I was wasting time in Borders yesterday, waiting for Pete. As such I hadn’t thought to look for the Bookazine on the shelves, and it was a bit of a surprise when I found it whilst browsing the gardening magazines.
21.08.2023 - 12:03 / theunconventionalgardener.com / Emma Doughty
My promo copies of the ‘Growing Vegetables is Fun’ bookazine arrived on Tuesday, and I’ve been having so much fun dispatching them to their new homes that I’ve only just now got round to blogging about it!
Everyone so far loves it, and so do I – the design and production quality are awesome. Here’s a selection of the comments I’ve received so far:
Only 5 days to go before the general release!
Unless otherwise stated, © Copyright Emma Doughty 2023. Published on theunconventionalgardener.com.
Just been to buy our copy of the bookazine – it is great! – full of useful info and perfect for my vegetable growing-mad children! We have sown the peas already!!
Wow! You are keen
I was wasting time in Borders yesterday, waiting for Pete. As such I hadn’t thought to look for the Bookazine on the shelves, and it was a bit of a surprise when I found it whilst browsing the gardening magazines.
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.
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.
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.
Three minutes of loveliness
Plants that have (and can) change the world is the topic for my latest article published elsewhere – Dangerously in love with plants, for the Dangerous Women Project.
As I said, one of my aims for this year is to streamline my gardening library a little bit – not a drastic chopping back, just a little light pruning to keep the shape