Emma Doughty

This is a really fun video (12:24 long) from Adam Savage’s Tested series, in which a chef tries to help astronauts on the ISS eat nicer meals by combining foods they already have in stock. Chris Hadfield is their astronaut guinea pig, and demonstrates very effectively why it’s so hard to prepare meals in space!

Most vegetable gardeners lucky enough to have the use of a greenhouse use it for raising seeds early in the year, extending the season into the autumn, and of course growing tomatoes and cucumbers in the height of the summer. If you’d like to find something a little more exciting when you open the greenhouse door, these unusual crops will appreciate the extra heat.

The UK has been battered by storms over the last few weeks, and the weather has been very mild – if not warm – for the time of year. It seems ludicrous to deny the fact that the climate is changing, and that this wilder weather is the result. We’ve been lucky, but gardeners elsewhere in the country have suffered storm damage and flooding. The long-range forecast threatened a cold, hard winter for the UK, but there’s no indication of when, or if, that will arrive.

Earth Day seems to be an auspicious day on which to being a new blog series. ‘The Hive’ is going to be a collection of positive news stories about the environment, with a solarpunk vibe – demonstrating that those of us who care about the environment are not alone, and that in fact there are legions of people around the world who are actively making a difference, and who share a positive vision of how the future could look, rather than the gloom and doom of a dystopia forced on us by a broken climate.

At the beginning of 2009 I went a bit nuts and ordered myself two Webb’s Prize Cobnuts from Victoriana Nursery Gardens (a cultivated variety of the hazelnut, Corylus avellana). They have lived in large containers ever since, and have suffered somewhat in the various moves and periods of neglect they have been subjected to in the gardening interregnum.

One of the hottest gardening topics is how to turn your garden into a wildlife haven. Gardens are seen as a habitat of last resort for many hard-pressed species. Wildlife friendly products abound and you can buy homes suitable for any creature.

Without pollen, the world would be a pretty drab place. Pollen is the male part of the reproductive system for flowering plants, as well as a source of food for bees and other beneficial insects. And yet, as soon as the sun comes out and the plants start flowering, it causes millions of people in the UK to stay indoors to minimise their hayfever symptoms.

I haven’t been well this summer. An unbearable situation at work went on for far too long, and pretty much brought me to my knees. I can’t remember ever having felt so exhausted, literally dragging myself out of bed every morning. Ryan was a big help in the garden, and is the only reason we have made as much progress as we have. We’re stalled at the moment, waiting for the sheds to be delivered, but the plants in the finished half are all doing very well.

Although August is the height of the summer, and it’s worthwhile taking time to stop and smell the roses, the vegetable gardener also has to be aware that autumn is just around the corner. That doesn’t have to be a depressing thought! It just means you need to harvest any crops that won’t survive the first frosts, and that you may want to preserve some so that you can have a homegrown taste of summer during the winter months. You should have some new crops on the way to look forward to, and be thinking about potting up herbs to bring under cover for the winter.

By the end of last month, the paving was finished and I had planted my three front garden planters with peppers, bergamot and salvias for the summer. They’re coming along very nicely, and in fact the first cool chilli is appearing on one of my Fooled You plants.

As anyone who is anyone knows, the BFG (Big Friendly Giant) eats snozzcumbers. Because he refuses to eat people (human beans) he has to eat lots and lots of snozzcumbers. The snozzcumber is a giant vegetable, watery and bitter, but the BFG has a tasty drink called frobscottle to help wash them down.

I love tendrils, I find them beautiful and utterly fascinating. And occasionally irritating, when they tangle and cling to things they shouldn’t. Anyway, in previous years I have spent a far amount of time looking at tendrils, achocha tendrils in particular, like the one above.

Organic gardeners aim to feed the soil, and let a healthy soil take care of the plants. The best way to add fertility to your garden is to make compost, but in most gardens there is never enough compost to go around and there will be times when supplementary feeding is needed.

Today marks the 45th anniversary of the Apollo Moon landing, which seems like a good time to take the next step on our space adventure. You choose the topic of bees in space, so here we go!

The Pantry contains information about some of the items that are useful for a peat-free gardener, and gardening terms you may come across on your peat-free travels.

My plants must know, better than I do, that winter is on its way. Yet they’re showing little signs of giving up hope yet. The edible dahlias – which in theory I should be lifting this month – are still unbelievably floriferous. I took this picture on yesterday morning, after chopping back the floppiest ones yesterday. Ryan took the ‘discarded’ flowers round to his mum.

It has been a difficult spring for gardeners, and their plants, here in the UK. If you’re lucky enough to have the space (and funds) for a greenhouse or a polytunnel then that goes a long way to protecting plants from the vagaries of the weather, but for everyone else cloches are a good solution to the problems it brings.

I’m sure my parents didn’t know when they named me (and still don’t!), but Emma is the Tibetan word for a spice – the dried berries of Zanthoxylum species, more commonly known in the UK as Sichuan pepper. I really must replace the two species I had, which didn’t survive life on the allotment.

One of the big differences between now and the time before gardeners relied so much on peat-based composts is the rise in container growing. An army of modern amateur gardeners has to put up with small gardens, and possibly with no soil at all. Growing plants in containers allows us to garden wherever we like, and even to grow plants that would not thrive in our soil. Some plants are grown in containers to keep them under control; others so that they can be moved indoors in winter to ensure their survival.

A quick and easy potato salad that makes a lovely side dish for a BBQ.

Buying plants

I’d like to write more books. I enjoy writing and I have ideas and information that I want so share, and packaging it up neatly in a coherent volume is a bit different to just churning out blog posts. For one thing, it’s more permanent; I’ve sent copies of Jade Pearls and Alien Eyeballs to the British Library and to the five legal deposit libraries (Bodleian Library Oxford University, The Cambridge University Library, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales and Trinity College Dublin), and knowing that they have been preserved for posterity is not a small thing.

I’m not the kind of person who creates a meal plan and shopping list every week, and then sticks to it religiously. I do like to have some idea of what we’re going to eat, however, as this cuts down on the number of nights when there’s nothing for dinner. Our current methodology is to fill the fridge and the freezer with things we eat regularly, and to eat them in rotation to avoid food waste. It’s a mix-and-match, ‘that will go nicely with this’ kind of thing, rarely looking more than 2 days ahead unless there’s a special event happening. It works for us, and we have very little waste.

There are no diseases that particularly single out plants grown in containers, with the exception of damping off – the fungal disease that affects seedlings, which we met in Chapter 2. As long as plants are kept well-watered and suitably fed (i.e. not stressed) then container culture should be very healthy, particularly if your potting compost was a sterile mix.

It’s not often you get to hunt for unusual wildlife in the Cotswolds, but over the weekend Ryan and I went on a dinosaur hunt! We popped over to Bourton-on-the-water to take a Jurassic Journey at Birdland, where they have upgraded their wildlife walk to include lifesize models of dinosaurs along the trail. The point, of course, is that modern birds are descended from dinosaurs, and if you take a close enough look at our feathered friends you can see the similarities (I always thought they were pretty obvious in our chickens….).

All being well, the contractor will arrive to start paving the garden on Thursday. It has been a long time coming, and it’s only the first stage in getting the garden ready to be planted. Once the paving is complete then we still need to build raised beds and fill them, which will probably involve a bit of levelling here and there. When we investigated the cost of building the E-shaped raised beds in the original plan, we found that they would be considerably more than we wanted to spend. Ryan has come up with a cheaper alternative, which should look just as good, and even gives me more planting space! He has created a 3D render, printed it out and stuck it to the patio doors to give me something to look at:

Ericaceous compost

Sowing seeds is often the first gardening task of the year, and a favoured way of propagating plants because it’s very cost-effective. It’s the first stage in many plants’ lives and seeds want to grow, it’s their reason for being. And yet some gardeners are intimidated by seed sowing and avoid it where possible and others struggle to grow plants from seed successfully in peat-free compost. So I’m going to begin The Peat-Free Diet with a look at what happens when we sow seeds, the best way to go about it, and how to achieve a good success rate.

This morning I have finished reading the Introduction of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, a call to arms to everyone on the planet to prevent climate change becoming a human-extinction event. A week ago, the Guardian published an article suggesting that using the narrative of war for environmental purposes may not be a good idea. The author thought that it may be deepening the divisions between us, making it harder to get our message across. It didn’t suggest any alternative wordings, except:

Header image: Tokyo Bekana Chinese cabbage leaves prior to harvest aboard the International Space Station. Photo credit: NASA

Things have been a bit quiet here of late, as we have been working on the garden rather than enjoying it – it was time for the new sheds (yes, there’s more than one!) to arrive, and they had to be painted and assembled. Now that they’re here, we have more storage space, which meant we could order a new toy, something I’d been longing for since we saw one at the Eden Project in spring.

Right now, 200 miles above your head, chilli peppers are growing on the International Space Station (ISS).

Ryan and I celebrated the start of National BBQ week (running from 25th – 31st May this year) with a slightly over-ambitious outdoor cooking session. More about that later, but for now I’m going to skip ahead to the end, because dessert was the best bit.

Gayla Trail over at You Grow Girl has been blogging recently about an illness that has kept her from gardening this year, and how that makes her feel, and as a result she has rebooted her Grow Write Guild series of writing prompts by asking gardeners to write about a time when they were unable to garden, for whatever reason.

I have always been an organic gardener, so the fact that my hydroponic kits are currently fuelled by chemical fertilisers irks me somewhat. The main problems with chemical fertilisers (from my perspective) are the pollution they cause once they’re out in the world, and the energy required to make them. While the former is not an issue in my indoor garden (I give any wastewater to houseplants or plants in the garden), the latter most certainly is. So I would like to move to a more sustainable fertiliser solution in the future.

I have resigned from my job, in the hope of a happier life, and the looming period of self-imposed austerity has brought out my Inner Womble