Own Grown Gardening

  Now, you're probably thinking this is an odd post. To be honest, I'm thinking the same. It manifested out of an unexpected windfall of, you guessed it, alpaca poo. We decided to take a walk on the Cornish side of the Tamar River last weekend and found ourselves wondering past the gate of Mount Edgcumbe House . A little sign greeted us simply stating "Alpaca poo", one bag for £2.50. How unusual. I duly popped my payment into the smiling piggy bank honesty box and became the proud owner of a heavy bag of poo. Hahah! You can probably guess my intentions for it. In the spring, I'll incorporate it into the veg patch as fertiliser. Over the winter, I'm letting it mature in my garden's two compost bins. The worms are already getting to work on it. Pleasing to see. I must admit, it has bothered me for a while that I don't have access to any sort of livestock manure to use as fertiliser. Manure increases soil organic content and plant available nutrients . It...

  Today, I would like to introduce you to something rather mysterious and, arguably, rather magical. Terra preta.  Also known as Amazonian dark earth, terra preta is one of the world's most  fertile soils found in sporadic, unpredictable patches within the heart of the Amazonian rainforest. The fact this coveted soil is found in the Amazon is rather surprising, because tropical rainforest soil is notoriously, and counterintuitively, infertility. This is because so much life recycles nutrients so efficiently through the ecosystem that almost all the carbon and nutrients are  locked up in the forest's living and decaying matter. They barely get the chance to reach the soil beneath, which remains thin and infertile. This is why subsistance farmers in the Amazon are often forced to practice slash-and-burn agriculture. This destructive farming technique involves clearing and burning a section of forest, growing crops on the land for about three years after which time t...

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...