Show the love & notice change

Three of the edible dahlias in flower today.

There might be a new chill in the air, but autumn is a beautiful time of year, when the leaves change color on the trees and the sun shines through a million little stained-glass windows. But once the leaves fall to the floor then it’s a different story. If they fall into ponds they can foul the water, on the lawn they can cause bleached patches and they make paths slippery in the winter. Gardeners everywhere spend the autumn raking up leaves to prevent these problems, but did you know that you can turn them into free soil improver for your garden, rather then sending them off with the rubbish?

It’s at this time of year, I think, that a polytunnel or greenhouse really comes in handy in the garden. Over the summer it may just be a tangle of tomato vines – productive, but a space that you really only go in to keep up with the watering chore, or to harvest ripe tomatoes. You know you’re going to come out with green stains on your clothes and hands that smell funny – tomatoes are like that. Those tomatoes will hang on longer into the autumn than you thought they would, and by the time you’ve cleared out the polytunnel the season will be so far advanced that it will be cold and dark and your crop of overwintering salads will barely be growing – just marking time until the days are long enough for them to actually grow.

This is a really fun video (12:24 long) from Adam Savage’s Tested series, in which a chef tries to help astronauts on the ISS eat nicer meals by combining foods they already have in stock. Chris Hadfield is their astronaut guinea pig, and demonstrates very effectively why it’s so hard to prepare meals in space!

Earth Day seems to be an auspicious day on which to being a new blog series. ‘The Hive’ is going to be a collection of positive news stories about the environment, with a solarpunk vibe – demonstrating that those of us who care about the environment are not alone, and that in fact there are legions of people around the world who are actively making a difference, and who share a positive vision of how the future could look, rather than the gloom and doom of a dystopia forced on us by a broken climate.

The Pantry contains information about some of the items that are useful for a peat-free gardener, and gardening terms you may come across on your peat-free travels.

This morning I have finished reading the Introduction of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, a call to arms to everyone on the planet to prevent climate change becoming a human-extinction event. A week ago, the Guardian published an article suggesting that using the narrative of war for environmental purposes may not be a good idea. The author thought that it may be deepening the divisions between us, making it harder to get our message across. It didn’t suggest any alternative wordings, except:

We’ve had the Hydroponicum for over a year now. It has kept us supplied with salads and stir-fry veg, and I’ve grown one or two more experimental crops as well. Not everything I have tried has been successful. My spinach bolted (I’m not sure why, and I haven’t tried again yet). Alliums don’t seem to like germinating in the hydroponic seedling tray, and coriander downright refused. Coriander seedlings will grow hydroponically, though, so I may try allium transplants at some point.

This is our garden plan for the front garden and the ‘back’ garden (which is at the side of the house, strictly speaking). The red areas are paving – a garden path, a wide patio and enough hardstanding to go underneath two sheds (one of which may turn out to be a greenhouse).

We see a lot of articles about how you can save money by growing your own food. And it’s true, it’s absolutely true, you can. A packet of salad seeds is roughly the same price as a bagged salad, and will keep you in salads all summer (and probably beyond). You can save money by picking up seeds at seed swaps, saving your own seeds, sharing with friends and neighbours, making your own compost and plant feeds and recycling household items into pots, etc. But there’s an elephant in the room – a factor that’s often left out.

The problem with elections, with votes of any kind, is that the process is inherently divisive. Whatever the result, there are winners and losers. The majority picks the direction we will take, for a little while, and everyone else just has to make the best of it. Given human nature, it seems like there’s a constant battle between tradition and progress. We’re all voting for a better world, we just disagree about what that means.

I have been out in the garden a bit more over the last week. Rather than wait until later in the day, when I generally don’t feel like going outside, I have started going out to do something first thing in the morning, before I sit down at my desk. The weather is very mild, and a lot of days have been dank and overcast, but on the brighter mornings I can happily potter about for an hour before coming inside. It’s quite often the nicest part of the day, weather-wise.