemed sturdy enough to attempt weaving like I did with the rope chair and within those 40 minutes had one side of the bench done. Of course, months later I haven’t made it back to finish the rest of it.
Images: Top row l-r: 1. Hazel arbour; 2. Green manure bed chopped, dropped and covered; 3. Scythe and freshly-scythed grass. Bottom row l-r: 1. Volunteers in a row along a path doing some teamwork weeding; 2. Progress on a woven discontinued climbing rope bench; 3. Pruned chilli looking bare, temporarily.
Flax.
This would be my fourth year sowing and growing flax. Perhaps this is the year I’d actually do something with the crop. I was taking a year-long seed production training course with The Gaia Foundation, with flax and woad as my “portfolio crops”. Normally I would buy seed, chuck it into the beds, and then every now and then marvel at the nice blue flowers and golden seed heads, and forget about it. As this was to be more of a controlled experiment, I needed to better understand what I was doing.
I sent an email to Simon of Flaxland who honestly immediately gave me a call back. I’d asked whether I should purchase linseed or flaxseed, or a mix of both, because I’d been learning about pollination (and cross-pollination) and whether this could occur with the linum species. In 2024 I had left the crop to go to seed rather than harvesting the fibre, so I was convinced I’d have linseed present in the soil. And a note, this was linseed not flaxseed as there’d been an issue importing flaxseed from the continent so only UK-grown linseed was available. This producers a shorter straw, not usually used for fibre and instead for seed for food and oil. As this was in the bed, I didn’t want to then sow flaxseed into it.
Another discussion was then had with Zoe Gilbertson who was researching bioregional resilience of bast fibre crops, in particular flax. She’d mentioned about a “landrace”, and Simon too had said he was going to grow ten heritage varieties in pots to save seed from and sow again, following a research study at Durham University. This got me considering what I wanted to grow the seed for. I hadn’t anticipated this would be for commerical purposes (I’d never have the land acreage required), but was interested in addressing differences in varieties. So from Flaxland I bought linseed and flaxseed.
Bed #1 was the landrace bed. It already would have some historic linseed in the soil, so I did a mix of the new linseed, flaxseed, and also old packets of promotional European seed. I’d then select the best looking stems to be what I’d save for seed and have a mix of whatever variety. I broadcasted because I knew the historic linseed seed would be all over the place, so no point then doing drills.
Bed #2 was the sort of control bed. This was sown in drills with the suggested spacing and specific seed for the application (flaxseed sown closer together for fibre, linseed sown further apart for seed). It also had less light down here, with half of the bed horizontally being pretty much fully in shade due to a fence, so I’d see if there was any sort of resilience in the crops growing despite the poor conditions.
Both beds needed to be heavily weeded. #1 was full of horse chestnut casings, nasturtium seedlings, magenta tree spinach, couch grass. #2 was full of bindweed, herb robert, couch grass. Soil was poor with lots of stones, but as I’d successfully sown both flax and lin in these before, and not wanting to use fresh compost with too much nutrition (not exactly how it would be commercially), I just ensured there was a deep watering before sowing, a tamp down of seed, and some good wishes sent.
Unfortunately it was clear come later in the month that the seedlings I saw in bed #1 were in fact spurge. It’s quite a tricksy plant looking similar to early-stage linum seedlings. Additionally, the linseed in the control bed hadn’t germinated or were eaten (possibly because rhubarb plants are next to it and they harbour molluscs). I had to spent hours weeding bed #1 and had to purchase more linseed to resow bed #2.
Images: 1. Weeded bed #2 with planks put down to allow walking across it without compacting the soil; 2. Weighing out the flaxseed and linseed according to square metreage; 3. Drilling flax seed.
Beekeeping.
I had been frequently checking in on the bees after the revelation in late March that the families were alive and just getting started. The log hive however had been busy since January and so it was unsurprising when they started swarming early on in the season. It’s told that as soon as you see dandelions — which are an early source of nectar for honeybees — is when a beekeeper should be ready for swarming. On April 9th there was some minor bearding outside the log hive and I was like, no, not yet please, but watched them for a minute and decided they were just fanning to keep cool.
With awareness that the weather was going to continue getting warm and that I needed to prepare the apiary for any new hives, I got to weeding. It had been on my mind the whole winter so getting this done made me feel instantly better. It needed loads of greenery trimming back, edges weeded, bed weeded, the ground levelling, ground sweeping and the hives themselves tidied up. It also gave me the headspace to look properly at the hive of the dead family, that I’d just left for a day when I could deal with it. I knew it had capped honey, but didn’t know how much, so I simply monitored that no animals could get in but allowed it to be sniffed out by scout bees in case they did want to move in. This had caused me some confusion when I’d seen the other two supposedly dead hives come to life, because this one I’d deemed absolutely dead, and here it was with some bees flying around it. I think it was scouts from the log hive.
I still didn’t have the full days to process any of the dead hive comb, so I popped the two boxes at the back of the apiary covered with a piece of wood to block any animals or other bees. It had really crazy cross-comb that had been propolised in sections where the brood was, so it was darker than cells reserved for honey. I wanted to give it all the attention and respect it deserved, particularly as bees had died in situ in the cells.
Images: 1. Detail of honeybee hive box showing dead bees in the cells and comb sticking the bars together; 2. Propolised cross comb in another hive box; 3. Weeded apiary looking tidier.
Swarm #1 — April 21st the log hive swarmed for the first time. Of course mum bee landed on the top of the highest cherry plum tree, again. She’d landed in a few spots so the workers clustered around where the pheromone remained, and over the course of an hour disintegrated to be one larger cluster. I knew it wasn’t possible to get it; the tree is on a slope, other branches are in the way, and it wouldn’t be possible to shake them or cut off a branch safely for them or for us. A colleague in the centre who really likes catching swarms was determined but he agreed on my final word.
After a few hours they lifted off and noisily streamed back into the apiary. I’d set up a couple of bait hives with comb from the hive I had yet to process, but to my absolute surprise and even joy, the scouts had chosen to select the national hive. This is a whopping big hive, that we can’t look into unless it’s opened fully, so I’d only been able to surmise that the family had struggled through winter due to their late start. The scouts choosing this hive was confirmation that either the mum there had already died or she was weak, and they thought their mum was better, essentially. A volunteer sat and watched the swarm stream inside, feeling calm amidst what others may feel as chaos.
Images: 1. Honeybees swarming in the sky before they land in a cluster; 2. Honeybees clustering up high on a cherry plum tree; 3. Swarm moving into an existing hive.
Swarm #2 — April 30th I was in the centre on a cleaning shift when a Duty Manager came to find me to say that there was another swarm. I’d missed the swarming itself so could only surmise it was the log hive again, but they landed on a small apple tree. It’s interesting how they go for the same spots, despite it not being the same family (due to queen selection and turnover of workers). This tree is a little awkward for centre visitors because if the apiary path is blocked then they have to use this one, but this one had to be blocked because the bees were clustering next to it. Fortunately they settled very quickly.
I’m not in the habit of bundling up the bees and forcing them into a home of my own choosing; if the scouts found another suitable home elsewhere and they flew off, that’s fine with me, so over the course of a few hours I would check in on them. I took some videos of the scouts doing their waggle dances to communicate where they’d found a possible home. I could only hope that they’d found one of my bait hives and would move themselves, but decided that on this occasion it was logistically possible to catch them and rehome them myself, and they were taking a fair amount of time to decide on their own. Their location next to the path wasn’t ideal even though they were chill and a small cluster.
This was the first time I’d catch and shake a swarm on my own, as no one else was around. I couldn’t spot the mother, so had to do two shakes, but after this second go the tree cluster dissipated. Scouts on the hive I shook into were bums in the air wafting their Nazonov pheromone to indicate home was that way, and meaning mum was inside and they were all quite content. Over the next few days into May I would check on them, particularly when there was another swarm on May 1st, and comb was being built rapidly. They were home. Watch me shaking that swarm in this video.
Images: 1. Honeybees swarming in the sky before they land in a cluster; 2. Honeybees clustering up high on a cherry plum tree; 3. Swarm moving into an existing hive.
Flora and fauna.
Other animals and flowers were spotted and observed and enjoyed too.
A worm longer than my hand was in the bed I weeded for flax. Many frogs and toads, one of which scared the living daylights out of me coming out from under a chicory plant in the polytunnel. A cat that looks like regular River but with different ears, and then another cat that looked the same as that one, so we assume they’re both offspring.
Poppies all over the site were popping up (oh, is that why they’re “poppies”?!) and bumblebees were soundingly delighted at the food. The flower bed up on Herb Terrace was brimming with hollyhocks in the second year now stemming and budding, red campion, purple toadflax, lamb’s ear, fennel and woad and weld plants also in the second year. It was good to see how they’d all established themselves here, most of which hadn’t even been sown but was clearly a good spot for them.
The fruit trees were blossoming, looking like delicate pom pom puff balls. I personally rejoiced in the apples because I could then tell my pruning was good (or, good enough). It really was a very nice looking garden at this time.
Images: Top row l-r: 1. Poppy with pollen-covered bumblebee inside; 2. Toad disturbed by harvesting in the glasshouse; 3. Woad plant starting to flower. Bottom row l-r: 1. Cultivated cherry in blossom; 2. Dwarf apple tree looking incredibly pretty and stylish in blossom; 3. Currants starting to flower and fruit.
I keep bemoaning myself for these diary posts being behind. It’s arbitrary. But it’s as if I can’t do something from one season in another season. April was spring; it was all suddenly in bloom, all fresh and colourful and buzzing. I’m writing this in the middle of June, one week away from the Summer Solstice and I can tell that certain plants are already switching over, such as the elderflower to elderberry. And that’s because the spring season came very early and in full force due to drought. It was lovely, but also harrowing.
Writing about the previous season feels incongruous — where it was sunny but you were still wearing a down jacket, while now wearing shorts and a vest and all windows are open to get a breeze, and you’re covered in irritating mosquito bites. In this line of work you’re so rooted to the seasons, and yet the attunement means you recognise the slightest shift, and so things move fast. Looking back now on April I am reminded of the joy of seeing the first flush of flowers on the currants, the bees clambering over the phacelia, and the first smell of freshly-cut rhubarb and a face doused in elderflower pollen. It’s all too fleeting.
However, I hope with these posts I can provide you with some sort of sensation of the life in an urban garden, even when you’re not there yourself — or perhaps don’t even know what I’m referring to with certain terms (because I don’t have a glossary and it’s not smooth or quick to explain everything). By describing these tasks you too can go back to whatever month and remember what you were doing; what smells made you recognise the shift, what tastes brought joy, when you stopped wearing a jumper each day… little things that remind us we’re here and there is joy, and to continue the work in recognising this even when the world is collapsing inwards and we’re suffocating from what feels arbitrary and yet is the only way to restore a hold on something present.
Images: 1. Fruit salad sweet-looking chard stem; 2. Beautiful tight burgundy-coloured rose; 3. Lilac colour of phacelia flowers.