Grow Organic food

Who said home composting was a mugs game?

One of the first things our new government did was to announce that metered rubbish collections would be scrapped. There was a big cheer from the protest groups who want the ‘right’ to fill as many bins as possible. But maybe recycling and careful management of what is tossed into the bin might just be a good way of saving money.

In the US many local authorities are doing just that, saving money by not sending so much trash to land fill.

One town in Maine has tripled recycling rates while reducing expenses 50%. Sanford residents implemented a trash metering system that requires residents to pay by the bag for curbside collection. After one month, the 50% decrease in garbage tonnage far exceeded the town manager’s expectations. If projections hold true, this town of 21,000 in southwest Maine can save about $250,000 in garbage tipping fees, crucial as the city will face a 20% price increase in the service after the new year.

Over 150 municipalities in Maine have shifted to a trash metering system, and other towns and cities across the US are joining them as well. One program is WasteZero, a firm that works with about 300 cities in transforming their waste management systems. According to the company, these towns reduce their landfill waste about 43%, while together collectively net about $65 million, either in avoided disposal fees or revenues from recycled materials.
[From: http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/41688 accessed 27 Aug 2010 0700 GMT]

So, why the reluctance to do the same in the UK? Why do we feel it is our right to expect somebody to always be there to clear us the mess we make?

It is strange that this should have become such a big issue. If reducing the amount of waste we throw out saves money why object to doing it? It is sheer madness. Or is it just laziness?

In this household we recycle everything possible. The result is that out small size wheelie bin could be emptied every 4-8 weeks.

Food waste, there should not be that much, and other green stuff can be composted at home and used on the garden. It is such a valuable source of nutrients I would never throw it out.

The big question remains, why did the current government scrap metered waste? Was it to win friends and votes? Was it to divert attention from the savage cuts? Was it that they just do not care?

Allotments, quality and pesticides

There is still a lot of interest in allotment gardening. With waiting lists in many areas it is not easy to get a plot. Some new alotmenteers are driven by reduced incomes due to the recession but a small minority are using allotments as a way of supplementing their income by selling produce.

The legality of this is questionable. Some rental agreements forbid selling produce while others have clauses saying only the surplus can be sold. If you have 4-5 plots then there will be a big surplus!

Some enterprising gardeners are taking stalls at weekly markets and attracting a lot of customers as consumers have a preference for good looking fresh produce. You can’t blame them really when you make comparisons to the limp old stuff most supermarkets sell. But what of the real quality?

Most allotment holders use pesticides to control pests. It is part of the culture and at a recent meeting of dedicated veg growers boxes of a common pesticide were included in the raffle. There is no doubt that many prefer to use chemicals as it is easy gardening. I would argue that it also reliance on a quick chemical fix and does not lead to any understanding about ‘pests’ and how to avoid them.

The other big issue is that there is no regulation on the use of pesticides on allotment other than laws governing approval. This can lead to drastic over use and mixing of different products to produce cocktails of chemicals in combinations that were never considered by the manufacturers and that have not been tested or approved for use on food. I once heard an allotment holder tell that he had mixed Paraquat and Roundup together just to make sure he killed his weeds. He argued that as each was so good then the two together would be even better!

For the consumer the pristine appearance of much fruit and veg hides what has been used in production. A freshly picked perfect looking cabbage cannot reveal how much pesticide has been used and what residues it may contain. The problem is that we have become almost indoctrinated into using visual appearance as THE only measure of quality.

With no way of regulating how chemicals are used on allotments, and how often they are applied, it is impossible to know how pristine looking veg has been treated. Visual appearance is not a guarantee of quality. If in doubt ask the grower what they use, ask if you can visit them, make it plain that you do not want chemicals in your food. Most of all get used to real quality and accept that not everything needs to look perfect.

Friend or foe?

Got one of these on your broadbeans? Is it eating your plants? Is it a friend or foe? (Click to enlarge image.)

See this page to find out.

Or cheat – it is a ladybird larvae, they eat a lot of aphids and then develop into adult ladybirds which eat even more and then produce more larvae. Very useful!

Join the forum discussion on this post

Gardening and the drought

There is no doubt that the drought will have a serious effect on farming and gardening. Lack of water will reduce yields and kill plants if they are not watered. Some gardeners never water their plots saying that there is no need but this year that is just not true and fruit and veg will need water to survive.

Standing by your plot in the late evening spraying everything with a hose pipe will not work. The water needs to be on the soil and not on the foliage. Some say that watering at night is the best as it reduces evaporation, that is true but if you see plants with signs of severe water stress, i.e. wilting, water then immediately.

In previous years we have used drip irrigation which is often laid under mulch. This works very well as it gets the water to where it is needed and the mulch cuts down evaporation. The system has not been used for a while but is now back in service.

The best plan is not to water a little every day but to soak the ground every few days. Giving just a little water frequently does little good as it does no penetrate very far. The small amount of rain we had earlier this week got no further than the first inch of soil and then evaporated quickly the next day.

For small beds, including square foot gardens and square metre plots, use a bucket and either an old baked bean tin or yogurt container to ladle the water directly around the roots of each plant. I remember my grandfather doing this more than 50 years ago and it works just fine.

It is also a good time to consider collecting rain water as every garden should have some water butts. We are lucky in that we have 4 huge tanks to store recovered water but that will not be enough if the drought continues.

There are predictions that we will have more droughts that last longer and are more severe so we had better get used to coping with a lack of rain. Now is the time to plan how to manage your plots to ensure a good harvest.

Gardening ‘makes children happy and teaches new skills’

According to the RHS, Royal Horticultural Society, “Taking part in gardening can make a child feel happy and boost their development…” Did we really need a research project to tell us that? (Reported by the BBC here.)

Evidently children enjoy gardening and it makes them happier, stronger and more confident. Not only that when children grow food they are more likely to try different vegetables.

Why are we not surprised? Did we really need a survey of 1,300 teachers and 10 schools to confirm what many already knew? Maybe now that it has been proved, ‘scientifically’ more schools will have a garden.

Being of a reasonable age I well remember the school garden at the local secondary school. It was big, maybe around two allotments in size. From the first to fourth years boys were taught horticulture as part of the curriculum. We grew food which went round the corner into the kitchen as fresh ingredients for school dinners.

After nearly 50 years that is such a novel idea it is being reinvented as a way of showing kids where food comes from and as a money saving idea. It also teaches useful skills.

My memory is of the relaxation of gardening in the otherwise tense and overbearing atmosphere of school, so yes it does make kids feel happier.

If I have one plea it is that school gardens should be about growing food, learning where it comes from, learning how to grow it, cook it and eat it. There are so many curriculum links a school food garden could be a real education.

Crouch End supermarket grows vegetables on its roof

There has long been a need in the UK for the recognition that flat roofs can be used to grow food. Rooftop gardens have become a common feature in North American cities as well as in Asia and other countries where land for growing food is scarce. So it was with some joy that I approached this article on the BBC web site.

A supermarket in Crouch End, London is growing food on its roof at last. They have about 450 square metres of space which has been turned into a food garden. The owner calls it a “… a farm on top of a supermarket” which I think is stretching things a bit; a garden yes but I do not know of any farms with just 0.045 hectares of land. Another quote says the project has a very low carbon footprint because all the equipment has been donated. Nice idea but plastic compost bins and other stuff has to be manufactured and transported to the site so does have a carbon footprint even though somebody else has paid!

Not that I am criticising what they are doing, I have long argued that using city roofs to grow food is exactly the way to go. There are some superb examples around the world where aerial gardens work well. In Singapore Changi hospital grows food on its roof and uses it to feed patients. Not only does that use what was redundant space it also give patients healthy and tasty food and maybe even saves money.

Many of the projects use hydroponics which, at the present time, use fertilizers which are not sustainable i.e. they are made from oil and use huge amounts of energy in the production process. Some argue that there is nothing wrong with that as long as it feeds people but the organic argument is that it relies on heavy imports of nutrients which is both unsustainable, costly and does nothing to address the issue of declining oil supplies.

There are alternatives like growing in containers using peat free, or home made, composts and making nutrients from composting food waste. Some years back a really innovative project in Australia tried to use a continuous worm composting system to make nutrient rich compost from restaurant food waste. The idea was to grow leafy crops in the compost on the roof which would then be used in the restaurant thus completing the nutrient cycle. There was never any news of whether it worked but technology has moved on now and such a project would be perfectly viable.

For me any food grown on roofs, or in gardens, has to be ‘organic’ i.e. not just free of pesticides but sustainable. That means no artificial fertilizers. I would really like to see some innovation in plant based nutrients and container growing which would produce a sustainable system that is low maintenance and productive. That would also have to include some way of watering automatically maybe triggered by sensors when the compost dries out. There are easy ways to do that it just needs the will and vision to see an alternative to existing growing systems. And a nice big flat roof!

More information

Changi Hospital rooftop micro farm
University cafe rooftop garden in Canada
Rooftop gardens in Eygpt
For a round up of rooftop garden projects see this page . (Not all the projects are about growing food.)

Comfrey juice fertliser

There seem to be some misunderstanding, and not a little controversy, about how to make and use comfrey liquid fertiliser. A recent article in the Sunday press by a well known gardener stated that making comfrey tea was an easier option because it did not need to be diluted.

In his book “Comfrey past present and future” Lawrence Hills is quite clear about making comfrey juice i.e. concentrate not tea. He spent many years studying comfrey and even had a chemical analysis that showed comfrey concentrate had virtually the same constituency as Tomerite, see this page.

I am all for making things easier for newcomers to organic gardening but sometimes gardening celebs go too far. Comfrey tea is a very different thing to comfrey juice and will not have the same effects on plants. All too often I was asked why plants were not thriving and the usual answer was that they were not being fed enough, sometimes not at all!

Comfrey is an amazing plant and 0ne that every organic gardener should grow. Making comfrey juice is a good way to get lots of free fertiliser, just remember to dilute 1:10 for tomatoes (that’s 1 part juice to 10 parts water) and 1:20 (that’s 1 part juice to 20 parts water) for everything else.

Save our bees

In previous posts I mentioned that the UK government has excluded the use of neonicotonoid pesticides in research on bee deaths. That is still true and I expect the new coalition will not change the research remit.

An article in “Living Earth”, the journal of the Soil Association, gives more information about these pesticides. What amazed me is that they are so readily available to domestic users who may well be unaware of the danger to bees. The table below is from the article and shows just where neonicotinoids are used.

Product	Neonicotinoid	Shops	Websites
Westland Bug Attack	Thiamethoxam	Wickes, B&Q	www.selections.com
Westland Plant Rescue Bug Killer	Thiamethoxam	B&Q
Baby Bio House Plant Insecticide	Thiacloprid	B&Q, Morrisons	www.bayergarden.co.uk
Provado Vine Weevil Killer	Thiacloprid	Wilkinsons	www.bayergarden.co.uk www.selectrons.com, www.wyevale.co.uk www.plantandlife.com
Bug Clear Ultra Vine Weevil Killer	Acetamiprid	Wilkinsons
Bug Clear Ultra For Flowering Plants	Acetamiprid	Wilkinsons
Bug Clear Gun	Acetamiprid	Wilkinsons	www.wyevale.co.uk
Provado Ultimate Bug Killer Spray	Imidacloprid		www.bayergarden.co.uk www.selections.com www.wyevale.co.uk www.plantandlife.com
Bayer Provado Systemic Ultimate Bug Killer	Thiacloprid		www.wyevale.co.uk
Provado Lawn Grub Killer	Imidacloprid		www.bayergarden.co.uk www.wyevale.co.uk www.plantandlife.com
Provado Lawn Grub Killer (for smaller lawns)	Imidacloprid		www.selections.com www.plantandlife.com
Provado Ultimate Bug Killer Ready to Use	Thiacloprid	Wilkinsons	www.bayergarden.co.uk www.selections.com www.wyevale.co.uk www.plantandlife.com
Provado Ultimate Bug Killer Concentrate	Thiacloprid	Wilkinsons	www.bayergarden.co.uk www.selections.com www.wyevale.co.uk

Take action

If you care about the envioronment or are at all concerned abou the loss of the honey bee then I urge you to take action to ban the use of these products.

Avoid neonicotinoid based garden products and write to your local garden centre asking them to stock bee-friendly alternatives.
Buy organic food and support sustainable farming techniques.
Use organic techniques in your own garden. Use a wide variety of plants and don’t be too tidy.Leave wild flowering plants in place, ivy is a particularly important source of winter food for bees.
Take up beekeeping if you’ve got the space. There are some excellent courses available as part ofour Organic Farm School programme, details or which are available at www.soilassociation.org/farmschool.aspx
Write to your new MP asking them to put pressure on the Secretary of State at Defra to suspend the use of neonicotinoids, as France, Germany, Italy and Slovenia have already done.

Site upgrade

We are upgrading the site software to enable new features including groups, forums, friends, private mail and more facilities for making contact with like minded members. The first phase is complete and you might have noticed a new ‘groups’ menu item on the top left side bar. There is also a new menu across the top of the screen. It is not that visible yet and is one of the things we are working on.

We will try to keep disruptions to a minimum but there may be times when the screen layout is very different or soemthing does not work or that the site is not available. Please be patient as there is a lot to do and there are few willing workers!

The first major change is to the site structure; page names have changed as follows:

Old version – http://organicgarden.org.uk/?p=123
New version – http://organicgarden.org.uk/archives/123
Please update your links.

The grow you own is more expensive myth

It is amazing how urban myths start. Take the recent news items saying that growing your own food is more expensive than buying it. It seems to have come from several sources, The RHS, Gardening Which and every tabloid newspaper.

A little research highlights the possible source as Gardening Which when they slammed the costs of carrot plug plants from Gardening Direct. Evidently they were being sold for £1.09 each. Now carrots at £1.09 each is expensive and totally unnecessary but to take that single example and then say that growing your own is expensive is typical of the lazy sensationalist media we have in the UK.

Let’s get one thing straight, growing your own food should always be much cheaper than buying it. If it is not then you are doing something wrong.

I don’t doubt that newcomers might think that growing from seed is time consuming and difficult. It is neither of these but is certainly cheap. A packet of seed should cost about £1 and should give enough seed for ~ 700 plants. (Kings seeds Amsterdam forcing)

Many people have problems with carrots usually for two reasons: the seeds are planted far too deep and/or the seeds are not kept damp. The general rule of thumb for planting depth is not deeper than twice the distance across the widest part of the seed. For carrots that is very little!

With heavy soil it is often not easy to produce a soil fine enough for carrots so I take out a shallow drill (very mini trench) and fill it with good quality organic, peat free seed compost and water well. I then sprinkle a thin layer of seeds on top and cover with a very fine layer of sifted compost. The compost also helps keep the seeds moist, they must not be allowed to dry out.

That is it really, they take a time to germinate and will need thinning but there is nothing much else to do except harvest the best and cheapest carrots you have ever had!

To see a chemical free way to guard against carrot root fly see this page

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