Naked Gardening Day – health and safety tips

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.

What has changed in the garden since last week? Well, on Wednesday I got tired of waiting (for cold, windy days and then scorching hot days to pass) and planted out 3 of my squash plants. One Georgia Candy Rooster went out into the ‘allotment’ in the Sunset Strip, and two Rugosa fruilana courgettes went into a raised bed in the main garden. Each one was planted out into a mound of fresh compost, and protected with a plastic cloche and eco-friendly slug pellets. I replaced the black plastic mulch on the beds to give them extra warm and moist soil.

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.

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.

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.

Organic gardeners aim to feed the soil, and let a healthy soil take care of the plants. The best way to add fertility to your garden is to make compost, but in most gardens there is never enough compost to go around and there will be times when supplementary feeding is needed.

There’s nothing quite as British as a nice cup of tea, and sitting down for a good cuppa can certainly brighten up your day. A tea bush is unlikely to thrive in most UK gardens (although there are a couple of tea plantations) because of the climate, but there are plenty of herbs that are easy to grow and make a refreshing brew. They’ll even grow well in containers – so they make ideal plants for a windowbox or a patio. Having them close at hand means you can harvest leaves as and when you need them.

In Jade Pearls and Alien Eyeballs I talk about the journeys plants have made with us – crisscrossing the globe and leaving Earth entirely for missions in space.

Gardeners are privileged to witness miracles on a daily basis – seeds germinating, buds unfurling and bees pollinating flowers. No less miraculous are the quiet miracles that take place in the compost heap, where tiny organisms turn waste products into compost, allowing the cycle of life to begin again.

On 4th June 2012 I received an email from Niki Jabbour, a garden writer in Nova Scotia in Canada. She said that she was working on a book of edible garden plans and would like me to contribute a design for a composter’s garden. Niki continued on her quest to collect interesting plans for food gardens from writers and bloggers around the world, including Amy Stewart, Roger Doiron, Amanda Thomsen and our very own VP.