Recycled Propagators

Things you can re-use as propagators:

1. The plastic tray from a supermarket prime rib joint

2. Two-litre drinks bottles cut in half

3. Plastic bags held on with elastic bands

4. The packaging from Easter eggs

Why Save Water

Amy asked "Why bother?" I understand what she means. Water costs nothing. You turn on a tap and it comes - clean, cold, pure, delicious. It never runs out. It's always there. So why save it?

In one sense, water is an infinitely renewable resource. It never runs out because it just cycles round and round. You drink it, but it isn't gone - sooner or later you'll pee it out, it will get processed and return to the rivers and seas. You spill it, it evaporates and goes back to the clouds, to rain down and return to the reservoirs. Your pipes leak? So what? It all goes back to the groundwater where it was pumped out of in the first place.

On the other hand, because it is a (more or less) closed cycle, we can't make any more of it. But the population is growing rapidly, and our use of water is going through the roof. One of these days you're going to turn the tap on - and nothing will come out.

If that isn't reason enough to save water, think of the resources needed to collect the water (how much energy does it take to build a dam?), to clean the water, to store it and to pump it to where it is needed. When you think of all the energy that has gone to produce each pint of tapwater, it seems much more important to conserve it.

Put it this way - it takes 9 bottles of Evian to flush your toilet just once. 30 bottles of Perrier to take a shower or 80 bottles to take a bath. It takes 20 of those big 5 litre bottles of Volvic to run a washing machine. If you actually bathed in mineral water, people would think you were crazy. But the water that comes out of the tap is just pure, just as as expensive to produce and just as precious as the stuff you pay for at the supermarket. Next time you flush the loo, imagine pouring nine bottles of Buxton spring water into the cistern before you could flush it. Wouldn't you put a brick or two in it, to save one of those bottles?

Dirt Is Good

Scientists have proved that exposure to garden dirt makes you happier by boosting your serotonin levels - the brain's "happiness" chemical. What are you waiting for? Get out there and get your hands dirty!

Nettle Soup

Following the success of my dandelion salad, I thought I'd continue my "backyard forage" experiments with nettle soup.

I've made nettle soap before, and it was a great success. So I already knew that it only takes a little bit of heat to disarm the stings. There's no danger at all that your lunch will sting your mouth, as long as it is well-cooked. I collected a dish of nettles from my back garden, wearing rubber gloves, and added them to some potato soup. It tasted lovely - not strong, but just delicately "green". Perhaps a little bit like spinach.

I'll definitely make it again. It's delicious hot, but its delicate flavour also tastes good chilled and thinned out with a little cold milk, like Vichyssoise. If nothing else, it's a welcome change from sodding cabbage.

Nettle Soup
Peel a couple of floury potatoes, dice, and simmer in half a pint of duck stock (if you don't have duck stock you'll have to use a chicken or vegetarian stock cube) and half a pint of milk. Whilst it's boiling, go outside and collect a breakfast bowl full of nettle tops - the top 4-6 young leaves of each plant. Give them a rinse and pick out any "extras", then add them whole to the potatoes. When the potatoes are tender, whizz it all up with a stick blender. Stir in plenty of sea salt and freshly ground black pepper, and serve with a swirl of home-made yogurt (or cream, or creme fraiche, or whatever you've got).

Dandelion Salad

I read somewhere that this is a good time of year to pick young dandelion leaves. You can steam them and eat them like spinach, or eat them raw in a salad. They have a slightly bitter taste, rather like watercress or radicchio. You can also apparently eat primrose flowers (they don't seem to taste of anything much but they look pretty). So last night I combined them in a spring salad.

Spring Salad
Fill a pint jug with young dandelion leaves, from plants that have not yet flowered. Give them a good wash and remove any leaves that are brown or spotted, and any bits of grass you may have gathered by accident. Add a couple of quartered hard-boiled eggs, and a few washed primrose flowers. Make a dressing by putting 1 tablespoon of olive oil in a jam jar with 1 teaspoon of cider vinegar, a crushed clove of garlic and plenty of ground sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. Tightly seal the jam jar and shake vigorously, then toss the salad in the dressing.

Bird Feeder

Happy St Patrick's Day! My dad sent me a little badge with a living piece of shamrock which I'll be wearing all day. Afterwards I'll pot it up and encourage it to grow in a pot on my kitchen windowsill. It'll make me think of my dad in Co. Limerick whenever I look at it.

My sister, Steph, showed me how to make these bird feeders. You make holes in monkey nuts then thread string through. The blue tits in particular like to hang on them and peck holes in the shells to extract the nuts. I thought the grey squirrels would probably just steal the whole thing and run off with it, but oddly I haven't seen them bother with it at all. If you use natural string (rather than nylon or something) then when it is empty you can just fling the whole thing on the compost heap.

Feeding birds encourages biodiversity in the garden. If you tempt them in for a lunch of peanuts, they might decide to finish off with a dessert of caterpillars and slugs. Site your birdfeeder carefully because bird droppings will accumulate underneath it. These add fertility over time but may be too strong for some plants (and are unwelcome on e.g. lettuce). It occurs to me that if you had a layer of some sort of mulch under the birdfeeder you could change it once in a while and put the mulch plus droppings on your compost heap. Or you could fix the feeder directly above the heap and collect the frtility directly. But to tell the truth I don't feed the birds because it's good permaculture practice. I just feed the birds because I love watching them.

Oh S**t!

When we went to the allotment yesterday, there was an ENORMOUS pile of horse manure at the gate. The vegetable gardeners amongst you will understand my excitement. Everyone else will just think I'm bonkers.

My husband Ed and I spent a happy afternoon going back and forth with barrows full of manure and depositing it on our plot. The curious thing is that the kids spent a happy afternoon playing on a huge pile of shit. Normally they start whining after about half an hour, but they didn't do that this time so Ed and I kept working for about 4 hours. The kids got pretty mucky of course but at least they were warm.

I also planted some onion sets, some garlic, two rose bushes, a holly bush and a berberis (spiky shrub).

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.

Bird Nesting Materials

You can buy bird nesting material rings in garden centres. Wiggly Wigglers has got one for £18. I like Wiggly Wigglers but I'm sorry, that's just a rip-off, plain and simple. My sister Steph took one of those mesh bags you buy onions in and filled it with nesting materials - fluff out of the tumble dryer, bits of dried grass, teased lengths of sisal, feathers, ends of knitting yarn etc. then she hung it up in our garden.

It cost nothing at all, and it recycled some materials that would otherwise have gone into the landfill bin. It also encourages biodiversity in the garden, helping the native birds which eat garden pests. But even if the birds didn't do these beneficial things, Steph and I just love looking at them. We counted over 20 different species last weekend. I'm happy to help them build somewhere to raise their eggs, but I wouldn't pay nearly twenty pounds for a bunch of fluff.

Vandal-Proof Edible Hedge

My sister Steph and I moved most of a huge pile of couch grass roots on the allotment to a heap where we can cover them in light-proof sheets whilst they rot down for a year or two. We also planted three gooseberry bushes she brought us as a present.

Our plot runs along part of the fence which surrounds the allotments, so we are especially vulnerable to vandals. What is worse, the fence at this point is lower than elsewhere, so it is a favourite point for access. I have begun to plant a hedge of thorny bushes alongside the fence - blackberries, hawthorn, loganberries, and gooseberries. I'd like to add holly, roses and blackthorn. When mature this should be a vandal-proof barrier, and also provide food for us and habitat for native birds (who will in turn reduce the population of slugs, snails and caterpillars). If it gets thick enough it will stop passers-by on the footpath from even seeing into the allotments. I like chatting to the friendly people who go past and it would be a shame to cut ourselves off from them, but I think if the local toe-rags can't see what's on the other side of the hedge it will remove the temptation to break in and set fire to the sheds etc.

The Spice of Life

At the supermarket you don't get much choice of fruit and vegetables. Oh, I know you can buy lots of different fruits - pineapples, oranges, apples, pears, bananas, guavas, passionfruits etc. Vegetables too. But you don't get much choice of varieties of each different type. You might get a choice between Granny Smith, Gala and Golden Delicious [yuk!] apples, and you'll probably get a few choices of spuds as well. But you don't get to choose your own variety of tomatoes, say, or celery, or swede.

It came as a surprise to me that every kind of fruit and vegetable comes in a huge range of varieties to the gardener. The humblest of vegetables - turnips, say - requires you to choose from dozens of cultivars, each with their own qualities of taste, texture, time of ripening, resistance to pests and diseases, preferred soil and climate etc. You get no clue of this shopping at Sainsbury's.

That's because the supermarkets pick their varieties based on qualities that might surprise you. They want produce that is tough enough to survive packing, chilling, transportation and storage, and still look cosmetically blemish-free at the end of a few weeks. Did you ever see tomatoes in the supermarket labelled "grown for flavour" and think "Aren't they all"? The answer is "No". The properties prized by supermarkets are of no interest to the gardener at all, for whom flavour is likely to be paramount, although suitability to our own local conditions is also of interest (and few of us can resist the promise of a "heavy cropper").

If you suspect that those who claim home-grown food tastes better are kidding you, or themselves - you're wrong. It really does taste better, not because it is grown organically (although that's true), not because it's fresher or has travelled fewer food miles (although that's true too), not because knowing you grew it yourself adds self-satisfaction to the culinary experience (although that's certainly true) but because even before the seed was in the ground, it was chosen for its taste.

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.

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.

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.

Uses for Shredded Paper

My dad gave us an automatic paper shredder, so now we can be self-sufficient in chicken bedding. When I told my friends, one said:

Aaaarrrgh! Why didn't I thinkof that? We shred stuff regularly, but I've always just thrown the resulting shreds away. and then paid for hay for the chickens bedding. Thank you.

We've used quite a bit of shredded paper as packing material for dad's belongings. You can also add shredded paper to the compost heap, or make it into briquettes for burning. Any other uses for shredded paper?

Philosphical Musings About Walnut Trees

I'm still helping dad empty his house in preparation for selling it. We moved there in 1982, six days before Christmas. I was 11. I grew up there, and now dad will sell it to strangers, just as he bought the house from strangers 24 years ago.

People used to live in the house they grew up in, work the land their parents worked. They planted walnut trees, even though walnut trees take 50 years to mature, because they knew their children and grandchildren would benefit, just as they themselves benefited from the work their parents and grandparents had done years before.

I don't know where my grandparents lived. I visited their houses when they were alive, but I don't know the addresses, don't know who is living there now. I won't be planting a walnut tree here. My children won't live in this house.

It seems like that's where we went wrong. One of the places we went wrong, anyway. We lost the sense of connection to the land. We don't know who was here before us, we don't care who will come after. There's no reason to plant walnut trees any more.

Mushroom Identification

There are a lot of varieties of mushrooms in our local area at the minute, but I know nothing about identifying them and to be honest I'm a little scared of accidentally poisoning my family. So I've taken photographs and I'm going to try to find out what they are.

Some of them closely resembled the "brown field mushrooms" you can buy in the supermarket. They were growing in the boggy part of a grassy field, as were some that I'm pretty sure are shaggy ink caps, which are edible.

Some of them I think are the fairy ring type. There were loads of them but they're very small. Some were growing in the grass and others in wood chips under the swings in the park.

The most interesting ones were growing in a very shady part of my garden under a evergreen tree. I'm looking forward to adding them to the "Now Picking" section of my sidebar.

Ethics of Foraging

There has been a fascinating thread on the rivercottage.net forums about the ethics of foraging. It opened my eyes to a number of issues I hadn't really thought about before:

• Don't trespass whilst foraging
• Ask permission if you wish to forage on private land, including farmland
• Make sure you know what you are picking
• Don't pick anything rare or endangered
• Do bear in mind the other other plants and wildlife in the area - don't go treading on an orchid in your haste to pick those sloes

Foraging

The BBC website has a slide show with audio about foraging. It features a chap called Marcus Harrison who runs Wild Food School courses in Cornwall, teaching people about the edible wild plants in the area. I enjoy foraging for free food in the hedgerows near our house, but I'd like to learn more about wild mushrooms. I love mushrooms but I'm worried about inadvertently poisoning the family.