Succulents are some of the coolest plants you can have in your collection! Keeping that in mind, we bring you a simple hack to cultivate them quickly! Do This Simple Trick to Grow More Succulents in No Time!
21.08.2023 - 11:57 / theunconventionalgardener.com / Emma Doughty
One of the great challenges, during our summer of waiting to move, has been feeding ourselves. We packed away a lot of the ‘unnecessary’ cooking equipment for a few weeks, only to find it was out of action for a few months. With numerous false starts, I kept running down the cupboards and the freezer, in anticipation of a move date that never came. Stress levels rose, cooking mojo vanished and we ate far more oven chips than you can imagine.
So I am looking forward to settling in to my new kitchen, having everything to hand, and beginning my culinary explorations once more.
One of the things that I struggle with is Italian food, due to its fondness for dairy products, and the fact that I don’t love tomato-based sauces. But I had half a carton of Oatly oat cream to use up, so last week I invented a dairy-free spaghetti recipe that turned out nicely – it’s a good, quick, store cupboard meal:
Ingredients (to serve 2) 1 onion, chopped (roughly or finely, it’s your choice!) 2 large cloves of onion garlic, crushed and sliced 1 packet (about 2 handfuls) of chopped, smoked cooking bacon 1/2 carton Oatly* oat cream 2 servings of pasta (we only had spaghetti….) 1 large sweet pepper, or a handful of smaller peppers, chopped A little oil for frying
Method
*You could use soy cream if you like it (I think it tastes like cardboard), or regular cream if you don’t have issues with dairy.
Yesterday was a cold day in the office, and when I got home I had a hankering for something involving hot, bubbling cheese. And so the final carton of Oatly cream in the cupboard came out for another pasta extravaganza – this time a pasta bake.
Pasta bake is an awesome way of turning leftover pasta into a new meal – simply pop it into a suitably-sized
Succulents are some of the coolest plants you can have in your collection! Keeping that in mind, we bring you a simple hack to cultivate them quickly! Do This Simple Trick to Grow More Succulents in No Time!
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Glidden
Seed trays, modules and pots
When plants are grown in the soil they can send out roots, make friends with fungi, and source their own nutrients from their surroundings. In gardens we help them do this by improving and feeding the soil, a topic I will be returning to in chapter four. But when they’re confined in containers plants have a limited volume of soil and therefore a limited amount of nutrients to tap into.
Soil isn’t one thing, it’s a collection of different things that come together to make the life-giving, plant-growing ‘dirt’ that we love. We have a tendency to poison it, cover it over and generally forget that it’s there, but good soil is the heart of a good garden and something we should pay a lot more attention to.
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.
There is a big trend at the moment in recycling containers to use in the garden (we’ve already touched on it with recycled food containers used for raising seedlings). There is also a large range of containers you can buy – from cheap plastic pots right through to enormous designer urns. What you choose is as much down to your budget as it is to your tastes, but all containers need to hold a suitable volume of potting compost and retain water whilst allowing any excess to drain away. If you are recycling containers to use for food plants then be sure that they’re clean and that they weren’t used to store anything toxic in their previous life. And remember that not all plastics are UV stable – some degrade when they’re exposed to sunlight.
When a seed sends out its first shoot and it rises above the soil level, germination is over and seedling development has begun. This is a particularly vulnerable time for the plant – it is running out of stored resources and needs to start collecting its own food. In this period of rapid growth it is also particularly at risk from pests and diseases.
When I set about blogging The Peat-Free Diet it was an experiment, an journey into the unknown. My aim was to provide gardeners who want to garden without the use of peat with the information they need to do so, and the book evolved into a gardening primer that assumed peat was not on the menu. My love of science made more of an appearance than I had anticipated and there are plenty of big words to cope with, but it is my hope that they are presented in such a way that they are not hard to swallow.
Potting on
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.