The Moose in the Tar Sands

Day 3 started with the delivery of the aggregate and sand, and ended with quite a lot of the blocks being laid. We’re not allowed to walk on them yet, though!

If it’s the middle of winter and there’s nothing much going on in the vegetable garden, or you want some easy and ultra-fresh salad greens, or a rainy day project to help keep the kids occupied, then try growing mustard and cress!

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.

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.

We know that mustard has been a common ingredient in European food since the late 14th century. Prior to that we know that it was used medicinally, with its benefits mentioned by both Pliny and Pythagoras, and we think the Romans are responsible for spreading white mustard throughout Europe. A ‘hot’ plant, it has also long been considered an aphrodisiac.

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

In my occasional series, “When Plants Attack” we’ve seen some of the ways in which plants can defend themselves. So far I’ve covered the chemicals they produce to discourage other plants from growing in their space (allelopathy) and the conventional weaponry they use to guard against a physical attack. I am planning more posts to continue the series, which will include a look at the chemical defences plants have evolved to protect themselves against being eaten. But as soon as a plant evolves a defence mechanism, predators will begin to evolve or develop a way to counteract it. For example, some insects can collect poisons from the plants they’re munching on, and use them as part of their own defences. But until now it has seemed as though plant-eating mammals change their behaviour to cope with toxic plants – e.g. by changing how they forage for food, or by eating dirt (geophagy) to detox.