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21.08.2023 - 11:54 / theunconventionalgardener.com / Emma Doughty
If there is one thing I am truly grateful for during this extraordinary time, it’s my garden. Not only is it producing harvests for us and reducing our reliance on our over-stressed food system, but it’s somewhere we can step outside and be surrounded by nature, without having to worry about social distancing.
As a lifelong organic gardener, I am used to the wide variety of other creatures that call my garden home. They are welcome (for the most part!) and when I see something that I don’t recognise I try and find out what it is, rather than instantly removing it.
These days we’re all aware that bees are in trouble, and that we need to be gardening with bees in mind. We might buy a bee-friendly seed mix, or plants labelled as suitable for pollinators, or put up a bee box. Jean Vernon has taken bees to heart, and her latest book – The Secret Lives of Garden Bees* – is a love letter to these delightful creatures.
“I was and still am fascinated by plants and went on to study botany at university. Many plants can’t exist without bees and the two have coevolved together – perhaps that’s the best way to describe how I got where I am today. As a botanist, a love of plants come with bees and all the othe pollinators involved in their lifecycle.”
If you’re looking for a new pursuit to help pass the time during Lockdown, then Jean’s book could provide the key. What could be more fascinating than learning about the bees that visit your garden? You may be able to tell a honeybee from a bumble, but did you know that there are about 276 species of bee in the UK? And that’s despite the fact that we’ve lost 97% of our wildflower meadows since the Second World War.
Only one of those species produces honey, and only 25 or so are bumblebees.
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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.
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).
Plastic bottles are everywhere these days, even floating around in the oceans. Fortunately for the environment, recycling facilities are improving (here in the UK at least) but a lot of plastic bottles still end up in landfill, where they just don’t break down. If you would like to give your plastic bottles a new lease of life once they’re empty, and save money too, then try recycling them into something useful for the garden.
The English obsession with grass came into being in the 17th century, when the close cut lawn was a status symbol of the rich. Only they could afford to take land out of production for purely aesthetic purposes, and maintaining a lawn before the invention of the mower was a highly skilled and labour-intensive process. The middle classes started growing lawns from the 1860s onwards, and the Victorian popularity for outdoor sports led to their proliferation. Grass species from the Old World were taken to America during this period, and the lawn took there over in the early 20th century. In 2005, NASA published research suggesting that lawns (including residential and commercial lawns and golf courses) were the single largest irrigated ‘crop’ in America, covering about 128,000 square kilometres. In 2013 there were upwards of 15 millions lawns in Britain, costing us £54 million in fertilisers and £127 million on lawn mowers.
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
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.
There’s nothing quite as British as a nice cup of tea, and sitting down for a good cuppa can certainly brighten up your day. A tea bush is unlikely to thrive in most UK gardens (although there are a couple of tea plantations) because of the climate, but there are plenty of herbs that are easy to grow and make a refreshing brew. They’ll even grow well in containers – so they make ideal plants for a windowbox or a patio. Having them close at hand means you can harvest leaves as and when you need them.
It’s nearly two years since I started the Alternative Kitchen Garden Seed Appeal, with the aim of raising enough money to help the Millennium Seed Bank save a species. We still have a way to go to reach the target ;(
Move over, Mark Watney, there’s a new space botanist heading for Mars! Ryan and I have just finished watching the new Netflix series Away, which follows (over 10 episodes) the quest of five international astronauts to be the first people to set foot on the red planet.
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