Don’t struggle with spinach – grow chard

It’s Sunday morning, and Ryan is still asleep, and I got a bit bored and started playing around with one of those “blog title generators”. (For those of you for whom this is a new concept, they generate click-bait style headlines for a topic you give them.)

As its Valentine’s Day today, and the whole world is in the mood for love, I thought I would talk about one of the most enduring and productive relationships a gardener can have. Although plants (and even gardens) may come and go, if you invest in good tools and look after them properly they will be with you throughout your gardening life.

Fungus gnats are tiny little black flies that love living in damp organic matter (i.e. compost). They thrive in warmer weather, so at this time of year – with all the seedlings indoors – the house is full of them.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores gardening on Earth… and beyond! In this episode, Emma recaps the latest space plant news and then talks about some of the seeds with space stories.

Now that the arbor is up, I need to think about surrounding it with plants. I have climbing achocha and mashua which might (hopefully) provide some shade. Once you’ve eliminated the possibility of heat stroke, you’re left with that other perennial summer problem – pests. How do you stop bugs great and small from bugging you, or committing suicide in the jug of Pimms?

What happened to my allotment is a reminder that it’s not just animal and insect pests we have to worry about in our gardens – humans can be a problem as well. Bob Flowerdew refers to such anti-social individuals as ‘two-legged rats’.

I’ve always been fascinated by the Home Front, the enlistment of every man, woman and child in the British Isles in an effort to beat Hitler through food rationing, making do and mending, salvage, growing your own and basically making the most of scarce resources with elbow grease and endless ingenuity. I’ve just read Eggs or Anarchy by William Sitwell, a biography of Lord Woolton who was the Minister of Food for much of the Second World War. He was in charge of ensuring everyone got fed, and improving nutritional standards was one of his aims. It’s unusual to get the ‘behind-the-scenes’ view, and the political situation wasn’t as united as may appear from our rose-tinted histories.