Emma Doughty

Three of the edible dahlias in flower today.

If it’s the middle of winter and there’s nothing much going on in the vegetable garden, or you want some easy and ultra-fresh salad greens, or a rainy day project to help keep the kids occupied, then try growing mustard and cress!

This is a repository for all the information on this site about seed saving. If you want to start saving your own seeds, or you’ve picked up one of my seed packets from a seed swap and need instructions on how to grow the plants, then this is the place to look.

Grafting is a time-honoured technique for growing fruit trees – it allows gardeners and farmers to choose both the variety of fruit they want to grow, and the rootstock they want to grow it on. You can even graft more than one variety of fruit onto one rootstock, giving you a ‘family’ tree that saves space and spreads the harvest time, or gives you both ‘cookers’ and ‘eaters’ from one tree. Grafting vegetables, on the other hand, is something relatively new that has burst onto the home gardening scene in the last few years. Last year T&M gave us the opportunity to grow the TomTato, a tomato plant grafted onto potato roots that grows both tomatoes and potatoes – catchily nicknamed the Ketchup ‘n’ fries plant. This year they have added a new dual-purpose plant to their range: the Egg & Chips plant grows both aubergines (AKA eggplant) and potatoes.

Soil isn’t one thing, it’s a collection of different things that come together to make the life-giving, plant-growing ‘dirt’ that we love. We have a tendency to poison it, cover it over and generally forget that it’s there, but good soil is the heart of a good garden and something we should pay a lot more attention to.

Paula Cocozza had an article published in the Guardian yesterday, which was titled “No plastic please, Mum: my quest to make waste-free packed lunches“. In it she reported on a week where she and her 8 year old son Gabriel set out to fill his lunchbox with packaging-free food. It’s an article that will – I am sure – resonate with plenty of people who are juggling time and money constraints with food preferences and a desire to be a bit more eco-friendly.

Get ready for launch, it’s time for the latest edition of Gardeners off World!

Header image: Mizuna lettuce growing aboard the International Space Station before being harvested and frozen for return to Earth. Image credit: NASA 

My dad’s minimalistic and flexible (but delicious!) recipe for sage and onion stuffing.

What has changed in the garden since last week? Well, on Wednesday I got tired of waiting (for cold, windy days and then scorching hot days to pass) and planted out 3 of my squash plants. One Georgia Candy Rooster went out into the ‘allotment’ in the Sunset Strip, and two Rugosa fruilana courgettes went into a raised bed in the main garden. Each one was planted out into a mound of fresh compost, and protected with a plastic cloche and eco-friendly slug pellets. I replaced the black plastic mulch on the beds to give them extra warm and moist soil.

The fashion world used to work so far in advance that if you wanted a new swimming costume for your summer holiday, you would have to buy it in the spring. By August, swimming costumes were nowhere to be seen, and it was time to buy your winter coat. Things have changed with the rise in long-haul holidays; it’s always summer somewhere in the world, and you can buy clothes of all types year-round.

Mould (mold) spores are everywhere, they’re inescapable, and moulds love growing in the warm, damp and humid conditions that seedlings need to thrive. If you have biodegradable pots then moulds can rapidly colonize those; but they will happily grow on the surface of compost as well. A lot of the moulds we see won’t do much damage to the seedlings, but some of them will and having mould on the windowsill isn’t much good for us either.

When I clear the next bed it will be time to plant the overwintering onions. I choose to plant my onions in the autumn for two reasons; the first is that I like having the beds filled overwinter. It’s nicer than having a bare garden to look at. The second is that they are harvestable about a month earlier in the summer, which means their bed is available for replanting a month earlier, and that works for me.

In times past, blackberries were deliberately used as hedging plants, and their prickles make them a very good intruder deterrent if you have an open boundary. They have also been used in herbal medicine. Chewing blackberry leaves was said to soothe a toothache, and frozen blackberries are great for soothing a sore throat or a tickly cough.

An ideal seed compost is able to retain water, whilst at the same time letting excess water drain away to provide an environment that is damp but not waterlogged. It allows penetration of plant roots and is able to anchor plants, but has space for air. Its texture is consistent, and it is free from pests, diseases and weeds that would compete with the seedlings. As we have seen, it doesn’t need to contain many nutrients if seedlings are going to be pricked out; seedlings growing in modules will either need enough nutrients in the compost to support them through their first weeks of life, or suitable supplementary feeding.

There might be a new chill in the air, but autumn is a beautiful time of year, when the leaves change color on the trees and the sun shines through a million little stained-glass windows. But once the leaves fall to the floor then it’s a different story. If they fall into ponds they can foul the water, on the lawn they can cause bleached patches and they make paths slippery in the winter. Gardeners everywhere spend the autumn raking up leaves to prevent these problems, but did you know that you can turn them into free soil improver for your garden, rather then sending them off with the rubbish?

One of the things Ryan and I like to do is sit and make a cup of tea in the garden, for which we use a Kelly Kettle that can quickly boil water using very little fuel (even in inclement weather). We’ll enjoy it even more when the garden is finished and we have somewhere to sit!

It’s not the world’s best photo, because it’s taken with my camera phone, but here is my bookazine on the shelves in my local Tesco!

If there’s one thing that makes gardeners gnash their teeth with frustration, it’s watching their favourite plants being eaten by pests. We’ve moved on from the ‘any bug is a bad bug’ mentality, and many chemical controls are being removed from sale amid safety fears, but this doesn’t mean that we have to abandon hope of an attractive and productive garden.

When a seed sends out its first shoot and it rises above the soil level, germination is over and seedling development has begun. This is a particularly vulnerable time for the plant – it is running out of stored resources and needs to start collecting its own food. In this period of rapid growth it is also particularly at risk from pests and diseases.

There is a big trend at the moment in recycling containers to use in the garden (we’ve already touched on it with recycled food containers used for raising seedlings). There is also a large range of containers you can buy – from cheap plastic pots right through to enormous designer urns. What you choose is as much down to your budget as it is to your tastes, but all containers need to hold a suitable volume of potting compost and retain water whilst allowing any excess to drain away. If you are recycling containers to use for food plants then be sure that they’re clean and that they weren’t used to store anything toxic in their previous life. And remember that not all plastics are UV stable – some degrade when they’re exposed to sunlight.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, NASA astronaut Steve Swanson has been doing some gardening on the International Space Station, growing ‘Outredgeous’ red romaine lettuce in the new VEGGIE gardening system. This inaugural experiment, called Veg-01, is partly a test of the hardware and partly to see whether space-grown crops will be safe to eat. After all his hard work, Steve doesn’t get to eat his lettuce – it has to be returned to Earth for testing. If the lettuce is proved safe, a second batch of lettuce can be grown and eaten later in the year. This would be the first mouthful of ‘homegrown’ food to be consumed in space, and NASA have produced a great video explaining the VEGGIE project:

Hot off the presses, I have a garden plan for 2017. It’s not set in stone – last year’s got changed around during the season a bit due to unexpected arrivals and departures – but I have a guideline for what I’m hoping to achieve in the garden next year. 2017 will be the first year in which I start the year with all 12 raised beds in the garden built and available for planting. We still need to finish the margins of the back garden, and there are plenty of plants in pots that need permanent homes. We planted the front garden this year, and there are only minor additions to make to that.

Remember those heady days at school, when you were faced with choosing your subject options, or which courses – at which higher education establishments – to apply for? There were a lot of things to consider, lots of differing advice on hand, and the prospect of making decisions that would affect (you were told) the rest of your life.

I’m not a politician. I’m not a diplomat. I’m not an expert on foreign policy. It’s hard to watch what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank with any equanimity; over 1300 Palestinians have been killed so far, including 315 children and and 166 women.

Sometime towards the end of last year, my friend Chris gave us a homegrown, blue pumpkin. I’m amazed to find that I don’t have a photo of it, but it was large, a fairly traditional pumpkin shape, and rather spiffingly blue. It sat on the dining room table for months, waiting for me to pluck up the courage to do something with it, which eventually happened last week.

Not long after I finished the first draft of my manuscript for The Alternative Kitchen Garden: An A to Z, I received an email from an editor at Black Dog Publishing, asking me whether I would like to contribute to a collaborative book with the working title “Growing Stuff”.

When I set about blogging The Peat-Free Diet it was an experiment, an journey into the unknown. My aim was to provide gardeners who want to garden without the use of peat with the information they need to do so, and the book evolved into a gardening primer that assumed peat was not on the menu. My love of science made more of an appearance than I had anticipated and there are plenty of big words to cope with, but it is my hope that they are presented in such a way that they are not hard to swallow.

Fresh from the success that allowed astronauts to eat lettuce grown in space in August, NASA’s Veggie plant-growing hardware on the International Space Station (ISS) has been reloaded with new plant pillows – this time sown with Zinnia ‘Profusion’.

Every month this year I’ve been trying to read one of the unread books on my shelf, and to then decide whether it gets to keep its spot or needs to be set free to find a new home. For June I chose Nature’s Wild Harvest by Eric Soothill and Michael J. Thomas. It was published in 1983, and has been sitting on my bookshelf for three years, since I bought it in our local secondhand bookshop (which only opens on Wednesdays).

BBC News has an interesting article this morning about scientists that have managed to grow marigolds in crushed moon rock. Apparently with the right combination of bacteria they can extract the nutrients they need from the rock. Which, in my mind, proves that organic gardening is the way to go – it’s the only method that preserves the soil ecosystem that plants obviously rely on to thrive.

Yesterday I read that Trump adviser Myron Ebell, a climate change denier, thinks that the green movement is the greatest threat to freedom.

Victoriana Nursery Gardens is a family-run business. They like to help out local schools where they can – gardening is a fun and healthy activity for kids, helping them to learn about the environment and encouraging them to eat their veggies. They’re sponsoring a school garden this year, providing everything the school needs to get their veg plot up and running.

At this time of year, many outdoor growers are winding down their plots. It’s time to clear away tender plants before the first frost, gather in the last of the harvest and make sure the hardy brassicas that can survive the winter weather are protected against marauding pigeons.

The Body Shop has announced that it is creating its first show garden at RHS Chelsea this year. It’s called The Lady Garden, designed to pay homage to its “founding feminist principles and activist roots”.

A lot of new gardening and plant books have landed on my mat this spring, and I need to up my book reviewing game! I like to do them justice, and spend some time reading them before I write a review, so that does create a bit of a backlog. Right at the time when the garden is demanding my attention. Anyway, the book that has found itself at the top of the list is one that really encompasses the gardening zeitgeist – The Community Gardening Handbook, by Ben Raskin. I looked him up, and he has impeccable credentials. He’s currently Head of Horticulture for the Soil Association; prior experiences include working for Garden Organic, running a walled garden and being a Horticultural Advisor for the Community Farm near Bristol.