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21.08.2023 - 12:03 / theunconventionalgardener.com / Emma Doughty
Yesterday I read that Trump adviser Myron Ebell, a climate change denier, thinks that the green movement is the greatest threat to freedom.
He might be right. The green movement might be the greatest threat to his freedom to exploit and pollute the planet and foist the consequences off on other people. Liberals may be the greatest threat to his freedom to cut welfare, remove the minimum wage and then accuse people who can’t make ends meet of not trying hard enough. (Because, obviously, he worked hard for everything he has.)
(He also referred to scientists as the expertariat, a term of derision that (as far as I can tell from a quick Google) was coined by the alt-right to suggest that scientists are a body of unelected officials who are trying to rule the world. And, of course, the ‘people’ have currently fallen out of love with ‘experts’. It seems to me, with rising voter apathy and the election of the first American president with neither political nor military experience that they’ve fallen out of love with politicians, too.)
The Right are right – this is about freedom.
It’s about the freedom:
I want:
What can we do? I firmly believe that growing some of your own food, even if it’s just herbs on the windowsill, is a powerful political act of defiance. I was writing about leeks yesterday (for the second volume of the Small Harvest Handbook), and it made me smile, because plants are just so wonderful. That happy lasted for hours
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Creeping Thyme is a beautiful plant that adaptable to grow in various conditions. It is easy to look after and also grows stunning flowers!
There can’t be a more iconic symbol of Halloween than a witch riding a broomstick. In olden times it wouldn’t have been a problem to wander out into the woodland and cut a stout pole and then find sticks to make the sweeping end, and then you’d have yourself a fine broom, or besom. I suspect most of them were used for more mundane purposes – they are jolly useful things to have to hand.
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.
Wimbledon fortnight coincides with the height of the strawberry season here in the UK and the humble strawberry becomes world-famous as tennis spectators tuck into strawberries and cream in front of the cameras. This year it even looks like they’ll be able to leave their raincoats at home!
I’m not a chemist, but I do find plant chemistry (and the links and patterns between different plants) to be a fascinating topic. Fortunately there are chemists out there who can bring these to our attention, and Compound Interest includes some great plant-related infographics amongst a wider spread of chemical topics.
Like new potatoes and asparagus, giant American marshmallows are clearly in season at the moment – they’re appearing in all the shops. We spotted them in our local garden centre (!) and, fresh from the success of our inaugural marshmallow toasting, we thought we’d set ourselves a challenge and see whether we could repeat it with something considerably larger.
While we’re waiting for Tim Peake to blast off to the International Space Station (ISS) to begin his Principia mission, I thought it might be fun to have a look at the first Briton in space – Helen Sharman, who was also the first woman to visit the Mir space station, in 1991.
Part of my dissertation involved immersing myself in the history of plants that have been adopted as crops outside their country of origin – novel crops, as I referred to them. It’s a long history, with recorded attempts to move plants from one place to another going back as far as the ancient Egyptians. Even before that, probably for as long as we’ve been human, we have been moving plants around, whether by accident or design.
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.
COP21, the United Nations conference on climate change, has ended with a ‘landmark’ agreement that climate change is something we all need to tackle together. Last week I was talking about what gardeners can do to reduce their carbon footprint, and a lot of it is about being thrifty with resources – something that tends to come naturally to us! Over the weekend, Ryan has done his bit by recycling plastic plant pots in my direction. He came across a newly landscaped commercial building, where the unwanted plant pots were being discarded.
Fifty years ago today, at 13:32 UTC, Apollo 11 launched on its mission to drop off the first humans to set foot on the Moon. It’s something that hasn’t been achieved again since the Apollo program ended, although interest in going back to the Moon has been rekindled somewhat of late. While we remember it as one of the crowning moments of the 20th century, it’s worth noting that the Apollo program wasn’t without its critics. In an interview in 1961, Norbert Wiener, a professor and legendary mathematician at MIT, dismissed the Apollo program as a “moondoggle”!