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21.08.2023 - 11:51 / theunconventionalgardener.com / Emma Doughty
Taking a break from space for a while, I have made a transcript of the third episode of The Wartime Kitchen and Garden, a fascinating series starring Ruth Mott and Peter Dodson, with a voiceover by Peter Thoday. [You’ll find the first two transcripts, and other relevant posts, under the Home Front tag.]
Episode 3 transcript
00:56 [Recording of Churchill] “And now, it has come to us to stand alone, in the breach, and face the worst that the tyrant’s might and enmity can do. Bearing ourselves humbly before God, but conscious that we serve an unfolding purpose, we are ready to defend our native lands against the invasion by which it is threatened.”
01:14 [Peter Thoday] In June 1940, Hitler knew he had to gain command of the skies over Britain before he could invade. This meant destroying the fighter stations that protected London.
01:37 [Peter Thoday] Throughout the summer, workers in gardens like Chilton carried on under the deadly battle raging in the skies above them.
02:05 [Peter Thoday] The airfields were almost destroyed when Hitler’s bombers unexpectedly turned their attention to London. It gave a vital breathing space. Fighter Command’s victory on September 15th finally persuaded Hitler to call off the invasion.
02:23 [Peter Thoday] During these anxious weeks, people on the ground were keen to help in any way they could.
02:32 Knocking at the door
02:33 [Ruth Mott] Oh Joyce, go and see who that is at the door, will you please?
02:36 [Peter Thoday] Ruth Mott, in her kitchen, receives a visit from volunteers collecting aluminium pots and pans to turn into planes. This was the brainchild of newspaper tycoon Lord Beaverbrook, Minister of Aircraft Production. Everybody, including the Royal Family, loyally handed over their
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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.
Every month this year I’ve been trying to read one of the unread books on my shelf, and to then decide whether it gets to keep its spot or needs to be set free to find a new home. For June I chose Nature’s Wild Harvest by Eric Soothill and Michael J. Thomas. It was published in 1983, and has been sitting on my bookshelf for three years, since I bought it in our local secondhand bookshop (which only opens on Wednesdays).
Plastic bottles are everywhere these days, even floating around in the oceans. Fortunately for the environment, recycling facilities are improving (here in the UK at least) but a lot of plastic bottles still end up in landfill, where they just don’t break down. If you would like to give your plastic bottles a new lease of life once they’re empty, and save money too, then try recycling them into something useful for the garden.
The English obsession with grass came into being in the 17th century, when the close cut lawn was a status symbol of the rich. Only they could afford to take land out of production for purely aesthetic purposes, and maintaining a lawn before the invention of the mower was a highly skilled and labour-intensive process. The middle classes started growing lawns from the 1860s onwards, and the Victorian popularity for outdoor sports led to their proliferation. Grass species from the Old World were taken to America during this period, and the lawn took there over in the early 20th century. In 2005, NASA published research suggesting that lawns (including residential and commercial lawns and golf courses) were the single largest irrigated ‘crop’ in America, covering about 128,000 square kilometres. In 2013 there were upwards of 15 millions lawns in Britain, costing us £54 million in fertilisers and £127 million on lawn mowers.
One of the big differences between now and the time before gardeners relied so much on peat-based composts is the rise in container growing. An army of modern amateur gardeners has to put up with small gardens, and possibly with no soil at all. Growing plants in containers allows us to garden wherever we like, and even to grow plants that would not thrive in our soil. Some plants are grown in containers to keep them under control; others so that they can be moved indoors in winter to ensure their survival.
Buying plants
A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for some statistics about the average UK garden size, and I found some interesting ones. According to the 2015 media pack for the RHS The Garden magazine, a document that is aimed at attracting advertisers to the publication, the 380,000 RHS members the magazine is sent to have gardens that are 10 times larger than the UK average, covering over half an acre.
There’s nothing quite as British as a nice cup of tea, and sitting down for a good cuppa can certainly brighten up your day. A tea bush is unlikely to thrive in most UK gardens (although there are a couple of tea plantations) because of the climate, but there are plenty of herbs that are easy to grow and make a refreshing brew. They’ll even grow well in containers – so they make ideal plants for a windowbox or a patio. Having them close at hand means you can harvest leaves as and when you need them.
It’s nearly two years since I started the Alternative Kitchen Garden Seed Appeal, with the aim of raising enough money to help the Millennium Seed Bank save a species. We still have a way to go to reach the target ;(
Allotments are going to be all the rage this year. The National Trust recently announced that they’re making available enough spare land for up to 1000 allotments, via the Landshare scheme. British Waterways and British Rail are in on the act, too, looking for land along canals and railway lines that could be used to grow vegetables.
If you’ve got a small garden then you might find it difficult to find space for a conventional compost heap. A possible solution is a worm compost bin, which takes up far less space because an army of worms does most of the composting work.