Own Grown Gardening

Here is a funny little success story for you today. I'm growing four cherry trees in my garden alongside my apples, plums, medlars, and hazelnuts. I cram them into our tiny urban garden by pruning them into a columnar style . In other words, straight upwards, just like Nelson's Column. These trees are still young, so the very first trees to come into fruit are doing so for the very first time this year. When the cherry blossoms bloomed, they were beautiful and raised my spirits after the long winter. Cherries really do flower early.  When little green cherries began developing a few weeks later,  I quietly smiled, pleased they were heading in the right direction. Just look at those little emerald gems.  I refused to get my hopes up though. Young trees usually, and rightfully, drop their fruit to focus instead on strong root and shoot development. My heart quickened when one Kordia cherry , just one fruit, continued to swell and mature from green to red. By the way, this ...

Here is another little orchard management story, this time about grass. I'm only one person and Plymouth City Council only lets volunteers use hand tools in their community orchards. For health and safety reasons, I don't blame the council. This rule makes complete sense in my mind, but it means I must think very carefully about how best to utilise my limited time. Last year, I bought myself a little hedge clipper (see below), which I used to clip back the grass in little circles just around the trees. Even this conservative approach was a struggle though around all 26 trees. By the time I reached the last tree, the grass around the first one was already tall enough to clip again. This cycle looped around all summer. Not fun...   I noticed something interesting along the way though, something which I initially could not explain. The grass I clipped grew greener and more vigorously than the grass I left unclipped. This occurred consistently around every tree.  Over the winter, ...

Yesterday, I visited the community orchard I maintain in Plymouth's Central Park. One of my previous posts describes it in some detail. While there, it was the orchard's understory rather than trees that caught my attention. Let me rewind a bit to explain.  Last summer, I stumbled across a patch of yellow rattle ( Rhinanthus minor ), on the far side of Central Park from the orchard. They are lovely flowers. I always think they look like a choir of singing parrots pointing their yellow beaks to the heavens. I returned to the spot later in the season to collect some of the dried seed heads. By the way, the species gets its name from the fact its seeds literally rattle inside these heads . I collected the seeds to spread in the orchard, which is exactly what I did. I seeded them into a little patch by cutting the grass short and raking in the seeds to ensure they made good contact with the soil.  I went to all this effort because yellow rattle has the alternate name of meadow ...

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...

Living in rainy Devon, UK, one gets used to the disappointment caused by slugs and snails decimating beautiful young seedlings. Due to this all too frequent occurrence in my own garden, I'm constantly on the look out for ways to keep them under control. I outright refuse to use slug pellets or any other pesticides though.  However frustrating slugs can be, I have no interest in eradicating them or their shelled relatives completely. I merely wish to keep them in check until my delicate seedlings mature to a point where they can hold their own. A little nibble here and there encourages plants to bolster its own natural defences. Similar to how it is healthier for us humans to strengthen our own immune systems coming into contact with visuses like the common cold regularly, rather than cloistering ourselves away in sterile conditions. So today I was excited to welcome a new form of mollosc control to my little patch of paradise, toads! As you can see, they are minute right now, baby...

In the context of reimagining farming for the future, people often state that by 2050 there will be almost 10 billion people in the world, so we must boost food production to feed everyone. I don't deny the merit of this logic. What has always bothered me though is, where does it end? We can't perpetuate such thinking infinitely.    To put it simply, the world does not possess infinite resources to feed an infinitely growing human population. Does this mean we are marching inevitably towards an apocalyptic scenario where population is held in check by starvation? This disturbing question has plagued me for years. Recently, I finally did some reading on the subject. My eyes where opened to some remarkable global trends. Ones which aren't discussed anything like enough I would argue.  The UN (United Nations) closely monitors rates of fertility, mortality, and migration for all countries through time. Their data scientists use this information to forecast population project...

It is mid-March here in Devon, England, and my two little honeyberry ( Lonicera caerulea ) bushes are just coming into bloom, the perfect time to give them a mention.    They are known for producing some of the earliest fruit of the season. I harvested my first berries from the young bushes last year, just a tiny handful. Judging from the number of flowers both bushes have this year, I'm looking forward to a much bigger bounty. I own two bushes of different varieties. One of them is the variety 'kamtschatica duet' while the other is an unknown variety. They each have distinctively different leaf shapes and growth habits though. Duet has much rounder leaves and slighly sturdier stems.  When buying them, I searched and searched for two different varieties to maximise cross-pollination between the two. Like so many plants, they produce much better harvests when self-pollination is avoided. I should mention, the handful of purple fruit last year were delicious just straight o...