Greens in Gaza

Header image by Oleksandr Pidvalnyi from Pixabay

Green fruits can have a range of flavors, from sweet and juicy to tart and sour, and are rich in nutrients such as fiber, vitamin C, and antioxidants. Here are the Best Green Fruits with Pictures so you can eat and grow a variety of green delicacies.

Green is officially the new black, and pistachio green is the latest fresh shade to win over the internet (and our hearts). This playful hue fits right in with the increasing popularity of other pastel shades in home decor including lavender, light pink, light yellow, and more. 

Growing tea at home can be rewarding and fun. The best part is, you can also grow it in your balcony or patio! There’s nothing like watching a tea plant grow and sipping a piping hot tea made from the homegrown, organic tea leaves! Here’s everything about Growing Tea Leaves at Home!

Spring is a busy time for gardeners, with seeds to be sown, digging and planting to be done, and the first weeds making an appearance. Green manures may not be the first things that you think of to sow, but there are many green manures that are ideal for spring sowing and bring many benefits to your garden.

Lauren Alex O’ Hagan, Cardiff University

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.

At the beginning of the month I did a series of posts for National Gardening Week, exploring some of the early spring harvests from the garden. The season has moved on since then, and as the asparagus plants are still young I have stopped harvesting them to let them grow. The purple sprouting broccoli harvest was also coming to a natural end, and so I removed the plants to put in a second bed of potatoes, and to use one bed as a temporary space for hardening off my summer squash, sweet peppers, sweetcorn and new PSB plants.

Last year I thought I’d planted climbing French beans in the garden, and was later disappointed to find out that I’d sown a dwarf variety! This year I rectified that issue and sowed two different climbing beans – Blauhilde and Helda at the beginning of June. I sowed some indoors and some directly into one of the raised beds, where my intention was that they would climb the sweetcorn (and be 2 of the 3 Sisters). That hasn’t worked out – for some reason the sweetcorn has been a complete failure, with most stems barely reach two feet tall. In the end I put up tripods for the beans instead, and they’re really getting going now.

In 2020, Morgan Irons made space exploration history when she sent the first Earth soils to the International Space Station. Morgan joins Emma the Space Gardener to talk about the importance of soil structure on Earth, why she sent soil into space, and how we might develop living soils on Mars.

In this latest episode, Emma the Space Gardener talks with Dr Christina Johnson, who works with microgreens at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. She explains the benefits and challenges of growing microgreens in orbit, and what it’s going to take to get them onto astronaut menus.

During Lockdown I have done some sprouting – growing corn shoots, beansprouts, wheatgrass and pea shoots on the windowsill to use as salad and stir fry ingredients. We didn’t really rate the corn shoots and wheatgrass (and the leftover seeds are destined to go through the mill!), but the beansprouts and pea shoots are old favourites we sprout from time to time. The benefits of sprouts are that you get a large amount of nutrition from a small space, in a small amount of time.