Own Grown Gardening

Right now, the Government is consulting on our vision for England's future land use and how to achieve it. The consultation closes 25 April 2025, so there is still plenty of time remaining to contribute. If you wish to do so, head over to DEFRA's website . It is well worth it. Several questions were seriously on point. So much so, I felt the need to throw my own ideas into the ring. I've included them below. I highly recommend submitting your own thoughts too. Question What are the policies, incentives and other changes that are needed to support decision makers in the agricultural sector to deliver this scale of land use change, while considering the importance of food production? My Response Money is of course the biggest incentive regardless of how depressing it is to say it. If landscape stewardship schemes provide farmers and land owners enough financial incentive to adopt them, they will embrace them whether or not they fundamentally believe in their benefits. If, how...

The title of this post sounds like a children's fairytale. Entirely unintended. I guess, in a way though, it is rather fitting because although ragwort ( Senecio jacobaea ) with it's delightful, and prolific, yellow flowers has many benefits, it also possessed what some consider a dark side. We have all the ingredients of a Grimm's fairytale me thinks, hahah! Ragwort, although native to the UK, is classified by the government as an injurious weed . Why, you might ask, is it so vilified? It's because the plant contains toxins, called pyrrolizidine alkaloids , that cause liver damage and even death to grazing animals such as horses and cattle. My neighbour remembers back in the day the government advising the public to destroy any ragwort plants they encountered. Even now, DEFRA publishes a Code of Practice on How to Prevent the Spread of Ragwort . However, many environmental conservation groups, such as Buglife , rail against this advice. This is because ragwort is such ...

I've always liked those little gantt chart style sowing calendars you see every so often. You know the ones I'm talking about, those little calendars that show you when to sow and harvest your vegetables, if everything goes according to plan of course. I always look at these calendars and think, gosh this has such potential... But, this one is too difficult to read, that one is missing the vegetables I like, and these ones I'm never going to have in my allotment shed or garage or greenhouse when I need them. Yet despite all that, they still have such potential, if only... Well, this month I took the plunge. Taking inspiration from all the others, I built my own.  I published it here: Vegetable Growing Calendar freely available to all. I'll let it speak for itself.  Before leaving you to explore, I should mention that over the winter you will notice the list of varieties in there grow. This project has encouraged me to slowly begin working my way through my massively di...

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...