What is Compost Tea?

As we’re faced with another year of determining what's for dinner, we're sharing a glimpse at how BHG readers gather for a meal. Welcome to our new series, Dinner Diaries, where we're asking readers to anonymously share how they get dinner on the table including grocery shopping, budgeting, cooking, and their favorite family recipes. Here, a family of five enjoys tacos, spaghetti, bulgogi, and other dishes from around the world.

Q: Could you please recommend a good peat-free seed compost? I’ve tried a few over the last few years but haven’t had great results. I’d really like to do the right thing environmentally but am now at the point where I’m sorely tempted to go back to using a conventional peat-based compost. CF County Kerry

No other vegetable captures the succulence of summer like sweet corn. Whether you like your kernels white, yellow, or with both colors on the same ear, new hybrids offer incredibly delicious flavor with very little effort.

This is a jelly fungus. Jelly fungi are usually found growing on dead or dying branches.

Seeds are produced by plants following the fertilization of the flower, as a means of reproducing the plant. Each seed is a plant embryo, which consists of a minute shoot and root and a store of food. The food reserve enables the embryo to grow before its root is developed to absorb nutrients from the soil and before the leaves emerge above the ground and make sugars by photosynthesis, a complex process. In some seeds, such as those of sunflowers or

Peat is an acidic growing medium, which thanks to its excellent water and nutrient retention is traditionally used in garden composts. With a low pH it’s ideal for growing acid-loving plants such as blueberries, heather and Camellia sinensis, and peat-based composts have been widely used in horticulture – most garden composts contain some peat, and most garden centres still sell plants growing in pots of peat-based compost. However, due to its environmentally damaging effects, from late this year, the sale of peat-based composts in gardens and DIY stores will be banned in the UK. Issues with peat-free composts, such as expense, availability and performance have hindered its take up in the past but thankfully, compost manufacturers have responded to these concerns with research and investment and a broad range of high quality, peat-free composts are now widely available, with some even costing less than their peat-based counterparts.

These citrus leaves are showing symptoms of cold injury. This tree is part of a study at the Sandhill REC in Columbia looking at 9 varieties of citrus that are believed to have improved cold tolerance.

This sweet salad vegetable has a high food value. It needs deep soil and is best suited to a place where a previous non-root crop has been grown. Do not add fresh manure, as this is inclined to cause root forking. If instead of growing vegetables in the kitchen garden, they are grown in the old-fashioned cottager’s way interspersed with flowering plants, the beetroot is a most suitable plant since the round or turnip-shaped beet has generally fine decorative crimson leaves. In addition to the round beet, two other forms are obtainable: a long-rooted and an intermediate type, called tankard or canister-shaped. Good named kinds are: ‘Crimson Globe’, ‘Veitch’s Intermediate’, ‘Cheltenham Green Top’ and ‘Nutting’s Red Globe’. All are forms of Beta vulgaris.

A few weeks ago, I went to the garden center to buy some pansies to put in decorative pots by my front porch. In my experience, pansies hold up even after the mums bite the dust, and they provide color just about as long as anyone has a right to expect color from a garden plant.

Q: I have a winter flowering jasmine, growing profusely on a 3m-high north-facing wall. For most of its six years, it has produced an abundance of flowers, from early November until March. During the recent summer, I took a lot of its stems, which had bunched at about 2m, and gently stretched them out along a series of horizontal wires. This November I can only see a handful of flowers (less than 10). Did my gentle summer manipulation cause this drop in flowers and if so, how? CD, Co Dublin

In a world being reshaped by climate change, gardeners are increasingly asking themselves what can be done to counter the destructive effects of extreme weather events. The answer, as we’re discovering, is to take a nature-friendly approach that supports and nurtures resilience.

Kelsey Hansen