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.
I’ve developed a passion for rocket. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s not the most productive crop – that seems to be lettuce or mizuna. But I love its pungent smell and the flavour it adds to salads.
In terms of lettuce, my personal favourite is still Outredgeous, the space lettuce that has grown onboard the ISS. It has crunchy leaves, plenty of flavour and a red tinge. It grows well in the hydroponicum. But recently I tried lettuce Osterley, and it’s very good too. It has an unusually upright habit and pleasantly succulent green leaves. Mind you, I tried a heritage variety – Black Seeded Simpson. It had large, soft and floppy pale green leaves. And that was great, too. The only lettuce I’ve failed with so far was a ‘Tom Thumb’ heading variety. Rubbish.
One of the restrictions I keep bumping into is height. Choosing plants that fit the available space is a problem in space, too. The maximum growing height in the Veggie growth chambers is 18 inches (about 46 cm). The Advanced Plant Habitat (APH) – soon to be home to a radish crop – has a shoot height of 43 cm.
In the hydroponicum, my grow lights are suspended 30 cm above the plant trays. Anything that grows that tall pushes up against the lights. Although LEDs produce very little heat (a huge advantage
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A lot of new gardening and plant books have landed on my mat this spring, and I need to up my book reviewing game! I like to do them justice, and spend some time reading them before I write a review, so that does create a bit of a backlog. Right at the time when the garden is demanding my attention. Anyway, the book that has found itself at the top of the list is one that really encompasses the gardening zeitgeist – The Community Gardening Handbook, by Ben Raskin. I looked him up, and he has impeccable credentials. He’s currently Head of Horticulture for the Soil Association; prior experiences include working for Garden Organic, running a walled garden and being a Horticultural Advisor for the Community Farm near Bristol.
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!
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.
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:
A burgeoning batch of seedlings is a thing of beauty, but it’s also a responsibility – each tiny plant is dependent on us for everything it needs. It grows rapidly, needing more space, water, light and nutrients. Although we lavish care on them in their early stages, each plant needs to be prepared for the challenges of the outside world. Allowing your seedlings to grow up is the key to growing them on.
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.