Header image: Mizuna lettuce growing aboard the International Space Station before being harvested and frozen for return to Earth. Image credit: NASA
21.08.2023 - 12:03 / theunconventionalgardener.com / Emma Doughty
Marigolds aren’t really in fashion at the moment – their simple flowers and brash colours don’t seem to fit in modern gardens. But they’re worth growing in a kitchen garden for two reasons. The first is that these simple flowers are the sort that bees and other beneficial insects love. And the second reason is that marigolds are known to be pest-repelling plants – good companions.
After an initial error with marigolds towering over the peppers they were supposed to be protecting, I stick to dwarf varieties. I grow them in window boxes, and in amongst my tomatoes – they’re supposed to deter whitefly. It might not be scientific, but I’ve never had whitefly on my tomatoes!
Marigolds have nice big seeds that make them easy to sow. Sow them indoors early in spring for transplating outside later, or directly where you want them to flower from mid-spring onwards. They don’t need any special soil, aren’t fussy about position and don’t need much feeding, but will bloom throughout the summer.
Remove the faded blooms (dead head) to keep them flowering; towards the end of the summer you can leave some to set seed. You will get a lot of seed, and it’s easily detached from the flower heads and collected and stored. These flowers are half-hardy annuals, so at the end of the summer you’ll need to pull them up – but you’ll never need to buy marigold seed again!
This is one of a series of articles on gardening basics, which cover everything from soil preparation to planting and harvesting. If you’d like to stick to the topic of marigolds, you can also read about their role in companion planting, how to repel pests with plants and even the role marigolds have played in growing plants on the Moon. They’re even featured under M in The
Header image: Mizuna lettuce growing aboard the International Space Station before being harvested and frozen for return to Earth. Image credit: NASA
Yesterday I read that Trump adviser Myron Ebell, a climate change denier, thinks that the green movement is the greatest threat to freedom.
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.
Buying plants
Right now, 200 miles above your head, chilli peppers are growing on the International Space Station (ISS).
“Not only does Growing Vegetables is Fun! introduce children to a number of seeds and plants, but through containing a scrapbook and seed diary, also provides hours of educational fun!”
Good King Henry is a perennial herb in the family Chenopodiaceae – the same plant family as some familiar vegetables (including beetroot and chard), some familiar weeds (e.g. Fat Hen) and some other useful but more unusual plants – including quinoa and tree spinach.
Nasturtiums make a great addition to a kitchen garden, for several reasons. Firstly, they come in lots of hot, bright colours, and really cheer the place up when there’s a lot of green around. Secondly, they’re edible – you can add the leaves and flowers to salads (they have a peppery flavour, best used in moderation) and if you pickle the seeds you have a good substitute for capers. Thirdly, they act as sacrificial plants, drawing blackfly and other pests away from more valuable crops. And finally, they’re really easy to grow, to the point where after the first year they’re likely to grow themselves.
If you’ve just decided to grow your own vegetables to save money, then where do you start? A visit to the garden centre, or a quick flick through the seed catalogue, can be daunting – especially if you don’t have a lot of space for your vegetable patch. What’s going to give you the most bang for your buck?
Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores gardening on Earth… and beyond! In this episode, Emma recaps important spacecraft Arrivals and Departures and learns about growing nutrients and medicines in space. There’s a new plant experiment running on the International Space Station, and exciting news from ESA.
The international children’s charity World Vision are currently helping communities in the Bolivian Andes to grow vegetables against the odds – fresh food would otherwise be in short supply and children in these communities suffer from malnutrition.
Is growing veg easy? There’s a big trend in the gardening media at the moment promoting growing your own vegetables as easy, or simple. The prevailing wisdom seems to be that, unless you promote something as ‘easy’, people aren’t going to try it. There’s a flip-side to that, of course; if you say something is easy and people try and fail, then they’re not going to want to try it again. Or maybe it’s just because the people writing the articles have been gardening for so long that everything they do has become routine.