Take a look at the new Guardian blog

Jane Perrone has set up a new blog on the Guardian website. Check it out. She already has a regular blog of her own but this one will be bringing lots of new material from authors associated with the Guardian and some old material from writers such as Christopher Lloyd, which would otherwise be locked away in an archive somewhere. I think it will be another great on-line gardening resource. As you can see through this link the blog already has plenty of users http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/gardening-blog/2008/dec/03/1.

Babs2Brisbane – book on overland journey to Australia published soon

Check out the website of my friend Barbara Haddrill, who took an overland journey to Brisbane Australia from Wales to avoid taking the plane to her best friends’ wedding. She was dubbed the low carbon bridesmaid by the press and kick started a media debate about the environmental impact of aviation. With a decision about the third runway at Heathrow due to be announced today the book she has written about her experiences is extremely current and relevant. It is published by Centre for Alternative Technology Publications on February 12th but you can see extracts and details of the book on Barbara’s website at www.babs2brisbane.com.

Happy Christmas and if you’re going away remember to switch everything off.

Check out this video. The coolest Energy Saving video ever. I’m loving it! Have a great Christmas and I’ll see you soon. Thanks for visiting and for making a contribution.

The Organic Garden available at discount and free postage from CAT Mail Order

The Organic Garden (written by Chloe Ward and I) is now available at £8.99 plus free postage up until Christmas from CAT Mail Order – www.cat.org.uk/shopping or 01654 705959. A big saving on the £17.99 cover price. It is not available anywhere else until March when a new edition in paperback is published by Collins.

Comfrey: Past, Present and Future and other Lawrence Hills books now available

You can now get a print on demand version of Lawrence Hills‘ classic book on Comfrey and Its Uses. Its published by Faber on December 11th and is available through their website. You can also get other Lawrence Hills’ books – Down to Earth Gardening and Grow Your Own Fruit and Vegetables. All previously out of print. These are all great books with I think some useful if forgotten organic information.

Keep up to date with Yalding

You may remember back in the spring I ran some stories about Yalding Organic Gardens in Kent. Now you can keep up to date with news about whats happening with the gardens at http://www.yaldingorganicgardens.info/. Remember to keep visiting and maintain support for these beautiful gardens.

And Emily loved him

It’s a sad day on a blue crated moon somewhere in space. The soup dragon is crying into his ladle. And on a Welsh hillside a little stream train has nothing to toot toot about. He has lost his voice. And somewhere in a small shop in a little street in England a certain Professor Yaffle can be heard to say ridiculous, ridiculous. And however hard they try there are some things the mice on the mouse organ just can’t fix. Yesterday Oliver Postgate passed away and now that Bagpuss has gone to sleep I wonder whether all his friends will too. I loved Oliver Postgate – as many people of my generation did – somewhat irrationally probably as I never met the man. But he was a hero, a passionate advocate for the environment and for peace and love and a teller of lovable, meaningful stories. In a strange sort of way he was probably one of the most influential people of his day. Even in later years he used the money he had made from his stories to post full page adverts in national newspapers telling people the truth about global warming. His autobiography Seeing Things is a joy to read and an inspiration. It actually appears to be out of print as Amazon is only stocking the second hand editions at £38. I hope the publishers print a new edition. In tribute to Oliver Postage join me, take a few moments out of your day and watch…

Guia para la elaboracion del compost

I’m happy to announce the arrival of the Spanish translation of The Little Book of Compost. It’s published by Tutor in Spain www.edicionestutor.com. Tomando prestada una frase de Bart Simpson: Mola!

Last Weeks Garden News Article – in full.

Last week’s Garden News article in full!

With only three Allan Shepherd columns left until Christmas, the end of the year and sadly the end of my time at Garden News I thought I’d use my remaining features to provide a round up of my favourite organic books, ethical products and seasonal activities to keep you going through the coming year. There won’t be an organic column next year so I feel like I need to fill your stocking with something that will last a while!

For Christmas this year I’m asking santa to enrol me as a member of Garden Organics’ Heritage Seed Library. On Boxing Day I’ll get to chose up to six packets of seed from over 200 unique varieties that are only available to members. These seeds are no longer to be had commercially because their owners could not afford to register them on the National Seed List. Instead they have been made available to gardeners free of charge through the HSL. This does not mean that they are inferior seed stock; far from it. Some are more flavoursome and colourful than varieties grown commercially and many carry interesting histories. Perhaps just as importantly, all help to increase the diversity of crops grown in Britain, with many specifically suited to local climatic and soil conditions. I’ll be looking out for the Welsh ones!

Like all organic seeds HSL seeds are free from Genetic Modification – something that is important to me and may become more important to you over the next few years. In Britain Genetically Modified (GM) crops are currently only grown in field scale trials, where they have to be monitored by law to see if they contaminate other crops near by. There are moves afoot in the gardening industry to introduce GM crops to gardens but as yet there is no certainty whether this is safe or even in the best interest of gardeners.

In some agricultural scenarios GM seeds are designed to be grown with chemicals made by the same company. The farmer is reliant on the company for both seed and pesticide. And even then the seed can only be used once. GM seeds are not designed to be saved but to be grown by the farmer under licence from the company. Farmers do not have the right to save seed from their GM crop. Whereas a Heritage Seed Library seed can be saved and used indefinitely by the gardener and allowed to morph and change over many years, perhaps evolving over time into a new stronger variety, a GM seed is a fixed and patented invention designed to stay the same.

To me, membership of the Heritage Seed Library will not only be great fun – what could be better than picking out new varieties of seeds to order on boxing day – but it will also be a constant reminder that in gardening diversity = strength. Can we sign up for a better future? To borrow Barack Obama’s phrase: Yes We Can!

Recommended Reading
Back Garden Seed Saving, Sue Stickland

No more Garden News articles but I’m in The Guardian this weekend.

Well you can’t win them all. Garden News have decided that they don’t want an organic column next year so its adios and farewell to my compost lover column. I’ve enjoyed writing them very much and I’m quite sad that the magazine has decided to drop compost lover next year. Its no secret that Garden News supports the chemical industry and is supported by the chemical industry. It promotes the use of chemicals and arranges for particular columns to be published in association with specific chemical remedies. I guess its no surprise that an organic column would find itself a little out of place.

If you didn’t see last weeks paper you wont know that Garden News carried the front page headline SOS – Save Our Sprays. Because the European Union is examining the list of approved pesticides to remove the most dangerous the horticulture and agriculture industry are up in arms. Rather than explore alternative practices and change the way they do things to make the growing of plants a safer occupation or pastime, they are going to fight Europe to protect their own interests and profits. 

As a result they are running a high profile media campaign to get gardeners to write letters to their MEP’s in support of chemicals. The chemical companies have always tried to manage the media agenda – going way back to the attacks they made on Rachel Carson when she wrote Silent Spring. As the stakes get higher the campaigns get busier and more aggressive.

The most hurtful claim In the Garden News article was that chemicals promoted a healthy way of living. How anybody can say this without one finger crossed behind their back I’ll never know. There is plenty of evidence to show that pesticides are dangerous. Ask Georgina Downs – who has just won a high court case to prove that she has suffered from ill health as a result of farmers spraying pesticides next to her country garden. Or the millions of farmers in the third world who are sold all those chemicals developed nations will no longer allow because of health fears. Or the families of those farmers in India who have committed suicide because they have been forced into chemical dependence. Chemicals are also bad for animals and no one ever seems to want to talk about that. Thousands of animals have to suffer testing so that governments can ‘prove’ that chemicals are ‘safe’ for us to use.

Anyway going back to my headline – The Guardian is publishing an article I wrote on comfrey on saturday – thank you Jane Perrone for offering me the opportunity to talk to people through another medium. The article is published to coincide with the re-publication of Lawrence Hills‘ classic book on Comfrey and Its Uses. Its published by Faber on December 11th and is available as a print on demand book through their website.
Lawrence Hills lived by the motto “search only for the truth that hurts no man”. I’ll try and continue to do the same.

If you’re free this friday and near to Central London go to The Rachel Carson Memorial Lecture – http://www.pan-uk.org/Projects/RCML/index.htm.

Garden News article – November

Actually this is definitely too late! But one for next year. This one appeared at the start of november – which is pushing it a bit for planting over wintering manures – unless you live in very warm parts of the country. Ideally you should be planting September/October. But anyway – the resources are useful for next year.

 

It’s November, it’s cold – it’s your last chance to plant a winter compost crop! If you’ve got a clear, weed free patch of ground and you’re not planning to plant it up with anything until Spring the best thing you can do now is cover it up with a green manure. Nature hates bare soil. More nutrients are lost from soil through leaching (ie loss through wind and rain) when the soil is bare than from the growing of crops.

 

New research from Garden Organic – a four year field trial funded by the government – has found that growing grazing rye over the winter reduces loss of nitrogen from the soil by up to 97% compared to leaving the soil bare. This means that come spring your soil will be raring to go – plants will get a head start and you wont have to use so much nitrogen feed. As the cost of nitrogen fertilizers has risen by 15% in three years (the price being linked to the cost of oil) there’s also a financial incentive.

 

You may think it better to grow nitrogen fixing legume crops but legumes don’t fix nitrogen in the winter. Cereal Rye’s are much better because they grow quickly, getting a good start before winter really kicks in. Even if they die during the winter, the carbon they have stored during growth goes back into the soil, breaking down and feeding soil micro-organisms, whose numbers might other wise be greatly reduced without this supply of fresh organic matter. Because soil fertility is dependent on the activity of micro-organisms it really pays to have a spring soil filled with life.

 

Rye leaves and roots also produce chemicals that work as a natural herbicide, so this is the best compost crop to grow in soil overrun with weeds like fat hen and ragwort. Its vigorous growth helps to choke out these weeds. You must be careful though that the crop does not become a weed itself.

 

Cultivation is fairly simple. Prepare the bed you want to plant up as you would a seed bed. Sow the seed evenly and carefully according to the recommendation on the packet. Be aware that gaps left between rye plants will be filled by rogue weeds so make sure you cover as much ground as possible. Rake the seed gently into the soil. Pat it down with a roller, your feet or the end of the rake.

 

Unless you are saving seed for the following year you should cut the rye down before it sets seed in the spring. It has a strong root system and is hard to kill. The best way to organise its demise – which you must do to stop it taking over and to make room for your crops – is to cut very close to the ground in early April (when you can feel the seed head at the base of the stem) and then again two weeks later if it shows signs of re-growth. After this second cut the plant generally gives up and the roots decompose in the soil. So long as the seeds haven’t set you can incorporate all the organic matter back into the soil – either by digging it in – or just leaving it to decompose on the surface.

 

Resources

Growing Green: Organic Techniques for a Sustainable Future, Jenny Hall and Iain Tolhurst – quite technical but comprehensive guide for gardeners and farmers wanting to make the most of natural growing techniques.

The Complete Compost Gardening Guide – probably my favourite gardening book this year. Born in the U.S.A but suitable for British gardeners, this is easy on the eye and very informative.

www.organiccatalogue.com 0845 130 1304 – various sized seed packets, including one that will cover 7 square metres, enough for a small garden like mine. Booklet: Step by Step Green Manures.

Garden News article 22 – Mid October article

This is obviously also a bit late but hope some of the information contained within it is useful still now. Actually it is because the leaves are still falling. Not too wintery yet! 

 

At this time of year trees and shrubs start to reclaim some of the nutrients they have been storing up in their leaves. They take them back into their dormant buds before allowing the leaves to fall. These concentrated sugars act as a kind of natural antifreeze, helping to preserve the buds through the winter. The colour of the leaves change and we embrace our time of mellow fruitfulness.

 

I’m lucky to live in an area of mixed deciduous woodland so when the leaves change colour and drop they give me almost two months of viewing pleasure. The hillside opposite blushes bronze and burns with copper hues. The trees are not stupid – when they finally let their leaves drop most of the nutrients have been removed from them. What falls on the ground is little more than a carbon shell.

 

Not necessarily a bad thing for gardeners: sometimes a carbon rich material is exactly what we need to make good compost. Compost lovers can learn at a glance which materials are going to be good for the composting process by studying the carbon:nitrogen ratio of each. The trick is then to balance out materials that are rich in carbon (cardboard, old bedding plants, old straw, tough vegetable stems) with those that are rich in nitrogen (grass, manure, vegetable peelings, cut flowers).

 

For example, our old friend comfrey has a carbon:nitrogen ratio of 10:1. This means that for every one part of nitrogen you find in a comfrey leaf you will also find ten parts of carbon. Although this makes comfrey a great material for composting, if you composted the leaves by themselves you would not end up with compost but a messy slop with a very nutritious liquid run-off. This can be used as a nitrogen rich liquid feed but it is not compost.

 

To make compost you have to mix nitrogen rich material with something rich in carbon. Fallen leaves have a carbon:nitrogen ratio around about 50:1 so the two of them work well together – the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers of compost materials. Sorry, too much Strictly…

 

Most gardeners know that you can pile up leaves in a wire cage in the corner of your garden and let them rot into leaf mould. Nothing wrong with that – leaf mould gets plenty of organic matter back into your soil and can absorb five times its weight in water so great for supporting plants in dry soils. But you can also combine carbon rich leaves or the finished leaf mould with nitrogen rich materials like comfrey to make proper compost.

 

Garden Organic has developed the following recipe to do just that. You can use it if you already have some leaf mould and comfrey leaves available. If not then now’s the time to start collecting leaves for future use. In a couple of years’ time you’ll be able to make your own peat free potting and seed compost.

 

• Use an old dustbin or black polythene sack and fill it with alternate 7.5-10cm (3-4in) layers of 2-3 year old leaf mould and wilted, chopped comfrey leaves.
• Firm down gently and add moisture if the leaves are dry. If the leaf mould is very wet, get it out of the cage and allow to dry for a few days before making up the mixture.

• Do nothing. Leave for between two and five months or until the comfrey leaves have virtually disappeared.

• Scoop the compost out of the bin and use as a general potting compost. Alternatively add 25% horticultural sharp sand to make a seed compost.

• The pH of comfrey leaf mould is usually between 5.8 and 6.2. If a more alkaline compost is required, lime may be added.

 

Step by Step: Comfrey for Gardeners, Garden Organic – available from www.organiccatalog.com; 0845 130 1304; £1.35 plus postage.

Garden News article from October – sorry its late!

This article’s a bit out of date now as it was a direct response to Toby Buckland’s first interview on becoming the new Gardeners World presenter. It was published in Garden News back in October but I think its worth having up here for the record and to remind people of the organic gardening research Geoff Hamilton did over twenty years ago. Its annoying that we keep on having the same debate but there it is. There’s a lot of vested interest in the gardening industry to keep people buying chemicals. Garden centres need the regular income, magazines need advertising revenue – and so on and so forth. So here it is:

 GARDEN NEWS ARTICLE – MORE COMMON SCIENCE LESS COMMON SENSE

It’s not my want to give anything other than practical advice about organics in this column but the headlines and comments surrounding Toby Buckland’s recent interviews about chemicals has led me this time to break from the norm and write a response.

 

Over twenty years ago Geoff Hamilton carried out a series of experiments on four plots in his garden. The first he gardened organically, the second with pesticides, the third with a mixture of the two and the fourth he didn’t use any special treatment at all. This was what he called his control bed – a benchmark to test the other beds against. He wanted to find out whether gardening organically was a practical scientific and to borrow Toby Buckland’s recent words ‘common sense’ approach.

 

His experiments led to a ‘Road to Damascus’ conversion that developed into a life long interest in organic principles. As his wife Lynda Hamilton wrote in her introduction to Geoff’s posthumous collection of Daily Express articles Year in Your Garden “He was trained as a commercial grower where rule number one was: ‘If it moves spray it’”. Seeing the same sort of arguments about chemicals raging in the press then (as now) his trial set out to prove that organic gardening didn’t work. In the end he proved the opposite: that chemicals hindered rather than helped gardeners.

 

He carried out his experiment over five years and recorded the yield in each bed. Sure enough in the first year the chemical plot produced far and away the best results. By the end of the second year there were signs that the organic plot was catching up. In the fifth year the organic plot was vastly out yielding the other three.

 

This experiment in common science – as opposed to common sense – changed his life, led him to a different style of gardening and paved the way for Gardeners World to go chemical free. It also led to the creation of his landmark TV series The Ornamental Kitchen Garden and Paradise Gardens (still available on DVD by the way). I think the gardening nation was better off as a result. Let us not forget that before Geoff came along Percy Thrower was thrown off Gardeners World for taking payments to advertise pesticides!

 

Geoff found in his own experiments what those who gardened organically already knew: chemicals create dependence. Once you start using them you have to carry on using them. This is because they kill beneficial predators and disturb the balance of life in the garden. In a balanced eco system it is very rare to find swathes of pests taking over and laying waste to plant life because nature creates conditions favourable to predators. Mostly organic gardening is about doing the same. It’s really quite simple.

 

We need to remember that chemicals are primarily prepared for agriculture, to be used in situations where single crops are grown in endless uniformity in conditions that prove very attractive to pests and where there are not enough predators to prevent crop damage. They are not prepared for gardens filled with a wide variety of plants, pests and predators.

 

Of course if you look beyond those headlines that screamed “It’s common sense to use pesticides”, and a little closer at his actual interviews, Toby Buckland didn’t give the ringing endorsement of chemicals some might have hoped for. He actually does little more than suggest glyphosate isn’t so bad to get your patch cleared, which may or may not be true depending on which environmental and health reports you read. Whatever the case, using chemicals is not and never will be ‘common sense’! It might be convenient in the short term but it is also taking credit from a bank of natural resources that can never be paid back. This approach is not for me – better to be an organic success than a chemical failure. 

Rainwater harvesting tanks

Following on from my last blog garden writer John Walker has emailed me an alternative suggestion for sources of tanks for rain water harvesting:

“I bought my tank from www.smithsofthedean.co.uk, who sell recycled 1500
litre tanks and a good range of smaller ones, too – click on ‘recycled
containers’. These were lovely people to deal with – they even rang me
up when the large tanks came back into stock. Dealing with them and
delivery of the tank was a real pleasure.”

Garden News Article Twenty: Water harvesting, green manures and intercropping

I’ve only got six more articles to go for Garden News now until the end of the year. Here’s Number Twenty:

Following two summers of almost continuous rainfall it seems hard to believe that this time three years ago we were coming to the end of one of the driest summers on record. The need to engineer our garden water supply to balance out the peaks and troughs is obvious. We can’t determine the amount of water that falls on our gardens but we can control how much we collect, store and use.

A friend of mine reckons he can survive anything but a cataclysmic drought with a drip feed irrigation system that combines a large rainwater harvesting tank (available cheaply from The Tank Exchange – see below for contact details), a grey water recycling system that runs straight from the pipes underneath ever plug hole in the house (grey water being water that has already been used but can be used again for some lower order process that does not require clean drinking water) and a series of irrigation pipes running along the surface of the soil. The plants receive a regular supply of water automatically every time he pulls a plug – though this doesn’t stretch to toilet water (known as black water), which quite rightly goes straight into the mains sewage treatment system.

If you can’t do any of this for logistical reasons (I can’t) or even if you can, the simplest way to guard against weather extremes is to make sure your soil contains loads of organic matter. This is engineering of a different kind. Organic matter regulates the amount of water that remains in the soil around the roots of your plants. In very wet years a soil rich in organic matter will be less waterlogged because it will have a greater number of worms and other soil organisms; all of which help to create drainage channels that improve the flow of water from the top soil to the sub soil. In very dry years organic matter helps to keep water near the roots of plants. It does this by turning particles of soil that are too small to hold water into large crumbs that can. Each crumb is wrapped in a thin film of liquid that roots penetrate to draw off water.

Adding compost to the soil is one way of building up organic matter but you could also use intercrops (extra crops grown between rows of regular crops just to add organic matter to the soil) and green manures, both of which do the same job. An intercrop could be something as simple as grass grown between rows of trees in an orchard. The grass keeps soil in place and stops erosion. Every time the grass is cut and left to rot extra organic matter is added to the soil.

Mostly though intercrops are red clover, beans and other legumes sown in between rows of vegetables, cut before they seed and left to rot. The cut crop acts as a mulch – stopping water evaporating from soil on hot days – and provides food for soil organisms (in the same way that compost does).

Green manures (crops grown specifically to add fertility to the soil) are more commonly grown in crop rotations (in gaps between sowing) but can be planted on any patch of bare soil waiting to be planted up. They include: alfalfa, buckwheat, fenugreek, field beans, lupins bitter blue, mustard, phacelia, red clover, ryegrass, sunflowers and tares. Each one has a different function, growing pattern and harvesting time so you’ll need a guide (see below) but the general effect of all is to increase the volume of organic matter in the soil.

Resources
Garden Organic publish Green Manures:a step by step guide (priced £1.35 from www.organiccatalog.com 0845 1301304)
The Centre for Alternative Technology publish the tipsheet Making Use of Greywater in the Garden (priced 50p from www.cat.org.uk/catpubs 01654 705959)
The Tank Exchange sell large recycled water containers for garden use (www.thetankexchange.com 08704 670706)