Own Grown Gardening

It is a wretchedly wet New Year's day here in Devon, UK, but I didn't let this dampen my spirits. I used it to propagate our honeyberry bushes ( Lonicera caerulea ) . You probably remember these two little guys from my previous post last spring. Just looking at those photos, I hadn't fully appreciated how big both bushes grew last summer. Here is a snap from today of one leafless honeyberry, looking rather naked and forlorn on this winter's day. Now there are several choices to make when thinking about propagating honeyberries. You can, of course, grow them from seed. Doing so, however, does not allow you to preserve the parent plant's variety and, as such, it is not recommended. We definitely want to retain good sized sweet berries. One of my bushes is the named variety of Kamtschatica 'Duet' while the other is an unnamed variety of Kamtschatica. I found it super difficult to source any honeyberries in the UK, so I felt blessed finding two different Kamtsc...

As I'm sure you can tell from my previous post , composting is a topic close to my heart. So, when I stumbled across the method Joel Salatin and his team use on Polyface Farm in Virginia, USA, I got quite excited. Joel farms grass-fed beef cattle. In winter, he houses his animals inside due to Virginia's harsh weather. Inside the barn is where the magic happens. I've, honestly, never heard of a more elegant composting solution. Essentially, by simply behaving naturally, Joel's livestock breeze through all the heavy lifting.  The process starts with the cattle themselves. They do what cows do best and poo day in and day out inside the barn. Rather than carting the manure away to slurry pits, Joel and his team simply cover it over with woodchips and straw right there on the barn floor. Over the winter months, this pile of poo and carbon grows higher and higher to well over a metre.  By spring, isn't everything buried literally in sh** you might ask? The short answer...

A couple years ago, I wanted to give away seedlings without breaking the bank giving away their pots too. I searched online for a cheap container solution, and thought I'd struck gold finding biodegradable non-woven grow bags. You can buy loads of these for next-to-nothing on eBay. They claim to be biodegradable, so healthy for the environment. Excellent, or so I thought. Sigh... They are anything but... I decided to do a bit of an experiment with them the same way this guy did on YouTube. I filled them with potting soil, and planted some cherry tomato seeds in them. The seedlings germinated nicely. When their roots began growing through the bottoms of the bags, I thought this is great. I planted them directly into their final 30 litre pots for the greenhouse conveniently leaving them in the grow bags. No need to risk sending the seedlings into shock through transplanting. I assumed the biodegradable bags would simply decompose amongst the roots as the plants grew. This assumption...

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...

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,...

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...