Gardenig in Germany. Tips & Guides

Out with the ham and in with the spam [Image credit:63056612@N00, CC BY-SA]

Can you imagine stepping outside your house and wading out onto a reef to collect seaweeds and shellfish for your lunch? Or talking the dog for a walk into the nearby forest, hunting for mushrooms and foraging edible plants to go with them?

Header image: TheOldBarnDoor/Shutterstock.com

Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores cultivating the cosmos, planting planets and sowing seeds in space. The second episode of Gardeners of the Galaxy includes a look at the current state of plant experiments on the International Space Station, a rundown of the missions on their way to Mars and a sneak peek at the future of space chillies. And there’s a seed giveaway too!

The Wartime Kitchen and Garden, starring Ruth Mott and Harry Dodson, was broadcast in 1993. Although you can still find copies of the book that accompanied the series, you can’t buy the episodes on DVD (or even video!), even though it is possible to buy the sister shows The Victorian Kitchen and The Victorian Kitchen Garden.

Ryan and I had a day off, so we took a trip out to Milton Keynes to visit Bletchley Park, a stately home that was a top secret location during WW2, the home of the codebreakers who cracked the German’s Enigma code, and helped the Allies win the war. What went on at Bletchley Park was so secret that everyone employed there had to sign the official secrets act when they first walked through the gate. It wasn’t until wartime documents were declassified in the 1970s that the truth started to emerge, and people were allowed to talk about what went on there.

During the Second World War, the British Isles were subjected to a Nazi naval blockade, the aim of which was to disrupt food imports and starve the British people into submission. Shipping, whatever it was carrying, had to get past the German U-boats before it could safely deliver its cargo. Of course, the Allies were also trying to prevent ships from reaching Germany – this was the Battle of the Atlantic. By the end of the war, more than 2,400 British merchant ships had been sunk, with the loss of over 30,000 men.

On 10th June, thousands of scientists worldwide went on strike, putting their research activities on hold for a day to reflect and take action on systemic inequalities in science. #ShutDownStem was part of the wider Black Lives Matter protests, forcing us to take a long, hard look at how systemic racism affects people of colour.

I am making transcripts for The Wartime Kitchen and Garden, a fascinating series starring Ruth Mott and Peter Dodson, with a voiceover by Peter Thoday. This is episode six (of eight). [You’ll find the other transcripts, and other relevant posts, under the Home Front tag.]

What kind of traveller are you? Do you prefer to lie in a hammock slung between two palm trees, reading the latest blockbuster novel? Or would I find you soaking up the local culture along with the sun? I’m more of the latter, and it helps to know a smattering of the local language if you go off the beaten track!

On Saturday, ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer shared a taste of home with the rest of the crew of the International Space Station (ISS). Maurer is from Saarland, a forested, southwestern German state. Saarland is named after the Saar River, a tributary of the Moselle, and Saarland is considered part of the greater Moselle wine region.

On 31 January 1971, Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell and Stuart Roosa launched on their Apollo 14 mission to the Moon. While Shepard and Mitchell walked on the Moon, Roosa stayed in orbit, taking photographs and performing experiments. Tucked away in his personal belongings were 500 tree seeds, which orbited the Moon 34 times.

Continuing my research into which of NASA’s African American astronauts are space gardeners, I turned my attention to the second name on the (alphabetical) list: Guion Stewart Bluford Jr.

Weathering the worst of an Antarctic winter, a shipping container may hold the key to feeding astronauts in space. The EDEN ISS greenhouse was shipped to the German Neumayer Station III Antarctic station in 2017. It sits on extendable stilts to cope with the snow accumulating underneath. On a clear day, the views are breathtaking. At other times, the crew need a rope guideline to find their way from the greenhouse to the station. During the worst blizzards, EDEN ISS is fully monitored and operated from the control centre at the DLR Institute of Space Systems in Germany.

In January 1992, Space Shuttle Discovery took the first-ever British plant experiment in microgravity into space.

Header image: The German Neumayer III Station in Antarctica. Credits: NASA/Jess Bunchek

In 2018, the German Space Agency (DLR) and ESA launched 2kg of wildflower seeds (containing 61 species) to the International Space Station as part of astronaut Alexander Gerst’s Horizons mission.

In the latest episode, Emma the Space Gardener talks with two young scientists, Pia Bensch and Nils Wörz, from a team of students working on a space plant experiment. Glücksklee will spend a month on the ISS next year, exploring the relationship between a clover-like plant (Medicago truncatula) and its symbiotic bacteria (Sinorhizobium meliloti).

Today I learned about the social media phenomenon that is #FingerpostFriday. It involves people posting images of fingerposts. But I’d never heard that name used for the things I simply call signposts.

In 2018, the German Space Agency launched a particularly ambitious project on a year-long space mission – a satellite equipped with two greenhouses designed to grow tiny tomatoes at gravity levels equivalent to those found on the Moon and Mars. But it was more than just an experiment to grow plants in space. In this episode, Emma the Space Gardener explores Eu:CROPIS, a project to develop a biological life-support system… for tomatoes.

Remember EDEN ISS? It was a greenhouse built inside a shipping container that spent several years in Antarctica. The idea was to help develop controlled environment agriculture technologies for use in hostile environments on Earth, the International Space Station (ISS), and future spacecraft and Moon/Mars bases.

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As native grasses such as little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium and cvs., Zones 3–9) and prairie dropseed (Sporobolus heterolepis and cvs., Zones 3–9) increasingly gain traction in gardens, exotics such as miscanthus (Miscanthus sinensis and cvs., Zones 4–9) are losing favor because of their invasive tendencies. But not all exotic grasses are troublesome and need to be avoided. Feather reed grass (Calamagrostis × acutiflora and cvs., Zones 5–9) is a natural hybrid of C. arundinacea and C. epigejos, which are both nonnatives and prolific self-sowers, but the hybrid rarely sets fertile seed—a major plus for an exotic grass, right? So why are other reed grasses—‘Karl Foerster’ aside—so underused? To answer that question is to understand the phenomenon of ‘Karl Foerster’ feather reed grass (C. × acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’).

It’s Christmas time! You have probably bought your Christmas tree already or you’re waiting for it to be delivered to your door and installed as well. Getting your house into the festive Christmas mood is the fun part of the holiday.

After salad crop failures in Spain and shortages of courgettes, broccoli and other ‘long distance’ vegetables gardeners could to worse than focus on traditional and non-traditional root crops.

Do you remember Bill & Ben the flowerpot men and their friend Little Weed? Did they have gnomes in the garden and if not why not. These little stone or pot ornaments do not do any harm except when dropped on slugs.

However you spell Peony you will still be captivated by this family of Northern Hemisphere perennials. Lush flowers and foliage are a major attraction but there is also the opportunity to study and become involved in more detail with a concise family of interesting and often endangered species.

Afre years of dipping in and out I bought 2 Saintapaulia better known as African Violets (AV) in December 2016 and managed to kill one within months. This  12 month survivor has been in flower continuously ever since. The plant is happy in a 4″ globular ceramic pot which has a sump to water from underneath. Through my unconscious neglect the plant has to wait until the leaves start to flop before I remember to water. They quickly plump up after a drink but after the first death I have made sure the Violet does not stand in water ‘damping off’ the roots.

Georg Arends was a German nurseryman who bred many perennial plants. His business was successful until the second world war and has been regenerated to be one of the oldest in Europe. It still remains within the Arends family.

The title of this post gives the game away but I will pose  the question anyway. ‘What do Croatia, USA, Germany, UK, Cyprus, Portugal, Ireland, Poland any several other central European countries have in common?’

When I first started exploring roses, I thought myself to be pretty educated once I knew the difference between a David Austin and a Knock Out. And then I discovered a whole new world of

When you hear the word salad, what comes to mind? Leafy greens? Chicken? Potatoes?

I have a collection of heirloom German flag iris from my mother’s garden along with shared plants from aunts and good friends. The cultivar names are unknown, but the memories of the people who shared them with me abound every time I see the irises bloom.

Traditional beef rouladen is a German dish in which thinly sliced beef is wrapped around varying vegetables and then cooked until tender. When I was in high school, my mom and I found a recipe for beef rouladen in our church cookbook. We quickly fell in love with the recipe, and it became a family favorite. I lovingly and jokingly named it “Pickle Steak.” When I went away for college and then moved from home, I always asked my mom to make “Pickle Steak” when I came home to visit. I now frequently make the recipe for my own family. However, one day I was in the mood to make the recipe but did not have the top round steaks needed. I did, however, have stew beef! So, I created the Pickle Steak Stew! It tastes exactly like the original recipe without taking the time to roll the steaks and vegetables hence the nickname lazy beef rouladen. It’s incredible comfort food, and it freezes well too. I hope you enjoy it!

While the Christmas tree takes the front-and-center stage during this holiday season, supported by a cast of poinsettias, cyclamens, kalanchoes, Christmas cactuses, and amaryllises, hollies often find themselves relegated to wreaths, garlands, and candle adornments. Years ago, I learned from Fred Galle’s tome, “Hollies: The Genus Ilex” (Timber Press, OR 1997), that hollies were quintessential Christmas symbols extensively used for centuries in holiday wreaths and Christmas decorations. Galle wrote that in London in 1851, 250,000 bunches of English hollies (Ilex aquifolium) were sold and adorned houses, churches, street corners, and marketplaces. In some parts of England, residents retained the holly sprigs until the following year because they believed it would protect their homes from lightning strikes.