Own Grown Gardening

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 attended a thought provoking event today. It was a Science Policy Interface group meeting of the VISIONARY project . As you'll see on their website, the goal of this project is to identify ways to make Europe's food provision more sustainable (economically, environmentally, and socially). This particular meeting consisted of stakeholders (producers, customers, and staff) of the Tamar Valley Food Hub . The food hub connects local food producers with local customers living in and around the Tamar Valley, on the border between Devon and Cornwall. One of the questions we explored today was: how can we promote local food systems? We all acknowledged there is no easy answer to this question. Someone suggested maybe there is a lack of consumer motivation to buy local. Let's explore this idea with a thought experiment. Imagine a shelf in your local supermarket stocked with two lots of carrots, both at the same price and of the same quality. One lot is marked as locally grown with...

I'm working a new allotment plot this season and, as I normally do, I planted broad beans. I watched the little seedlings grow, but my glee quickly turned to concern when I noticed a curious problem develop. All the young leaves acquired these little notches along their edges. Below, you can see what I mean, like little peck marks, but they seemed too uniform and neat for pigeon damage... I felt puzzled. So, as I do, I commenced some research and RHS quickly offered the answer: pea and bean weevils ( Sitona lineatus). The leaf damage is caused by adult weevils. They overwinter in field margins and then fly in spring seeking out legumes, preferably beans and peas, on which to feed. Once fed, they lay their eggs in the soil around these same plants. Their larvae then feed on the plant's nitrogen fixing root nodules (housing rhizobia ). To quench your curiosity, you can see clusters of rhizobia filled root nodules growing on the broad bean roots below. My natural next question wa...

In the last month, our City Council offered us a different allotment plot, one less windswept and possessing a thriving Allotment Association. Hurray! The timing of this couldn't be better from the point of view of observing the pressures the ground faces from Devon's wet winter weather. The shallow sloping plot possesses a thin layer of heavy clay soil over what appears to be shillet. Bad for drainage, it must be said. After rain, the site becomes a quagmire of mud with pools of standing water. Not ideal, but equally not insurmountable. The plot design must mitigate waterlogging while catering for the periods of dry summer weather we occasionally, yes occasionally, get too. This clearly requires careful consideration. After contemplating this question over several nights of fitful sleep, this is the plan I'm actioning. A photo of my progress to date describes it nicely. As you can see, it's a lot of graft, but hopefully worth it. The approach consists of building up a ...

  Earlier this month, here in the UK, I stumbled upon an episode of Tim Harford's More or Less on BBC Radio 4. Tim interviewed Jason Hawes, a researcher from the University of Michigan. Jason and his colleagues recently published this article, Comparing the carbon footprints of urban and conventional agriculture , in the academic journal Nature Cities . This publication is not to be sniffed at. Nature Cities is a new offshoot of the esteemed academic journal Nature no less.  Now, I'm not going to mince my words. For allotmenteers out there, Jason's research findings make sober reading. Their results suggest that low-tech urban farming, the sort of vegetable production we do in our home gardens and allotment plots, emits six times more carbon into the atmosphere per serving of food than conventional industrial agriculture. Wait, what? Gah!  Initially, that depressing finding sounds just baffling. How can it be true? This is the exact question Tim put to Jason in his inte...

It is a wretchedly wet New Year's day here in Devon, UK, but I didn't let this dampen my spirits. I used it to propagate our honeyberry bushes ( Lonicera caerulea ) . You probably remember these two little guys from my previous post last spring. Just looking at those photos, I hadn't fully appreciated how big both bushes grew last summer. Here is a snap from today of one leafless honeyberry, looking rather naked and forlorn on this winter's day. Now there are several choices to make when thinking about propagating honeyberries. You can, of course, grow them from seed. Doing so, however, does not allow you to preserve the parent plant's variety and, as such, it is not recommended. We definitely want to retain good sized sweet berries. One of my bushes is the named variety of Kamtschatica 'Duet' while the other is an unnamed variety of Kamtschatica. I found it super difficult to source any honeyberries in the UK, so I felt blessed finding two different Kamtsc...

I watched this fascinating YouTube video today, which reveals some of the reasons why the local food hub in Exeter, Good Food Exeter , closed it's doors to business a couple years ago. At face value, such a closure sounds like a massive blow to the sustainability of Exeter's local food system. But is that really true? After listening to Lynn in this video, I'm not so sure. In case you don't know what an online food hub is, I'll attempt to explain. Actually, I'll let the US Department of Agriculture explain because their definition is as relevant in the UK as it is in the USA. Here it is: a food hub is "a business or organization that actively manages the aggrega- tion, distribution and mar- keting of source-identified food products, primarily from local and regional producers to strengthen their ability to satisfy wholesale, retail and institutional demand." This definition explains the purpose of the Tamar Food Hub of which I am a customer here in Pl...