Incredible Edible Didcot: Level 1

At the beginning of the month I was helping to survey some planters in the centre of Didcot that Incredible Edible Didcot (a group within Sustainable Didcot) had been given permission to plant with edible herbs as their first Incredible Edible community planting project.

Yesterday was the big day, when Sustainable Didcot and volunteers from the community came together to donate plants, plant up the space with edibles and make signs to let people know what was happening.

The council had cleared the old planting out of the first tier of planters for us. The old planting wasn’t bad – there were plenty of flowering plants for bees and beneficial insects, including rosemary and lavender, but it was neglected. We knew the soil was rock solid, so we brought peat-free compost to improve it, and plenty of bark chips to mulch the plants and give them some litter protection!

Most of the plants were donated by the public, but Sainsbury’s Didcot sent up some herbs to get us started. The coriander and basil are off to a new home in Sustainable Didcot’s community allotment – they didn’t quite fit the bill for the planters – but we planted up the chives, mint and parsley alongside the other plants.

The volunteers really got stuck in to the hard work of digging over the soil.

Tibor (red cap) is from Hungary, and works as a professional gardener here in the UK. He did all of the work for the middle planter himself! After digging, adding compost, planting and watering, and applying the bark chips, this is the result. He chose lavender for the back row, various thymes for the front, and little bay trees for the middle. There’s a pair of strawberries (‘Snow White’, leftover plants from my garden!) at either end, too. You can see that one of the