Can you survive eating nothing but potatoes?

Check out the list of 12 Edibles You Can Grow in Water with ease! You don’t need a garden to grow these–A small windowsill, balcony, or tabletop is sufficient to have a fresh supply right at your fingertips!

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Border plants play an essential role in unifying gardens. They are used to delineate space and accentuate the lines of a landscape, including planting beds and pathways. Border plants bridge the gap between the floor plane of a garden and its plantings, creating a more finished look. The best border flowers for your garden include annuals and perennials that complement their surroundings while guiding the eye through the landscape.

Header image: Suited up to simulate the conditions of working outside on Mars. Jonathan Clarke (the author, left) with visiting engineer Michael Curtis-Rouse, from UK Space Agency (right). Jonathan Clarke personal collection, Author provided.

Two researchers from the University of Central Florida – Kevin Cannon and Daniel Britt – have been looking at how a Martian colony might feed itself. Although NASA has been growing some food on the International Space Station, its goal is to supplement the vitamins and minerals in a standard astronaut diet and to improve crew morale – it’s not about making a space station, or a colony, self-sufficient.

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.

A few days ago I received an email, asking me the following question:

Spend many months attached to the ISS and see how well you grow. [Image credit: NASA, CC BY]

If October starts warm it can provide a nice breathing space, to catch up late harvesting, saving seeds and generally getting the garden ready for the winter. It’s also the time to cover any bare soil, with mulches if necessary, to protect your soil structure from bad weather, and to ensure any tall plants (mainly brassicas) are staked against ‘wind rock’, which can lift their roots out of the soil. You may also need to net brassicas to stop them being munched by marauding pigeons.

Ah, April, a month that gives us leaves on the trees, blossom in the hedgerow, and a headache with its changeable weather. We gardeners would love April to be a season of sunshine and soft showers. But, instead, we need to plan for sleet and hail, or even snow. As the effects of climate change are felt more widely, we may even need to forego thinking of April as a rainy month at all, and just an extension of dry winters. It’s also at least a month before we can be relatively sure that there will be no more frosts.

You’ll hear weather forecasters referring to spring from the beginning of March, as meteorological spring starts on March 1st. The spring equinox, when the days start to get longer than the nights, is around 20th March. Actual signs of spring – warmer days and plant growth – may take longer to appear!

Food waste is a hot topic at the moment, and deservedly so – the environmental damage done by producing 10 million tonnes of uneaten food each year in the UK is impressive, associated with around 20 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. The monetary value of that food is over £17 billion a year, and 60% of the waste could have been avoided.