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21.08.2023 - 11:51 / theunconventionalgardener.com / Emma Doughty
I’ve got a little behind in my project to read one of the unread books on my shelf each month. Or, at least, I’ve got a little bit behind in publishing the results! My book for March was Just Vegetating: A Memoir, by Joy Larkcom. I eagerly awaited its publication in 2012, and started reading it as soon as it arrived. And then I stopped, part way through, because it didn’t live up to my expectations. I was expecting a memoir, telling the story of Larkcom’s life in plants. Just Vegetating does do that, but it does it through the medium of articles she has published through the years. It’s not a coherent narrative.
Larkcom feels (with good reason) that a lot of her articles deserved to be preserved in this collection for posterity, rather than disappearing from the world forever as the magazines they were published turn yellow and are recycled.
Approaching the book with a different set of expectations this time, I found that I enjoyed most of it. There are reminiscences about Larkcom’s career and the books that she has published.
My favourite part is chapter two, articles about ‘The Grand Vegetable Tour’, when Joy, her husband Don and their two children set off to explore Europe for a year, in a caravan. They visited several countries – including some that were still firmly Communist – looking into what people were growing in their vegetables gardens, and how. There were planned visits to research establishments, together with less formal encounters with farmers and amateur gardeners.
The result of that year was the ‘discovery’ of a wide range of salad plants, which Larkcom effectively introduced into the UK, selling ‘saladini’ salad mixes and breaking us away from the traditional English salad of lettuce, cucumber and tomato.
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The garden and I have not spent much time together this summer. I’ve been busy… there was weather… there have been too many days when I didn’t feel like going outside. Since the courgette and summer squash started fruiting, I’ve been a bit afraid to go outside in case there’s a mountain of fruit to pick. But the light was nice this morning, so I ventured outside to take a few photos (and the squashes seem to be slowing down, so it’s safe).
An ideal seed compost is able to retain water, whilst at the same time letting excess water drain away to provide an environment that is damp but not waterlogged. It allows penetration of plant roots and is able to anchor plants, but has space for air. Its texture is consistent, and it is free from pests, diseases and weeds that would compete with the seedlings. As we have seen, it doesn’t need to contain many nutrients if seedlings are going to be pricked out; seedlings growing in modules will either need enough nutrients in the compost to support them through their first weeks of life, or suitable supplementary feeding.
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).
The Body Shop has announced that it is creating its first show garden at RHS Chelsea this year. It’s called The Lady Garden, designed to pay homage to its “founding feminist principles and activist roots”.
The English obsession with grass came into being in the 17th century, when the close cut lawn was a status symbol of the rich. Only they could afford to take land out of production for purely aesthetic purposes, and maintaining a lawn before the invention of the mower was a highly skilled and labour-intensive process. The middle classes started growing lawns from the 1860s onwards, and the Victorian popularity for outdoor sports led to their proliferation. Grass species from the Old World were taken to America during this period, and the lawn took there over in the early 20th century. In 2005, NASA published research suggesting that lawns (including residential and commercial lawns and golf courses) were the single largest irrigated ‘crop’ in America, covering about 128,000 square kilometres. In 2013 there were upwards of 15 millions lawns in Britain, costing us £54 million in fertilisers and £127 million on lawn mowers.
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.
One of the big differences between now and the time before gardeners relied so much on peat-based composts is the rise in container growing. An army of modern amateur gardeners has to put up with small gardens, and possibly with no soil at all. Growing plants in containers allows us to garden wherever we like, and even to grow plants that would not thrive in our soil. Some plants are grown in containers to keep them under control; others so that they can be moved indoors in winter to ensure their survival.
Buying plants
A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for some statistics about the average UK garden size, and I found some interesting ones. According to the 2015 media pack for the RHS The Garden magazine, a document that is aimed at attracting advertisers to the publication, the 380,000 RHS members the magazine is sent to have gardens that are 10 times larger than the UK average, covering over half an acre.
It’s nearly two years since I started the Alternative Kitchen Garden Seed Appeal, with the aim of raising enough money to help the Millennium Seed Bank save a species. We still have a way to go to reach the target ;(
Move over, Mark Watney, there’s a new space botanist heading for Mars! Ryan and I have just finished watching the new Netflix series Away, which follows (over 10 episodes) the quest of five international astronauts to be the first people to set foot on the red planet.