Warm earth music for plants... and the people who love them.

Plant Sentience and Stevie Wonder: The secret life of plants (1979)

With a experimental-funk Stevie Wonder soundtrack, this documentary is based on the 1973 book of the same name. 'The Secret life of Plants' explores way-out concepts and entertaining pseudo-science such as plant sentience (plants can feel, man!) orgone accumulation (plants can focus energy, man!) and plant emotions. Yes, plant emotions. Great timelapse photography and the film's interesting alternative take on our green leafy friends make this worth a watch.





Was Roald Dahl onto something when he wrote 'The Sound Machine'?

His 1949 tale of a man who invents a machine that can hear roses shreiking as they're cut and trees groaning as they're felled?

Royal Academy of the Arts: Urban Gardening

An interesting looking event happening on the 27th Feb:

'CONTEMPORARY URBAN GARDENING - Provocations in art'

Artist Wendy Shilliam's rooftop veg plot

From the RA website:

Join us for a panel event exploring the current state and future potential of contemporary urban gardening.

Chaired by journalist and horticulturist Alys Fowler, this event will explore the subversive and exciting work of guerrilla gardener and author Richard Reynolds, forager John Rensten and artist Wendy Shillam.
Panellists include:

• Gardener Wendy Shillam, currently undertaking a project in cultivating a 5m x 6m rooftop garden on top of her Central London home, containing thriving organic fruits and vegetables.
• Forager and founder of Forage London, John Rensten, studies wild food and leads city foraging walks in urban green spaces.
• Guerrilla gardener Richard Reynolds, whose record of illicit cultivation began in 2004. His website is now a hub for those who cultivate land as guerrilla gardeners.

Permaculture Magazine

Another great mag well worth a look. Inspiring stuff for anyone interested in growing veggies and looking after the planet. and it's printed on lovely thick paper.

http://www.permaculture.co.uk/

 

Belated halloween special: a pumpkin's worst nightmare? Vegetable gardeners, keep the elephants away from your pumpkin patch.

The great You-Dig? No-Dig experiment.

I got my allotment at the start of 2015 and it was just a wild jungle of pernicious weeds. Couch grass, bindweed, horsetails, their roots making thick mats of tough tangle in the soil. Soil that would've been SOOO much work to dig over. 

Despite being a very lazy person, I have somehow managed to end up with a job that requires a lot of time and effort, a 3 year old person to look after (that also requires a lot of time and effort), a million and one hobbies and a 10 rod allotment in my sole care (apart from the 3 year old person sowing the occasional seed).

Imagine my delight when I peeked inside the cover of this book:

Charles Dowding: How to create a new vegetable garden from scratch.

I'd read his articles in 'The Garden' magazine and thought he seemed like a bit of a dude, so ordered his book and followed his advice for creating a new no-dig veg garden.

So what is no-dig gardening? It's just gardening without digging, using a thick dressing of mulch and relying on the gardener's friends, the little wormies, to look after the soil. 

Soil has a delicate balance of helpful microscopic life in it, and undug soil suits these little friends just fine. Digging can trash the structure of the soil and is not necessary for plants to thrive, as I was to find out.

Being a bit of a chicken, I used the bottom third of the allotment as my top secret experimental no-dig test bed (kind of like Q's lab in the james bond films, but with less exploding pens). I just dug over the rest of the allotment as normal.

But the no-dig beds? Well, I spent several weeks asking every shop in the local area for their old cardboard boxes, flattened them and plonked these straight over the weeds. Then, I bunged on a load of straw from our local riding stables, which came loaded with handy bits of horse poo (aka manure). Next, I collected up as many grass cuttings as I could and chucked them on top. I covered the whole lot with landscape fabric and forgot about it for a couple of months.

Meanwhile, I had a brood of little squash, courgette and tomato plants growing in pots at home. Come May, I scooped out some little holes in the mulch, put in some compost and planted the seedlings, crossing my fingers that the un-rotted straw and grass cuttings wouldn't poison them with a nitrogen overdose. See the photos below for what happened...

February: the plot before the no-dig attack.

 mulching with cardboard, straw and grass cuttings

May: The seedlings are planted out 

August: It's a jungle!

October: 1 million tomatoes

 November: The plants have died back, been pulled up and the whole thing has been tickled with a rake. The soil is lovely soft, rich, friable compost-y stuff. My onions and garlic are in under the fleece and I'm left with the warm glow of maximum results for minimum effort! Hooray for no-dig!!!

I ended up getting 8 big Crown Prince squash, tons of tomatoes, loads of courgettes, a little bit of lettuce, 2 vegetable spaghetti squashes and one tiny, wizened turks turban squash (a mole dug under the roots and the plant wasn't happy). I can safely say that my spade will be getting considerably less use next year, as I'll be going no-dig on the whole plot. Thanks Charles Dowding!

Allotment Update

Remember this:?

My allotment, feb '15

Well here it is now:

My allotment, July '15

There's a willow playhouse covered in purple and yellow french beans at the back, parsnips, baby and regular sweetcorn, 2 types of peas, bush and broad beans, courgettes, nasturium, sunflowers, calendula, chamomile, coriander, parsley, stripy chioggia beetroot, borage and black cumin. The white thing in the middle is my 'carrot cage' made of old net curtains, trying to keep the carrot fly off my multicoloured carrots. The ramshackle arches behind it are some pvc pipe I found in a skip, with netting stretched over to protect a motley assortment of cabbage, brussels, purple sprouting broccoli and dinosaur kale (cavolo nero) from the caterpillars. 

And that's just in the top half of the plot!

The rest of the plot is home to strawberries, red orange and yellow raspberries, plums, 'discovery' and 'james grieve' apple trees (not fruiting yet because I only put them in this year), a morello cherry sapling, blue honeysuckle berries, worcesterberries, blackcurrants, whitecurrants, blackberries, japanese wineberries, cucumbers, 4 types of tomato, 3 types of squash, 5 types of potato including purple fleshed ones, rainbow chard, spring onions, elephant garlic, leeks, lettuce, mixed oriental salad leaves, rocket and radish. Oh, and some chervil too.

Try reading that list without taking a breath!

More photos to follow soon, including a scintillating (tittilating even!) glimpse at the no-dig experiment I'm running on the bottom half of the plot.