Little Black Flies on Houseplants

Do you ever get those nasty little black flies on your houseplants? Clouds of the buggers fly up whenever you disturb the plant. They're really gross.

They're called sciarid flies, fungus gnats or mushroom flies. And you've only yourself to blame; they eat rotting vegetable matter, such as the rotting roots of your chronically over-watered houseplants. The flies don't do any damage to your plant. If an infected plant dies it's usually from the over-watering that attracted the gnats in the first place. The flies are the symptom, not the cause.

Fortunately, the treatment is simple and completely organic. First of all let the poor old plant dry out. It won't harm the plant to do this, in fact it will probably do it a power of good. But mainly you're trying to disrupt the gnats' life cycle. The eggs take about a week to hatch, so if you can keep the soil dry for a couple of weeks you should be able to kill the already-hatched larvae by desiccating them, any larvae that hatch from the eggs after a week will also desiccate, and the adults will have no rotting roots to feed on so they should die too. So you can see that two weeks of dryness should sort the problem out.

If you feel you need an extra line of attack you could get some sticky yellow traps from your garden centre. I don't think they have a proprietary name, just ask for "sticky yellow fly traps for houseplants". These attract the flies - apparently it's the yellow colour that attracts them, not any chemical or scent or anything. And the stickiness is just glue that sticks the flies down and traps them - there's no pesticide in the traps. So this is an organic approach that should help get rid of the nasty little blighters.

Once you've eliminated the flies you might want to put a physical barrier on top of the soil to deter them coming back. An inch-thick layer of sand or fine gravel will prevent females from laying their eggs in the soil.

Finally - STOP OVER-WATERING YOUR POOR PLANTS! Always feel the soil before you water them and if the soil is moist then don't add any more water. Don't let the plant sit in a saucer full of water all day, or worse still for days and days. If there is water in the saucer half an hour after watering, pour it away. Different plants need different watering regimes, so don't water all your plants at the same time. If your moisture-loving Boston fern is looking crinkly round the edges then give it a drink, but you shouldn't water your drought-tolerant Easter cactus at the same time every time. Plants in great big pots need less frequent watering than plants in little pots, although obviously they need more water each time.

Good luck with the sciarid flies, if you have them. And if you don't, give yourself a pat on the back for not over-watering your plants.

Grocery Store Wars

Our Sunday funny this week is Grocery Store Wars - a 5-minute video about buying organic, based on Star Wars. It's right up my street. Hope you enjoy it, too.

But if you don't - why not? If you'd prefer a video that's not as funny but actually contains some persuasive information and arguments about how our shopping choices affect the environment, try The Story of Stuff. Alternatively, if you'd prefer really funny videos about Star Wars set in a supermarket without the irritating environmental message, try Chad Vader.

Cartoon from Climate Cartoons. Click on the panel to read the whole strip.

Slow Food

I've been reading about the Slow Food organisation:

Slow Food is a non-profit, eco-gastronomic member-supported organization that was founded in 1989 to counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.

I agree with all of that. They seem to have started out as a group of gourmets who were interested in fighting the growth of fast food and supporting fine dining. But their mission has developed and now they also support fair trade, biodiversity, local food, seed banks and heirloom varieties, and organic farming. They oppose monoculture, factory farms and agribusiness, genetic modification, and the use of agrichemicals.

I think it's a great example of how ethical issues and quality of life issues complement each other. I began gardening organically because of environmental and health concerns, but it has had an enormous impact on the flavour and freshness of the food I eat, and has improved my quality of life in various other ways as well. The gourmets and the greenies are on the same side. It's a surprise, but a very nice one.

Weed of the Week - Comfrey

I think my favourite thing about comfrey is the name. It's one of those words that is pleasurable to say. Say it out loud - comfrey. Com - frey. Ooh, lovely.

It's also a very useful plant. Its deep roots bring up nutrients from the subsoil, especially potassium. Think of it as non-smelly manure you can grow. You can add the leaves to your compost where they will speed up the decomposition in much the same way as fresh farmyard manure. You can stick bundles of leaves in a bucket and cover with water where they will rot down to a really foul smelling "tea" - you then dilute it to the colour of black tea and pour it on hungry plants as an organic plant food (you can also do this with fresh manure - see what I mean?) Or you can just stick the comfrey leaves in a bucket with no water where they will decompose spontaneously to thick black slime, which is just an even more concentrated form of the same plant food. It absolutely stinks to high heaven, so the manure analogy continues. If you dig a trench you can drop comfrey leaves all along the bottom, as you would well-rotted manure, and then plant crops such as potatoes in there. Or if you are planting out a pot-grown plant or seedling you can shove a comfrey leaf or two in the bottom of the hole. And you can lay a few leaves around your seedlings where they will act as a mulch to prevent water loss and enrich the soil - just like well-rotted manure. This is especially helpful for tomatoes which guzzle the potassium. Don't feel afraid to cut as much as you need - even as far as cutting back the whole plant. It will regrow with amazing rapidity, and seems to come back stronger every time.

It's clearly invaluable to an organic gardener, but it is also prized for its healing powers in humans. One old name for it is "knitbone", and scientific research has confirmed that it is beneficial in bone disorders. However it must not be taken internally as it can have very bad effects on your liver. If you come across any old herbal remedies that advise you to drink it as a tea for example, you should know that this is now considered a very bad idea. But preparations of comfrey for external use, such as oils, ointments or the fresh leaves, are used for skin conditions such as acne and rashes, for bruises, and for broken bones and sprains.

So why is this "weed of the week"? Why not "Very useful and beneficial plant of the week"? Well, if it's growing somewhere you don't want it to - bad luck. It's very hard to get rid of. Its deep roots which give it such useful properties also mean you'll have to dig an enormous hole to get it out. The roots are very brittle, so if you don't dig a deep enough hole, you'll snap the tap root and leave a bit behind. And sure as God made little apples, this will regrow. Don't think you can just cut it back either. As I said earlier, the more you cut it, even cutting off every leaf, the stronger it seems to get. It doesn't spread terribly fast, although if you let it set its pretty purple flowers, seedlings will appear. Deal with them quickly before they establish.

The best approach seems to be this one: if you have comfrey growing in your garden or allotment, declare that place to be your "comfrey patch". Erect a little sign if it makes you feel better. Fence it off if you like. Consider yourself lucky to have a healthy comfrey patch, and don't neglect to make much use of it. Because you probably couldn't get rid of it even if you wanted to.

2007 UK Veg Box Awards

Voting is now open for the 2007 UK Veg Box Awards. So if you love your veg box, and would like to show the people who provide it how much you apreciate them, why not nominate them using the online nomination form.

And if you don't get a veg box - why not? Find your local scheme by clicking on the picture below.

Roots, Pots, Legs and Bras

We've had a few hard frosts at night and the allotment is transformed. Squash plants deflate like a popped balloon. Runner beans turn black and limp. It's time to tidy up.

Spent plants can be put on the compost heap or dug directly into the ground. Beans in particular do a lot of good because they capture nitrogen from the atmosphere and "fix" it in the ground. You can pay a lot of money in a garden centre for nitrogen-rich fertiliser. Or you can just plant some beans and wait a season.

I'm fuzzy on the science, but I know these curious nodules on the beans' roots are involved (see the photo). The bottom line is - plant beans, dig them into the ground when they're finished, and put brassicas in the same earth next time. Brassicas love the nitrogen.

If you can't remember the order of the 4-crop rotation, try this mnemonic "Roots [point to ground, where roots grow], pots [point to your boots, like plant pots for humans], legs [point to your legs], bras [you can invent your own gesture for this one]". That's the order - roots, pots, legs and bras. Root veg first (like carrots, parsnips etc.), then pots (potatoes), next legs (legumes i.e. beans and peas) and finally bras (brassicas, that's cabbage, sprouts etc). Then you're back to roots again.

Wake Up Gordon

Did you know it's Organic Fortnight until September 16th? The Soil Association are celebrating by running a Wake Up Gordon campaign. There's a funny flash game where you can feed Gordon Brown a healthy organic breakfast. The tally of how many people play the game will be presented to Gordon Brown as a petition in favour of supporting organic farming in Britain.


You can find out what other Organic Fortnight events are taking place near you on the Soil Association's What's On page.


Thanks to The Allotment Junkies

Green Fly Control

Not GREENFLY control, although they're a pest as well. I'm talking about fruitflies, mainly. I left a bag of rhubarb in the kitchen when we went away on holiday and when we got back the kitchen was full of fruitflies. I don't really want to use poison to eliminate them, so instead I got rid of the rhubarb and anywhere else they could live, such as the compost bucket, and hung up flypapers.

If you're not familiar with flypapers, they're incredibly sticky strips that you hang up. As soon as a fly blunders into one, it gets stuck for good. Frankly, they're a bit gross, but they're better than having flies everywhere.

One final thing - under no circumstances allow small children to "help mummy with the dusting" anywhere near them. Last year Sam was playing with my genuine ostrich feather duster and got it tangled with the flypapers. By the time I had cut all the sticky bits off my duster, it was so badly maimed I was forced to do the merciful thing.

What are Carbon Offsets?

Watch more videos like this at www.quantumshift.tv

This month I've been writing about carbon - what a carbon footprint is, how to calculate it, what it has to do with climate change, and so on.

Our modern lifestyles have released a lot of extra carbon into the atmosphere. Can we somehow trap it again? Trees trap carbon, so does the soil. Can I fly to Malaga as long as I pay someone to plant a bunch of trees for me? Does that work?

There's an interesting video about carbon sequestration which you should look at if you have about 9 minutes to spare. It explains how organic farming can help trap some excess carbon in the soil, which just adds to the long list of reasons why organic farming is a good idea. I love the guy who narrates it, Percy Schmeiser. He's pretty rubbish at looking natural in front of a camera and reading from a script, but this somehow makes his statements more convincing. He must know what he's talking about because he sure as hell wasn't chosen for his presenting abilities.

But that's different from paying someone to plant trees for you so you can fly to Malaga with a clear conscience. Carbon offsetting is a last-ditch option. It's like having chemotherapy when you've got cancer. You don't say "Oh, I might as well smoke as many cigarettes as I like because I can always have chemotherapy if I get cancer". Similarly we shouldn't say "It's perfectly OK to live a high-carbon lifestyle because I can afford to offset it by planting loads of trees someplace". It's a radical attempt to fix damage already done, not a "get out of jail free" card.

Yes, we should be planting trees, returning to organic farming, collecting methane and all the other carbon offsetting things. But we should be doing them to offset the damage we have already done, not as a sort of "indulgence" permitting us to carry on with our planet-damaging activities and still sleep soundly.

10 Reasons To Eat Organic

1. It's better for you.

2. It's better for your children. Because of their smaller size, children are more affected by pesticides in their food than adults, but feeding them organic food has been proved to significantly reduce their intake of pesticides.

3. It's better for the farmers and their families if they don't have to use pesticides and other toxic chemicals. This is especially true in countries which have less strict health and safety legislation.

4. It's better for the farm animals. Joyce d'Silva of Compassion in World Farming said "Organic farming has the potential to offer the very highest standards of animal welfare."

5. It's better for wild animals. In one study, organic farms were found to contain 85% more plant species, 33% more bats, 17% more spiders and 5% more birds than conventional farms.

6. It's better for the planet because it doesn't lead to soil erosion. Conventional farming is responsible for unsustainable soil loss, but organic farming actually builds the soil.

7. It doesn't lead to waterway pollution.

8. It doesn't depend on oil-based agrochemicals.

9. It uses less energy because it relies on people rather than machinery. David Milliband said “in many, but not all cases, [organic food] produces fewer greenhouse gases”.

10. It tastes better, and don't believe anyone who tells you they don't. Many years ago my sister Stephanie was helping me chop some carrots for our lunch and she ate a slice of carrot. Immediately she started exclaiming "Oh, oh, these carrots are wonderful! Why do they taste so good?" She hadn't known they were organic carrots.

Convinced? Why not sign up for an organic veg box to be delivered to your door?

Remember there are only two more days to enter our Skooperbox competition. There have only been seven correct entries so far, so your chances are excellent of winning a package of Skooperboxes, the recycled biodegradable dog poop scooper. All correct entries will be entered into a draw and winners will be announced on Wednesday.

Weed Tea

The weeds are growing on the allotment faster than I can deal with them. But every cloud has a silver lining, and I've used some of this fabulous green manure to make a huge drum of weed tea. No, it's not an accompaniment to cannabis cookies, it's home-made plant food. Much cheaper than buying tomato food from the shops, and another example of the law of return - never take anything away from the land unless you can put something of equal value back.

Weed tea is easy to make. Fill a container (we used a huge plastic drum that was left on the allotment when we took it over) with weeds - leaves, roots and all. I used a bunch of big dock roots and couch grass roots, as well as a trug full of leafy weeds such as cleavers, good king henry, bindweed and dandelions. Then I added as much comfrey as I could gather. Comfrey is fantastic stuff, and I always make sure I leave a clump somewhere on purpose (that's what I tell people anyway. The truth is it's a bugger to eradicate even if you wanted to). It has a deep root system and draws up nutrients from deep in the soil. As a result it is rich in the NPK (nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium) nutrients that plants need. It is a great addition to your compost heap, you can lay the leaves around seedlings as a mulch and feed combined, or you can use it to make cheap top-quality plant food like this. I'll also bring some chicken manure from home to add to the tea next time I go to the allotment. You could add nettles, manure (sheep, cow or horse - not cat, dog or human). You can put in grass clippings, seaweed, even perennial weeds like horsetails, bindweed, even japanese knotweed! Anything you've got a lot of, heave it all in, and cover it with water.

Now you need to cover it tightly because once it begins to ferment it will smell like the devil belched. Leave it a few weeks, then put on gloves and a gas mask (I pull my jersey over my nose and mouth) and ladle some into a watering can. Dilute it with clean water until it's about the colour of tea, and feed it to your plants. Tomatoes love it, so do courgettes and pumpkins, cucumbers, all those hungry crops that take a lot out of the soil. I'm told it's also good for flowers, and I'm prepared to believe it. The stuff is liquid gold and every gardener should have some on the go at all times. What's your excuse? Haven't you got enough weeds?

When you've used it all up, tip the foul black gunge that's left over on the compost heap and start another batch. See, even weeds have their uses!

Interview with Friends of the Earth

I am a big supporter of Friends of the Earth, the environmental campaigning organisation. In particular their campaigns on food and farming are close to my heart. Richard Hines from the Friends of the Earth Real Food & Farming Team agreed to answer some of my questions.

Bean-sprouts: A lot of families are on a very tight budget and find it hard to afford fresh fruit and veg, never mind buying organic. What would you suggest?

Richard: Get down to your local market or greengrocer and you might be surprised how reasonable their prices are. Studies have shown that they're cheaper than the supermarkets for fruit & veg which means you can eat tasty fresh produce on a tight budget. And if you spend an extra few minutes cooking from fresh instead of buying ready-made meals you'll save loads of money too, and have a much healthier diet.

Bean-sprouts: I know all the reasons to buy organic, and Fair Trade, and local. But it's rare to be able to get all three in one product. When I have to choose between them, which should I go for and why?

Richard: Each product is different so there isn't a golden rule for choosing what to buy. But you can go a long way to reducing your environmental impact by buying seasonal, local produce from local shops wherever possible. That way you'll be benefiting the environment by cutting down on food miles whilst supporting local farmers and shops. But if you simply must have those bananas and chocolate then look for the Fair Trade version. And if pesticides are your main concern then organic produce will be your best bet.

Bean-sprouts: Another ethical dilemma is when big companies with poor ethical or environmental records produce certified organic or Fair Trade products alongside the rest of their range. Should conscientious buyers choose these products or continue avoiding the company?

Richard: When choosing what to buy, shoppers should certainly bear in mind who they're buying from as well as what they're buying. Simply having a few green or ethical products doesn't hide the fact that big companies damage the environment and often treat suppliers unfairly. If a company has a poor record, seek out alternatives. And if your local shops don't have the products you want, ask for them!

Bean-sprouts: How can I be sure that food I buy does not contain genetically modified ingredients?

Richard: GM products have to be labelled so they should be easy to spot, and thanks to opposition from shoppers there still aren't many out there. Unfortunately there is a loophole when it comes to meat and dairy. Although they need to be labelled if they contain GM ingredients themselves, products from animals fed GM (such as GM soya) do not have to be labelled as such. The only way to guarantee that the food you're eating doesn't come from animals fed GM is to buy organic.


Thank you, Richard. That was very interesting and helpful. I must admit I sometimes buy non-organic meat, but now I know it may come from animals fed on GM ingredients I will avoid it religiously in future.

The Law of Return

There's an important principle of organic gardening called the law of return. The idea is that you shouldn't take anything away from the land without putting something of equal value back. It sounds suspiciously like airy-fairy nonsense but it is actually quite sensible. If you keep growing crops on a patch of land and then taking them away, to sell them for example, eventually the land will become depleted of certain nutrients and will produce smaller and smaller harvests and ultimately be unable to grow that crop (or perhaps any other) at all.

So-called "conventional" growing (in reality the system is less than 100 years old) solves this problem by adding fertilisers - doses of single nutrients such as phosphorous or nitrogen. This is rather like taking vitamin pills. You might see an improvement in the patient's condition but it's no substitute for having a healthy varied diet in the first place.

With organic gardening you avoid the problem of depletion by the "law of return". So you compost the parts of garden plants you don't need, and the weeds. And the things you take away, the fruit and vegetables, are replaced by compost brought in from elsewhere, or well-rotted manure, or something else of equal value. If you can manage a closed system in which nothing leaves the site (which in practice means composting human and animal dung and burying animal carcasses on site etc.) then that is the ideal situation.

Ed and I have been digging up couch grass roots from the allotment for, oh, feels like forever but in fact it's a few weeks. All the couch grass roots are now piled up on top of a sheet of horticultural plastic, with more plastic wrapped around it and over the top. It will take take at least a year, perhaps more, before they all rot down but when they do they will turn into beautiful compost, full of nutrients which we will return to the soil. The alternative was to take them to the landfill site, and lose all those nutrients forever.

When you see the huge pile of roots, already starting to try to sprout up again for another year, you can really see the sense in the law of return. You can see the roots in the right of the picture, the heap is about 4 feet high. They are full of nutrients for the soil, trace minerals as well as carbon, nitrogen and all that good stuff. It would be a serious loss to dump them all off-site, but this way even weeds can be put to good use.

Review: How To Grow More Vegetables

I bought John Jeavons' How to Grow More Vegetables recently, hoping it would live up to its promise of showing me:

"How to grow more vegetables (and fruits, nuts, berries, grains, and other crops) than you ever thought possible on less land than you can imagine"

I got pretty irritated wading through several chapters of irrelevant waffle that kept promising this amazing new technique would allow me to grow between twice as much and thirty-one times as much per unit area as "conventional" methods (which I assumed meant whatever method I am using now), but which never spelled out what this method was. When I finished chewing my way through the book I was disappointed. All this "new method" is, is just:

• Grow organically
• Use raised beds, not rows
• Use loads of compost
• Use intensive plant spacings
• Companion planting

Just about every gardening book I've got advises those exact same things.

It also contains some advice I consider dubious:

• Planting by phases of the moon
• Planting shedloads of stuff (60% of your available area) purely so you can turn it into compost
• The author isn't keen on animal manure or green manure

In retrospect I'm glad I read it, but I wish I'd got it out of the library instead of spending money on it. For one thing, it does contain some helpful information, but buried under a lot of crud. For example, information about the depth of the root systems of various crops.

It also makes very clear what a "raised bed" is. For a long time I thought it meant building retaining walls full of earth and planting stuff 2' in the air surrounded by brick walls. It doesn't mean that at all - it means having areas where you plant, with paths in between. You don't walk on your beds (you have to make them about 5' wide or less, so you can reach the middle for weeding and harvesting) so they don't get compacted and don't need digging every year. Within those beds you plant intensively, so leaf growth covers all the soil, stopping weeds growing and water evaporating. The book makes that much clearer and if I had read it sooner I could have saved a lot of confusion about raised beds.

I also like its emphasis on the soil. It talks a lot more about soil than plants. For example the fact we are destroying soil far faster than soil is being replaced. This is going to be a very hot topic in the near future, although the public have heard very little about it so far. I'll write more in a future post but remember you heard it here first. The book describes all the different components of soil - organic and inorganic, living and dead. It talks about the ideal structure of soil as a "living sponge cake". In the section about watering it emphasises that you are watering the soil, not the plants because plants don't take in water through their leaves, only their roots. All these are things I have felt for a long time and it is nice to see them expressed so clearly.

The thick cheap paper and goofy line drawings may put some people off but I love that sort of thing. My favourite illustration from the book is of a bearded hippy sitting cross-legged on the ground sowing seeds in a bed. I find that sort of thing charming, and it captures my imagination much better than the modern style of glossy photographs which manage to look less "real" than drawings do. In fact, I wish I had the 6th edition instead of the 7th, because it had a picture of a quilt on the front with appliqued fruits and vegetables.

But it's not going to help me grow loads more crops than I have in the past with some radical new approach, because I was doing all those things anyway.

If you want my advice, buy this book if you see it cheap in a charity shop, or ask your library to order it for you. It is interesting, and a useful part of building up your understanding of vegetable growing. But don't believe the hype - you're probably already using most of the methods it advocates so it won't tell you how to have vastly bigger yields.

New Potatoes

Our organic veg box delivery each week is very exciting, but at this time of the year some repetition is inevitable. Spuds - check. Swede - check. Savoy cabbage - check. Leeks - check. etc.

This week I was thrilled to find new potatoes in the box! New potatoes! My mind went into overdrive thinking of all the different ways I could prepare them. Steamed and served with sea salt, butter and parsley, or in a salad with home-made mayonnaise and spring onions, or cut into circles and sauteed in olive oil then tossed in sesame seeds and seasoned before serving...

Of course I could have bought new potatoes any time I wanted during the last six months. They've been available in all the supermarkets and at the greengrocer in the village. I could have had strawberries for that matter, or asparagus, or pineapples, or breadfruit. But those things haven't been available locally during the winter (of course some of them never are) and so they haven't been in my veg box. It's more fun this way. Cooking creatively to keep the same winter vegetables each week exciting. The thrill when a new variety comes into season. Sure, I could have bought new potatoes from the supermarket. I could also eat nothing but chocolate for breakfast lunch and dinner. It's more enjoyable when it's kept for a treat, though.

If I've convinced you that organic veg boxes are a great way to put the fun back into fruit and vegetables, as well as helping to save the planet and support local producers, why not click on the picture to find your own local veg box scheme?

Why Organic?

My dad asked why we bothered pulling all the couch grass out by hand, rather than just zapping it all with weedkiller. I love this kind of question because it prompts me to think clearly about my philosophy and the basis for my actions.

There are lots of reasons why I choose to garden organically. One of them is much more important than the others, and I will come to that last.

1. It costs money - the people who rented that plot before us told me they sprayed £60 of weedkiller on it. And it's still full of weeds. I can only imagine it would be even worse if they hadn't but still, it cost Ed and I nothing to entirely clear a quarter of it by hand, and we'll do the other three quarters over the next weeks and months.


2. Artificial herbicides, pesticides and fertilisers are made from oil, and the oil is running out. We need to learn how to live without them. Organic gardening isn't a middle-class fad, it's the future.


3. We eat the produce from our allotment. I don't want to put poisons anywhere near our food. Just seems like common sense to me.


4. The ground needed digging anyway (in response to Hedgie's astute observation that digging makes couch grass worse - in fact we forked it, then removed all the roots, then forked again and removed more roots until either there were no more roots or we were fed up). So using weedkiller wouldn't have saved us a job, it would just have saved us the "removing roots" stage of the job.


5. We could have used weedkiller and then hired a rotavator to clear and cultivate the soil. That would have been pretty easy and quick. But then again we could have bought all our veggies from Tesco in the first place, even easier and quicker. But it's not about what's easiest, it's about what's best, in our opinion.


6. It's good exercise. Some people join gyms at great expense and spend an hour a day on treadmills and rowing machines to keep fit, and then they hire someone at great expense to mow their lawn and trim their hedge for them. Seems to me you could save some money on that arrangement and still keep fit. This isn't really a "reason" why I chose to dig, but it is one of several nice benefits.


7. There's a promising new blog called Allotment Junkies which is about allotment gardening and depression recovery. Being out in the daylight, taking vigorous exercise, having short-term achievable goals and seeing the tangible results of your labours (not to mention eating a healthy diet rich in fruit and vegetables) are all proven to be more effective treatment and prevention for depression than anti-depressant drugs. I have experienced depression in the past and have no intention of going there again if I can help it. Digging the garden or allotment helps keep me happy and healthy. This is also a pleasant bonus rather than a reason for my choice.


8. But the main reason why I choose not to use Roundup is that soil is alive. Or rather it is an ecosystem of lots of interdependent organisms - plants, animals, fungi and bacteria, both microscopic and macroscopic. Using herbicides and pesticides damages that ecosystem and in extreme cases can result in sterile i.e. dead soil. As a gardener, I am in the business firstly of creating healthy soil. Healthy plants follow on from that. I won't do anything that damages the health of my soil if I can possibly avoid it, which is the same thing as saying I garden organically.

Couch Grass

We got down to the allotment for a few hours yesterday and dug up plenty of couch grass. Couch grass looks pretty much like normal grass above ground but below ground the roots are like spaghetti - thick and invasive. The easiest way of getting rid of it organically is to cover it all with a thick light-proof layer like old carpet, but that takes months. We did it the hard way - fork it all up and remove as many roots as possible by hand. It's back-breaking, and I feel stiff and achey this morning.

The area which we have designated for soft fruit now looks like a pretty respectable tilth. But we know that if you dig down, there are still plenty of buried bits of couch grass root. Each tiny fragment of root is capable of growing into more horrible couch grass as soon as the weather warms up, and ideally we'd like to eradicate it entirely but that's probably not possible in the short term without using a chemical herbicide.

We'll go back tomorrow and dig it all over again and remove as much as possible. But at some point we'll call it a day and plant the fruit bushes Ed gave me for Christmas. I need to look up how much space they need, but I hope there will be room left over for some strawberry plants. Then each time we go to the allotment we'll spend a bit of time pulling up any couch grass that dares to show its face, and in time we'll kill it all I hope.

I hate couch grass. The only kind of couch grass I like is the kind in the picture, which comes from ReadyMade Mag.

(If you haven't signed the petition to save Manor Gardens Allotments, here's the link again: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/manorgardens/ )

Uses For Compost

I've been taking a couple of trugs of compost down to the allotment every day from the garden compost heap. That's because the garden heaps are full whereas the allotment ones are almost empty. But it's the allotment that needs the nutrients right now.

For example, I've put a generous mulch of compost over two of my rhubarb crowns, and I've put a bucket over another, covered with compost, to "force" the rhubarb (i.e. encourage it to grow early, long, tender shoots which I'm really looking forward to eating as soon as possible). That one will need a bit more compost tomorrow, because the point is to exclude light, something almost none of the gardening books tell you. Upending a cheap orange bucket from B&Q over your rhubarb crowns will do no good whatever, as glowy orange light will filter through quite strongly.

Compost is absolutely magic. It's something non-gardeners (or at least non-composters) just can't understand, why people get so excited about compost. You throw smelly rubbish like tea bags and banana peels in a big pile, with some grass clippings, shredded paper, and even stinky chicken poo. And a few months later you have beautiful brown crumbly compost that you can quite happily rub your fingers through without feeling that you are touching anything foul. And its transformative effect on your soil and garden produce is just as magical. It's the nearest we can get to alchemy - turning dross into gold.

Farm Shop

Our local farm shop is Norbury Farm. Aboult a mile or so away, it's a proper working farm, which also sells fruit and veg, meat, flowers and has a new tea shop. I don't know much about flowers, but the other things are excellent, with top-quality local produce and high levels of expertise. The staff are all very knowledgeable and happy to answer your questions. I wouldn't dream of buying bacon anywhere else now, or sausages. And although I get most of my weekly fruit and veg from an organic box scheme, I sometimes take surplus produce from my allotment to the greengrocer here to barter for things I can't grow.

I went there today to place my Christmas order. We're having a duck. I've found a duck is just the right size for the few meat-eaters in the family. A turkey is too big and I'm not a huge fan of turkey anyway. I'd love to do a goose one day, but they're so big it would mean inviting a dozen people over for Christmas dinner to make it worth it.

The tea shop is a new addition, and I popped in today and had a cup of coffee and a slice of cake. The cake was home-made on the premises and was delicious. The staff were super friendly, and the decor was tasteful country-farm, cosy and appealing.

Farm shops can be a good place to buy local good quality produce. If you have a good one don't keep it a secret - tell your friends, neighbours, family and colleagues. Use it regularly, or next time you look it may not be there anymore. But as with farmer's markets you have to take care. Some of them just buy rubbish non-local food from the cash and carry, or even from supermarkets, and then charge you extra. Be prepared to ask questions, and think about the quality of the food you're buying. Is this good quality meat and veg? Can you tell the difference? Or are you just paying extra for the privilege of parking in a farmyard?

Compost Crazy

A lot of people are scared of composting. They think it's complicated, hard and smelly. In fact it's none of those things. At its simplest, you just pile up organic matter somewhere and leave it alone. That works. I swear. That's all you have to do to get compost. Of course you can make it more complicated than that if you want to. You can get very scientific about the proportions of "brown" and "green" materials, about the difference between "hot" and "cold" composting, "aerobic" and "anaerobic decomposition". You can buy a compost bin or a tumbler or a wormery if you want. Or you can forget all that stuff for now and keep it simple.

But whatever you do, I promise you will find it satisfying. It's a magical process whereby a heap of grass clippings, raked leaves, vegetable peelings and teabags turns into that stuff you pay £5 a bag for at the garden centre. In fact, the stuff at the garden centre is quite likely to contain peat, a precious and non-renewable resource. Even if not, it will have been driven around the country on a petrol-guzzling lorry. You've heard of food miles. Consider your compost miles as well. Home produced compost is splendid stuff for all these reasons.

But why would you want to? What are you going to use your compost for when you've made it? Well you can dig it into your garden soil to improve its quality. If your soil is either clayey or sandy compost will improve its texture making the clay soil less heavy and the sandy soil less light. Compost also adds precious nutrients to your soil which will make make your plants healthier without needing artificial fertiliser.

Compost also makes a good mulch. Just spread it about on top of the soil and it will prevent water from evaporating too quickly and it is said deter some pests, although that doesn't tally with my experience. In time the worms will take the compost down into the soil so you get the same benefits as digging it in without the hard work.

You can also use it to make your own potting compost, by mixing equal parts of sharp sand, garden soil and compost.