Hard Water Hair Care

If you want to add plants that have unusual foliage, then you must try growing these Unique Indoor Plants that Look Like Hair Strands!

Even the most experienced vegetable growers sometimes struggle with spinach. It’s a very fussy plant, demanding the best possible conditions and even then running to seed at the drop of a hat. Forget about transplanting your spinach, or nursing it through a dry season, or just forget spinach entirely and try one of the other leafy plants that are just as good to eat and easier to grow.

Every month this year I’ve been trying to read one of the unread books on my shelf, and to then decide whether it gets to keep its spot or needs to be set free to find a new home. For June I chose Nature’s Wild Harvest by Eric Soothill and Michael J. Thomas. It was published in 1983, and has been sitting on my bookshelf for three years, since I bought it in our local secondhand bookshop (which only opens on Wednesdays).

Victoriana Nursery Gardens is a family-run business. They like to help out local schools where they can – gardening is a fun and healthy activity for kids, helping them to learn about the environment and encouraging them to eat their veggies. They’re sponsoring a school garden this year, providing everything the school needs to get their veg plot up and running.

Potting on

I don’t normally say much about plants that you can’t eat, but this week I was escorting some visitors* from the Hardy Orchid Society around the site at work so I took some photos

Transpiration and evaporation

A few weeks ago, Brain remembered something. Brain wasn’t quite sure what it was remembering, but Brain was sure that – at some point during recent years – it had read something about an eco village in the heart of London. Brain wanted to know more; Brain was quite insistent. A search ensued, and it transpired that what Brain was remembering was Kew Bridge Eco Village.

Today Blue Origin today successfully launched the New Shepard space vehicle’s Mission 9. The spacecraft is carrying payloads from private companies, universities and space agencies- including the world’s smelliest fruit.

You can tell it’s March, because the windowsills are full. We moved offices at work, and I had to bring some of my plants home, and now the tender, over-wintered perennials are fighting young seedlings for space. It’s time for some of the hardier specimens to brave the great outdoors, but after a winter indoors they’re a little soft. They need hardening off before they can make it on their own, and there’s still a distinct nip in the air (and a risk of frost for several more weeks).

There are plenty of signs of new life in the garden at the moment, with bulbs pushing up and buds fattening up. And the surface of the compost in my containers is turning green. This precocious leafy growth is courtesy of hairy bittercress, Cardamine hirsuta, a small and speedy weed that’s pretty much everywhere.

Header image: Richard Bord/Getty Images