Want to know what happens When 40 Cheap Flea Market Things Become Garden Decor? Well, keep reading to get some awesome ideas!
21.08.2023 - 12:01 / theunconventionalgardener.com / Emma Doughty
Climb the cast-iron steps to the roof garden at the Reading International Solidarity Centre (RISC) and you can almost forget that you’re in the heart of the city. Just 30 by 6 metres, the garden manages to fill every vista and the breeze through the trees drowns out all but the loudest city noises.
The cherry tree reaching for the sky, the mature fruit bushes and the exuberant range of groundcover plants all belie the fact that five years ago there was nothing here but a leaky roof. The garden contains more than 160 varieties of plant, and all of this has been achieved with only a foot of soil.
Each plant here was chosen either because it has multiple uses and illustrates our continuing reliance on plants, or because it has a compelling history.
In spring, the medlar tree is a magnet for insects with its large white blossoms. The fruits are left on the tree until October, then harvested and stored on straw to ‘blet’ (a more enticing word than ‘rot’!) until the softened flesh can be eaten with a spoon. There is no place in our commercial world for a fruit that needs so much processing, but the medlar was a popular tree in times gone by.
A shrub that was commercially grown in Victorian times, but has since fallen out of favour is the Chilean Guava. An excellent hedging plant with the bonus of tasty fruit in October, the Chilean Guava deserves a renaissance.
The crab apple ‘John Downie’ would also make an excellent addition to many gardens. A good pollinator for other apple species, it is useful in its own right – producing sweet crab apples that make delicious crab apple jelly.
Climbing plants cover all the vertical surfaces. The golden hop, known for its role in flavouring beer, has flowers that can be dried and used in pillows
Want to know what happens When 40 Cheap Flea Market Things Become Garden Decor? Well, keep reading to get some awesome ideas!
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How does a kitchen gardener choose what to grow? It’s about balancing quite a complex set of variables, which include the space and time available, the local climate and soil, the gardener’s skill level and what they like to eat. That last one is, itself, quite a complicated topic as culture plays a significant role. There are many thousands of edible plants on the planet; most people only eat a small number and grow fewer still.
Whether you made a New Year’s resolution to cut your carbon footprint, or the credit crunch is putting pressure on your food budget, now is the perfect time to try growing some of your own vegetables. You don’t need a lot of space, or expensive kit, to get started – and it doesn’t need to take up a lot of your time.
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.
Hot off the presses, I have a garden plan for 2017. It’s not set in stone – last year’s got changed around during the season a bit due to unexpected arrivals and departures – but I have a guideline for what I’m hoping to achieve in the garden next year. 2017 will be the first year in which I start the year with all 12 raised beds in the garden built and available for planting. We still need to finish the margins of the back garden, and there are plenty of plants in pots that need permanent homes. We planted the front garden this year, and there are only minor additions to make to that.
BBC News has an interesting article this morning about scientists that have managed to grow marigolds in crushed moon rock. Apparently with the right combination of bacteria they can extract the nutrients they need from the rock. Which, in my mind, proves that organic gardening is the way to go – it’s the only method that preserves the soil ecosystem that plants obviously rely on to thrive.
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 Svalbard Global Seed Vault (also called the Doomsday vault) in Norway was officially opened in February 2008. During the 3 months prior to the grand opening, engineers pumped refrigerated air into the vault to bring its temperature down from a chilly -5°C to an arctic -18°C.
Now that the days are longer and the first flush of spring is over, gardeners all over the country have a chance to step back from frantic seed sowing, transplanting, digging and weeding and carry on gardening at a slower pace over the summer.
If you’re currently tending lettuce plants, then you have something in common with the crew on board the International Space Station (ISS). They’re testing NASA’s new Vegetable Production System – affectionately known as ‘Veggie’. At 11.5 inches by 14.5 inches, Veggie is the largest plant growth chamber to have been blasted into space, and was developed by Orbital Technologies Corp.
It is one of the big ironies of gardening that the pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers we use to keep our lawns green make them one of the least ‘green’ areas of the garden. Many gardeners put a lot of effort into maintaining their lawns, and this diligence can be a real asset if you want to go green, because it requires a fair amount of work to keep your lawn in top-notch condition using organic methods. The good news is that a more relaxed approach rewards you with a beautiful, wildlife-friendly lawn.