The Coral Plant is a stunning tropical shrub that can add a touch of exotic beauty to any garden or indoor space. It gets its name from its attractive coral-like appearance and unique foliage!
21.08.2023 - 11:51 / theunconventionalgardener.com / Emma Doughty
After 3 weeks (2 ‘official’, 1 trial) living on a modern version of the wartime rations, Ryan and I are calling it a day. We’re not hungry, and we’re not bored with the food. What we’ve found is that we live within the ration of meat, fats and dairy products quite happily. I guess this is because we are flexitarians (or reducetarians), and have been consciously reducing our meat consumption for some time, bulking out meals with vegetables and/or pulses, as they would have done in wartime. (And we’ve long been barraged with health warnings about eating too much fat!) Of course, we also have the benefits of a household fridge, and an array of foodstuffs that just wouldn’t have been available in wartime, particularly as the war wore on and people’s stocks of spices and flavourings ran down.
So we’re not going to bother weighing out the rations any more. But we’re not giving up on our wartime project, and I’m hoping to try at least one wartime recipe each week, and to blog them on Wartime Wednesdays.
In the meantime, I have found time to pop outside and plant the garlic. I normally do so with my dibber, which in true wartime style is a repurposed porridge spurtle. It was a gift, many years ago, and as I make my porridge in the microwave, I never used it for stirring porridge. But it makes a great dibber. However, it had gone missing. As I mentioned, I want to try planting the garlic much deeper this year – 6 inches deep – so I used a trowel to open up a slit and pushed each clove down into it. It’s easy enough in the soft soil of the raised bed. Of course, I found the dibber on the way back to the shed, perched on the edge of the last raised bed it was used in.
Garlic wasn’t unheard of in 1940s Britain, but it wasn’t popular.
The Coral Plant is a stunning tropical shrub that can add a touch of exotic beauty to any garden or indoor space. It gets its name from its attractive coral-like appearance and unique foliage!
It has been a difficult spring for gardeners, and their plants, here in the UK. If you’re lucky enough to have the space (and funds) for a greenhouse or a polytunnel then that goes a long way to protecting plants from the vagaries of the weather, but for everyone else cloches are a good solution to the problems it brings.
Buying plants
I’m not a chemist, but I do find plant chemistry (and the links and patterns between different plants) to be a fascinating topic. Fortunately there are chemists out there who can bring these to our attention, and Compound Interest includes some great plant-related infographics amongst a wider spread of chemical topics.
“April showers bring May flowers.” English proverb
At 11 pm on Friday (BST, 18:01 EDT), SpaceX launched an uncrewed Dragon cargo spacecraft on its way to the International Space Station (ISS). This Dragon capsule has been to the ISS twice before, making it the first to fly in space for a third time. This is the 18th SpaceX Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract mission for NASA: CRS-18.
The problem with elections, with votes of any kind, is that the process is inherently divisive. Whatever the result, there are winners and losers. The majority picks the direction we will take, for a little while, and everyone else just has to make the best of it. Given human nature, it seems like there’s a constant battle between tradition and progress. We’re all voting for a better world, we just disagree about what that means.
I’m lucky enough to live reasonably close to the Earth Trust, an organisation that aims to offer people life changing experiences that reconnect them to the natural world. They have lots of free and reasonably-priced events for both children and adults, and welcome lots of school and other groups to their HQ alongside Wittenham Clumps (a lovely vantage point from which to get a good view of Didcot!). Over the weekend I went to a workshop they had organised entitled ‘Cordage and Fibres‘, which promised to show interested parties how to make rope and cord from nettle, hemp and flax. It also aimed to explain retting, scutching and heckling.
The latest addition to the garden is a Gardman poppy bird feeder. I’ve popped it in the border and filled it with seed for the moment, but it can be used as a water dish in the summer – it’s made from painted cast iron. I was given mine by Gardman for review purposes, but they’re being sold to raise money for The Royal British Legion, as part of their annual poppy appeal. Gardman want to raise £200,000 for the charity, and 50p from the sale of each feeder will be donated. There’s a special bird food range to go with it, also including a donation to the poppy appeal.
I recently re-watched The Wartime Kitchen and Garden, and – as there is no legitimate way to acquire a permanent copy – I am slowly making transcripts of them. My episode 1 transcript is here.
COP21, the United Nations conference on climate change, has ended with a ‘landmark’ agreement that climate change is something we all need to tackle together. Last week I was talking about what gardeners can do to reduce their carbon footprint, and a lot of it is about being thrifty with resources – something that tends to come naturally to us! Over the weekend, Ryan has done his bit by recycling plastic plant pots in my direction. He came across a newly landscaped commercial building, where the unwanted plant pots were being discarded.
An ethnobotany superhero by night, my mild-mannered daytime alter ego is a science writer for the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), one of the UK’s research councils. It’s not often that those two worlds collide, although during the early summer the campus I work on is dotted with the blooms of hardy orchids.