Own Grown Gardening

Our urban soils can, unfortunately, hold a multitude of nasty secrets. I actually eluded to this problem in my previous post about compost when I mentioned having a rather depressing reason for keeping one of my compost bins on the hard standing rather than in the garden. To put it bluntly, our soil is contaminated with pollutants. Our tiny urban garden, 100th of an acre in size, has unsafe levels of lead, asbestos, and several aromatic hydrocarbons (probably from coal).  You might now be thinking, good God, why do you live in such a frightening place? We asked ourselves the same question when we got the soil test results back, particularly when we saw the high levels of lead. I'm sure I don't need to tell you the health risks associated with this heavy metal. Ever since receiving these results, we've hunted for an alternate property to buy in the city. What we discovered, however, during our house hunting is that the soil in ALL the properties we tested are contaminated

  Winter is closing in here in the United Kingdom. I had a couple tomato plants left with some lovely looking fruit on them, but it is just too cold now and the dark nights too long for them to ripen. Despising waste, I harvested the green tomatoes and composted the plants. The question is what to do with all these green tomatoes... The answer has got to be green tomato chutney of course, lovely with cheese and oat cakes. Here is the recipe. A word of warning, the house will smell of vinegar for days.  Ingredients: - 700g Finely Diced Green Tomatoes - 360ml Malt Vinegar - 1/8tsp English Mustard Powder - 200g Demerara Sugar - 3/8tsp Cayenne Pepper Powder - 70g Diced Apples (cored and peeled) - 1/8tps Ground Ginger Powder - 70g Finely Diced Onions - 10g Grated Fresh Ginger Root - 1/8tsp Sea Salt - 70g Saltanas or Rasins Mix all the ingredients together in a saucepan and slowly bring to the boil, stirring frequently. Once boiling, turn the heat down to a gentle simmer and leave the lid o

How can we balance our demands for food production against the necessity to conserve biodiversity? This difficult question is often debated by Conservation Biologists sitting on two sides of a great debate elegantly expressed as Sparing verses Sharing . I'll define each of these in turn so we can compare and contrast the two. I'm hoping, this will allow us to see how we might utilise both concepts in unison to manage the use of our precious land sustainably.  Sustainably. What a loaded word! I'm using it here in it's purest sense, as a way to describe a land management technique which maintains a stable state of ecosystem health and food production. A sustainable environment protects the health of the Earth and Humanity at the expense of neither. What a pleasant thought! So, the debate. To begin, what is Sparing? This photo actually sums it up nicely: It is the widely practiced concept of setting aside parcels of land as conservation zones (the forest in the background)

Today, I'm focusing on the practical topic of taking semi-hardwood cuttings of soft fruit , specifically gooseberries and black currants. You can do this in the autumn or spring, but I prefer the autumn to give the roots more time to develop before the buds burst and top growth develops for the new season. To ensure you maximise the chance of roots forming and a healthy plant, it is best to take cuttings from this year's growth. Such growth is quite easy to identify when you know what to look for. The bark is lighter in colour and you can see a sort of joint in the wood between this new growth and older growth like in the photo below. I take long cuttings, about 20cm, to ensure they have a good string of buds along their length. About ten is great.   At the very base, it is best to cut right below a bud. This encourages root formation.   If the cuttings still have leaves, gently pull them off by hand as this creates a clean wound.   Removing all but the very top leaves minimis

Since my last post about harlequin ladybirds as invasive species here in the UK, I've been reading more widely about this topic. My curiosity takes me on all sorts of twists and turns. I just love it! Along my travels, I stumbled upon the concept of ' Biotic Homogenisation '. This isn't a term I knew previously, so I thought others might be in the same boat. It is the phenomenon of two or more ecological communities (assemblages of species) becoming more alike over time.  This occurs through invasions of species into new areas triggering extinctions of others. You're probably already seeing how this connects back to the beautiful, but worrisome,  harlequin ladybird in my last post. I'll show you how this concept works through the simplified sequence of foody photos below. First, imagine the orange and green saucers below are two islands. The communities of species, symbolised by the fruit and veg, on each of these islands evolved in splendid isolation from one

I find myself thinking a lot this week about introduced species. When I say 'introduced' species, I mean non-native ones intentionally or unintentially introduced into an area by people. I think this topic is on my mind due to the number of  harlequin ladybirds ( Harmonia axyridis ) I'm finding in my garden this autumn. This species was purposefully introduced to  mainland Europe from Asia as biological pest control. It was released in France in 1982 for this purpose. I took all the photos above over the past couple weeks in my back garden among the raspberry patch mostly. I wanted to capture the amazing variety of colour variations within this one species.  These little insects are largely welcomed in my garden as they keep down the aphid population, but they are a species I simultaneously look upon with a degree of unease. This is because they are viewed by many as not just an introduced species but also a vilified invasive one on our shores. It was first recorded in t

I learned only recently that the UK government is banning the sale of horticultural peat to amateur gardeners by 2024. This is just over a year away. Very soon. To be honest, I stopped using peat based potting mixes a couple years ago in favour of coconut coir based ones. Coir is marketed as a more sustainable alternative to peat. It is quoted frequently that this is because it is a waste material from the coconut industry. Coir is basically the shredded, rinsed, and dried pith from the husks of coconuts. Light and water retentive, like peat. I've always wondered about the validity of this claim. Does coir genuinely possess a smaller ecological footprint than peat, or have I just been beguiled by the advertising? I dearly hope the claims are true because, if they aren't, banning the sale of peat in the UK will achieve nothing on a global scale. It will merely shift problems from one place to another. Tricky! As I say, let's hope the advertising claims are backed up by the