Monthly Archives: November 2008

Winter in the garden

29/11/2008 – 10:40

The garden has a real feel of winter now. The leaf mould is made, around 30 heaped wheel barrows of leaves were deposited in the makeshift ‘container’ by my able assistant. Not sure how well it will it will rot down but at least it prevented a neighbour from burning great piles of leaves!

Some of the beds have been cultivated, manured or had compost added depending what is to be planted next season,  and then covered with their blankets.  Other beds have been sown with a green manure that should over winter. The main aim is to keep the rain off to stop soil compaction and nutrient leaching.

I used two varieties of green manure this year; Hungarian grazing rye and winter tares. (Right >) The rye was mostly eaten by the resident pheasants. They did not go for the tares  which means I’ll be using more of that next season. The trouble is that the grazing rye does a good job of mining nutrients from the deep clay and its long roots also break up the soil. Tares fixes nitrogen, provided the whole crop is incorporated, which is useful but not required on every bed so it’s a difficult choice.

There is not much left to do now excpet a general tidy up and order the seeds for next year. Just right for these cold dark days.

By col2 | Posted in Organic food gardening | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Digging?

24/11/2008 – 20:43

It’s that time of year again when everybody is either talking about digging their plot or moaning about a bad back because they have just dug it all in one day! When I had an allotment there was always a procession of blokes walking past bent almost half double and asking me if I had done the digging yet. I was using no-dig then which always provoked comments about weed infestations and nothing growing.

I used no-dig for many years on my raised beds and each year there were fewer weeds. When we eventually moved there were no weeds at all. Digging disturbs weed seeds which then germinate. Not digging disturbs no one except adjacent plot holders.

The other big myth about digging at this time of year is that we need to add as much muck as possible. The bloke next to me used to do that and was often heard to say that the ground was very hungry as he always had to add more manure in the spring.

What happens is that winter rain washes out the nitrogen which ends up in the local river rather than in your plants. The answer is to keep the soil covered during winter. I have some plastic sheets cut to size for the beds without green manures or crops. The manure is rotovated in and then the bed is covered. The result is that when they are unwrapped for spring the soil is rich black and crumbly.

The other thing that rain does is compact soil. So by next spring your nicely dug soil will be flat, compacted and out of nitrogen. Your back might be better though, just in time to dog it all again.

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Fruit and veg boom needed to feed Britain

18/11/2008 – 09:51

An article in the Guardian says that we need a boom in fruit and veg growing to feed the country to survive the effects of climate change and peak oil. Yes we do! At last someone else is saying that we need to grow more of our own food to become more resilient to changes in the world food supply. Will anybody listen? I hope so. (Read more)

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Gardening IS good for you

18/11/2008 – 09:43

Here’s the proof, gardening is good for you!

Researchers are discovering that growing your own food—however much or little you can do—is better for your health than anyone ever suspected. And the nutritional value of what you harvest is almost the least of it. Growing your own food by messing around in your own garden proves to be nature’s fruitful way of cultivating your health—physically and psychologically.
(Read more)

I went back to gardening many years ago when I was working at home on computer based projects. It was the ideal antidote for long hours at the keyboard. It was also a way of getting cheap organic food when it was difficult to find in the shops. Now a research project has proved what we all know, gardening is good for you!

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Time to go against the grain

09/11/2008 – 11:50

In his latest article in The Guardian, Graham Harvey1 offers a positive solution to oil based agriculture when he says;

Oil-dependent production of cereal crops could be replaced by a traditional method of farming that is cheaper, greener and safer.

He makes the point that it is not so many years ago that traditional mixed farms were common. I wholeheartedly agree, mixed farms have a lot going for them. The critics will argue that we need to compete on world markets? Why? It seems totally crazy to import crops we can easily grow here and then export crops to other countries that they could grow. What a complete and total waste of energy. But there again any insertion of plain old common sense into the system would deprive the commodity market speculators of their profits!

I was talking to the farmer who supplies my muck and he said that many farmers were not selling muck to gardeners anymore because it has become too valuable to them. With fertiliser prices approaching £500 a tonne (which is more than double what they were in 2007 2) he said that farmers were going back to spreading muck on their own land.

That is not good news for gardeners as many of us rely of year supplies of muck. I used to make large amounts of compost but health problems prevent that now. There are other ways to preserve soil fertility but muck maintains fertility and is a superb soil conditioner.

Notes

1. Graham Harvey is author of The Carbon Fields, published last week by Grassroots, price £6.99. grassrootsfood.co.uk

2. Fertiliser prices from - http://www.mdcdatum.org.uk/FarmDataPrices/fertiliserprices.html

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Finding space to grow

07/11/2008 – 13:47

Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, was in the news this week. He was launching a project to increase the amount of locally grown food in the capital for the 2012 Olympics. The idea is to find vacant land and turn it into allotments or community gardens. Nice idea, one that I fully support and it will go some way to redressing the criminal destruction of the allotments that were taken to build a pathway to the Olympic site!

It’s good to see that vacant land is being considered for growing food as there is a chronic shortage of allotments in many parts of the UK. That is a point that Hugh Fernley Whittingstall is also addressing by setting up Landshare. His aim is to connect people with idle land with those wanting a space to grow. It is a national scheme that has already had an impact in London. The Church of England is a big land owner and they have agreed to look at sites throughout the capital that might be suitable for growing food. If that was repeated all over the UK then we really would be in business.

Let’s hope there are more of these schemes around the country as there is vacant land virtually everywhere you look.

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Square foot/square metre beds for single crops

06/11/2008 – 09:56
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It’s another cold, wet and dismal day and I’ve been thinking about what to grow next year.What impressed me this season were the high yields from almost everything we grew. Onions did very well again with most coming in at well over 1lb. (0.453kg) The four small trial beds produced over 10kg of onions from 1 sq m (0.25 sq. m. per bed)

All this has got me thinking that next year I will use 2, 1m square beds to grow the same quantity of onions that we grew in one of the 15ftx4ft (4.5mx1.2m) beds. I might not be brave enough to risk our whole years supply of onions and will most likely still grow some in a larger bed in case things go wrong.

Come to think of it there are 4; 1m square beds so I’ll use another for 48 carrots. The last one could have dwarf French beans freeing up even more space in the main rotation.

So, that looks like the trial for 2009; using 1m square beds for single crops to see just what is possible in such a small place. Should be fun…

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Lets hear it for ugly fruit and veg

04/11/2008 – 18:20

Strange things happen in this world but none stranger than Sainsburys championing the cause of ugly veg. Evidently they are incensed by EU rules that prevented them from selling misshapen and ugly veg at Halloween. Some might say it is a cynical publicity stunt especially as they are pitching their PR in the form of ‘we would love to sell class 2 veg that don’t meet the stringent requirements of class 1 so that poorer families can afford fresh produce’.

Some might ask why Sainsburys have waited so long to raise the issue of fruit and veg being rejected because they are an odd shape or too big/small. It could be something to do with the fact that customers looking to save on their grocery bills have deserted to lower cost supermarkets.

For so many years the quality of fresh produce has been judged solely on appearance. That’s a false perspective as looks show nothing of what’s inside.  There have been many challenges to this stance but the supermarkets have always said that they give customers what they want and we are told they want attractive veg!

Gardeners have also fallen into the appearance trap. How many times have you been to an annual produce show and seen a misshapen or ugly specimen win a prize? And that does not include the cup for worst in show!

A few years back I was giving a talk to a big audience from a Coventry gardening group. The lights were low as I was showing slides. I put up my picture of ugly carrots I had grown and asked what the audience thought of them. A voice came from the back with the reply  “bl**dy rubbish”. My response was that I ate every one of the miserable looking specimens and everyone tasted like a carrot.

For me flavour, freshness and nutritional value always triumph over appearance. I might question Sainsbury’s motives but it is really good to see these issues rasied at last.

By col2 | Posted in Food, Organic food gardening | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

EU wants to ban some agricultural pesticides

01/11/2008 – 10:56
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The EU wants to stop farmers using some pesticides. Naturally the NFU (National Farmer Union) are protesting long and loud. They are saying that the price of fruit and veg could double if not triple because of lower yields.

The argument against any sort of ban is that there is a balance to be found between the use of pesticides and the production of food. Those against say that people on low incomes would not be able to afford to buy ‘healthy’ fruit and veg.

Those for the ban would argue that ‘healthy’ food is not produced by spraying it with poisons, yes, poisons because that is what pesticides are. They are designed to kill pests.

We get constant reassurance from the government that it is all perfectly safe and they have even gone so far as to produce the safe maximum dose of each chemical used. What they have not done is look at how cocktails of various sprays affect human health.

A few years back a university in the US did some research which showed that two commonly used pesticides are linked to Parkinson disease like symptoms in lab mice when given at residue levels. This work was then duplicated by other researchers with the same results.

There have also been documented cases of birth abnormalities in areas of intensive agriculture. The BBC reported a high number of eye defects in children in Lincolnshire. There have been other cases of people who live next to farmland becoming sick after spraying has taken place.

It really is time we stopped using pesticides and herbicides in food production. The scaremongering about hugely decreased yields is just that, scaremongering. Organic farming has been shown to increase yields. There is certainly demand for chemical free fruit and veg and the large scale adoption of organic practices would bring the price down. The overall effects on the nation might well be to improve health and so reduce spending on the health services.

One day soon people will look back on this time in history and say “that was when they sprayed poisons on their food before eating it, how daft was that”.

Read more

University of Rochester Medical Center (Pesticides and Parkinsons research)

Pesticide link to eye abnormalities (Lincolnshire BBC piece)

Eye defects in Lincolnshire (Results of court action)

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