Own Grown Gardening

  It sounds crazy but, until about a week ago, I had no idea the  European Union and the  UK Government classes the burning of wood as a low carbon energy source. This logic is based on the fact the carbon released into the atmosphere when burning wood biomass was absorbed out of the atmosphere as the trees grew and, newly planted replacement saplings will  repeat the carbon absorption cycle again. In 2020,  12.6% of the UK's electricity production came from burning biomass contributing towards reducing coal burning for power generation to just  1.8% in 2020 from  28.2% in 2010. That is an astonishing achievement in a decade. Something which isn't celebrated enough.   At the same time, we must remember how far we still have to go to decarbonise. Biomass is a bit of a double edged sword as well. Although it is ultimately renewable, there is a time lag we must remember to appreciate. If you burn a tree today, all that carbon goes into the atmo...

I find myself increasingly wondering what a Net-Zero future might look like. Is such a future even possible?  Here in the UK, the government has signed a commitment for this country " to bring all greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 ". From where I'm standing at this moment on the cusp of 2023, to achieve this target feels almost farcical while simultaneously imperative. Some look to Cuba as a model for how to adapt. " The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil " takes this view. On the one hand, I find this documentary quite inspiring. One of its key messages seems to be that overcoming adversity has the power to bring us together for positive long lasting change. A pleasant thought when contemplating how to minimise and even survive climate change. On the other hand, is this documentary's message too simplistically idyllic to the point of misleading? Hmmm... I fear it might be... Let's examine Cuba as a case study. What caused the cr...

This little article on my very first bridge graft attempt ended up in  Plymouth Tree Partnership's newsletter as well as  Orchard Link's newsletter so it only seems right to share it with you too. Enjoy! It is amazing how this humble conference pear tree in Central Park Community Orchard , Plymouth, Devon has garnered so much interest. Let me tell its story. It begins back in November 2021 when I began volunteering as an Orchard Keeper for Plymouth Tree Partnership. While tending the Community Orchard’s young trees, a constant battle against brambles, this particular pear caught my eye.  It possessed a nasty injury, from canker perhaps, almost girdling the trunk. Only a pinkie finger’s worth of bark remained. My first thought was simply to prune the tree back below this point. But, loppers in hand, I simply could not bring myself to do it. The tree just looked so alive above the wound. That is when I thought a bridge graft might just give this tree a fighting chance. I’...

  I was lucky enough to collect a windfall of medlar from a local tree a couple weeks ago. As you can see, they are an odd looking fruit that, due to there rather unfortunate shape, where known once as the open-arse.  Although not widely known today, in Medieval Europe, it was a prized fruit. So much so that Charlemagne , in 800AD, mandated that all his gardens grew them. The reason it was so loved is because of the season medlar ripen. The fruit are ready to harvest very late, at the end of November and into December. This is a time when little else sweet remains. Bizzarely, when you harvest them from the tree, they are still hard. Not edible at all. The windfall medlar I collected off the ground where the same. Rock hard. To ripen them, I layed them along a windowsill out of direct sunlight for a good couple weeks.  Medlar probably fell out of favour, and into downright obscurity, due to the strange way they ripen. Some liken it to rotting rather than ripening, which ...

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 ...

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)...