Own Grown Gardening

I thought as a follow on from yesterday's post about propagating rosemary, I would share a little gem of a recipe that uses this lovely herb. I find these biscuits somehow simultaneously sweet and savoury, an unusual combination.    SERVINGS 8 biscuits COOK TIME Prep time - 20 min Bake time - 17 to 22 min    BISCUIT INGREDIENTS 1 lemon 1 sprig of rosemary (about 10cm) 120g flour 1/2 teaspoon baking powder 100g butter (salted) 100g sugar 100g ricotta cheese (full fat) 1 egg 1/4 tsp vanilla extract   ICING INGREDIENTS 80g cream cheese (full fat) 80g powdered icing sugar 1 tbsp lemon juice Dash of vanilla extract   BUSCUIT INSTRUCTIONS Preheat the oven to 180 C and line a baking tray with baking paper Zest the lemon Remove the rosemary leaves from the stem and chop the leaves very finely Mix the lemon zest, finely chopped rosemary, flour, and baking powder in a mixing bowl and set aside In a second bowl, cream together the butter and sugar Add the ricotta cheese, egg, and vanilla extr

I'm so pleased with this little success. I've never had any luck rooting rosemary or lavender before. I pop the cuttings into potting soil, augment with perlite for  drainage, water them fastidiously, and then watch them slowly wilt, drop their leaves, and die... So, I felt a new sense of hope a couple months ago when I read about rooting in water instead. I thought, gosh, what an interesting idea. If I put the cuttings in a glass jar, I could actually watch for root growth. What had I got to loose? Well, guess what? It worked! For the rosemary at least. Look! Let me show you how I did it.  Step one: I cut sprigs off this year's growth (white and soft rather than brown and woody) from the healthiest sections of my mother plants. Step two: using my sharpest pruning knife, a penknife would work just as well, I trimmed off the leaves running up the stem just leaving a little sprig at the very top. Step three: I trimmed the stem just below the bottom leaf node. The leaf nodes h

To be frank, I'm a little obsessed with my compost pile. It is by far the most visited part of my garden each day. Due to this, the beautiful beast sits right outside my kitchen's back door like a friendly guard dog beckoning me out into the fresh air each morning. I dearly hope you have, or can develop, such a cherished relationship with your compost too. I've seen too many bone dry compost piles for comfort, visited too many gardens without compost piles for comfort, and heard too much poor advice about compost piles for comfort. Let's try to remedy this. First of all, I strongly recommend positioning your compost directly on your garden's soil rather than a hard surface. Looking at the photo above you are probably now thinking... Huh? This lady doesn't follow her own advice... Please bear with me.    I recommend positioning your pile on bare ground because the soil your pile sits on will naturally innoculate it, without you needing to lift a finger. Microbes,

Last week, I was fortunate enough to attend this year's NHS Forest Conference . It was held online and at its peak had over 250 NHS staff participating from across the country. Quite impressive. I found Karen James'  presentation on the secret garden at Glenfield Hospital in Leicester, United Kingdom, the most inspiring. She discovered the garden by mistake out a window, forgotten, abandoned, and overgrown. Then, without a budget, Karen and countless colleagues, volunteers, and benefactors worked to resurrect it from beneath the bramble thicket. Now, this no-longer-secret garden is used by hospital staff and patients alike as a sanctuary away from the stresses of the wards, a place of healing as every hospital should be. I hope you enjoy this inspiring story as much as I do. I'll now let it speak for itself.

It's silly really, but growing  azolla fills me with such satisfaction. Today, I'm here to spread that joy. So what is azolla? Bizarrely, it's an aquatic fern that grows floating on the surface of pond water like duckweed. As far as I'm concerned, its humble appearance hides a spark of magic.  Although unrelated to legumes such as beans and peas, like them, azolla can fix nitrogen from the air. Nice! Azolla achieves this by forming a  symbiotic relationship with the cyanobacterium Anabaena azollae. Anabeana fixes nitrogen sharing it with the azolla while in return the azolla houses and protects the anabeana in special egg shaped cavities in its scale looking leaves.  If that isn't magic, I don't know what is. If that isn't enough for you, just listen to this. Paleoclimatologists have  discovered that during the middle Eocene, approximately 40 million years ago, giant rafts of azolla grew on the surface of the Arctic Ocean, a tropical environment back the

I learned that 'pests don't attack healthy plants' from two different sources this week, a coincidence I can't ignore. I heard it first during a lecture by   Dominic Scanlon on 'How Trees Grow' hosted by Plymouth Tree Partnership . Dominic talked about it in the context of diseases as well as pests. He explained that for trees to succumb to either, they must be damaged in some way first, either through physical damage such as losing a limb or through nutrient deficiency such as low nitrogen availability. Insects, viruses, fungi, and bacteria, all effectively need a way in first, some sort of weakness in a tree's defences. I found this concept quite thought provoking. I suppose this isn't something specific to plants. Thinking more widely, it seems to apply in the context of human health too. But I digress.  While listening to Dominic's presentation, this idea made sense to me for diseases, but less so for pests. In my garden, for example, at times i

I'm feeling conscious my last post was rather sterile with so much text and no photos. I'm determined to rectify that today.   This is my first time growing pak choi and boy am I pleased with the results. I'm growing them interplanted with carrots, the ferny looking foliage, along with chard which are more difficult to distinguish from the pak choi. They both have wide spreading leaves.     Some stinging nettles have opportunistically taken up residence between these plants. An unexpected welcome addition. Honestly.    Nettles provide so many benefits. First of all,  nettles refuse to grow in anything but nitrogen rich soil indicating my raised planter is fertile. Considering how well everything is growing in it that's a bit of a given, but added confirmation is nice too. By the way, nettles are brilliant additions for your compost bin to help activate decomposition.   Additionally, nettles are delicious. Nettle tea, nettle soup, nettle pesto, Cornish yarg cheese. That

I guess I better start with my gardening and food growing philosophy. I consider my outlook dynamic and evolving so I'm sure to return to this subject in the future. Everyone should have the right to grow at least some of their own food. Food is, of course, the literal sustenance of life keeping us healthy and happy. Equally, everyone has a social responsibility to grow at least some of their own food. Each of us, after all, are fundamentally responsible for our own wellbeing when it truely comes down to it. Since food sustains our health, we should logically each be responsible for food production. What are the consequences of this way of thinking? Well, if we as a society made a concerted effort to embrace this philosophy, we would grow far more food within cities because the world's population is already predominantly urban. Today, well over 50% of the world's population lives in urban areas, and the United Nations expects this proportion to rise further, to 68% by as s