Books Ideas, Tips & Guides

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).

WHY WAIT till year-end holiday shopping to offer a deal on books? In support of my supportive local bookstore, Oblong Books and Music in Millerton and Rhinebeck, N.Y., I fund a coupon every year for $10 off signed copies of my book “A Way to Garden,” which I totally redid in 2019 for an all-new 21st anniversary edition. Limited number; get them while they last! Use the coupon code: HOLIDAY23 at this link.

Seed trays, modules and pots

When plants are grown in the soil they can send out roots, make friends with fungi, and source their own nutrients from their surroundings. In gardens we help them do this by improving and feeding the soil, a topic I will be returning to in chapter four. But when they’re confined in containers plants have a limited volume of soil and therefore a limited amount of nutrients to tap into.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was wasting time in Borders yesterday, waiting for Pete. As such I hadn’t thought to look for the Bookazine on the shelves, and it was a bit of a surprise when I found it whilst browsing the gardening magazines.

My promo copies of the ‘Growing Vegetables is Fun’ bookazine arrived on Tuesday, and I’ve been having so much fun dispatching them to their new homes that I’ve only just now got round to blogging about it!

Potting on

I didn’t know whether the Bookazine was going to be available on Amazon – so you can imagine my delight this morning on finding out that it is!

Fresh from wondering where my writing career is going, I thought it might be fun to revisit some of the places it has been. In 2007 I was just starting out as a freelance writer, having been made redundant from my job as a techie. I’d been blogging for several years, and was slowly getting published (and paid!) online and off.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for some statistics about the average UK garden size, and I found some interesting ones. According to the 2015 media pack for the RHS The Garden magazine, a document that is aimed at attracting advertisers to the publication, the 380,000 RHS members the magazine is sent to have gardens that are 10 times larger than the UK average, covering over half an acre.

“Not only does Growing Vegetables is Fun! introduce children to a number of seeds and plants, but through containing a scrapbook and seed diary, also provides hours of educational fun!”

A burgeoning batch of seedlings is a thing of beauty, but it’s also a responsibility – each tiny plant is dependent on us for everything it needs. It grows rapidly, needing more space, water, light and nutrients. Although we lavish care on them in their early stages, each plant needs to be prepared for the challenges of the outside world. Allowing your seedlings to grow up is the key to growing them on.

Since Christmas I’ve been working on (and dropping occasional hints about) a big writing project. I can finally unveil it today – ‘Growing Vegetables is Fun’ is a Bookazine (a cross between a glossy magazine and a book) from Dennis Publishing.

Biochar

Transpiration and evaporation

Leaf mould

On 4th June 2012 I received an email from Niki Jabbour, a garden writer in Nova Scotia in Canada. She said that she was working on a book of edible garden plans and would like me to contribute a design for a composter’s garden. Niki continued on her quest to collect interesting plans for food gardens from writers and bloggers around the world, including Amy Stewart, Roger Doiron, Amanda Thomsen and our very own VP.

Why sow seeds indoors?

A few weeks ago, Brain remembered something. Brain wasn’t quite sure what it was remembering, but Brain was sure that – at some point during recent years – it had read something about an eco village in the heart of London. Brain wanted to know more; Brain was quite insistent. A search ensued, and it transpired that what Brain was remembering was Kew Bridge Eco Village.