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...

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)...

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...