Summer’s Fall

After the long wait of winter and the trials of spring, worrying about when to sow seeds or put out that delicate ornamental around the fickle weather, summer is hopefully a relatively peaceful time in the garden. With a bit of luck, the planning over winter and busy spring preparation has led to abundantly blooming flowers and vegetables growing vigorously ready for autumn harvest.

A spot of weeding, fertilising and watering to help plants, indoor or outdoor, through any summer heat generally keeps things ticking over as you can enjoy the fruits of your labour, sometimes quite literally! Some summer pruning is also advisable; cutting back fresh summer growth can mean for bigger yields from fruit trees and bushes, mean for better displays from ornamentals and keep them from taking over the whole garden.

All good must things must unfortunately come to an end though and whilst autumn can be a beautiful time of year, with deciduous trees turning gold and orange and lots of tasty crops such as potatoes being ready for harvest, there is some more work required to put the garden back to bed for winter. As well as some further pruning to keep plants in check, it’s a good time to add a layer of mulch, dead organic matter, as a top dressing to the soil. This can be applied generally as a feed to soil and specifically around plants that will be spending the winter outside such as kale, in addition to trees and shrubs.

For those who like to live dangerously, you can take a gamble and try sowing some veggies such as broad beans to over winter and grow on in the spring. It is prudent to cover any such seedlings or other tender plants with fleece to protect against frost, and for any very tender plants, to bring them safely indoors by October.

Not all gardeners have gardens of course and for those of us with houseplants much less maintenance is required as the seasons change but a light pruning back of any vigorous houseplants and moving any sun loving plants into a south facing window to make the most of the shorter days definitely helps many plants along.

There are also fun gifts from nature that we can all enjoy in the autumn wherever we live, as many plants offer their bounty in the form of autumn fruit. Brambles abound with juicy blackberries that make for a delicious crumble and rowan berries can make for an excellent tart addition to many a meal.

In the next post we will look at what to do in the garden as autumn turns to winter, we harvest the last of the tasty morsels and put the garden to bed for the season. Until then, as always, happy gardening!

Mayday mayday

As we clear the fickle weather of early spring and enter the more consistent, if damp, weather of May gardening can pick up a gear. Whilst the risk of frost is fading into the rear-view mirror as May is often a rather soggy month fresh perils await!

 

Slugs love the cool, damp conditions and the temperatures can still drop to the relatively chilly side so it’s best to still keep any delicate, or delicious, plants well protected.lugs love the cool, damp conditions and the temperatures can still drop to the relatively chilly side so it’s best to still keep any delicate, or delicious, plants well protected. 

 

The more robust ornamental plants such as daffodils will have already braved the cold in April and put on a beautiful display. As these plants go to seed it is the perfect time to dead-head them and tidy up outdoor beds. Weeds are quick off the mark and will be growing vigorously at this time of year so a sunny day in May is the ideal time to keep them in check.

If you are growing vegetables, hardier crops such as brassicas and beetroot will be fine if they have already been seed sown and if not, its not too late to do so in May. Just make sure to keep the weeds under control and protect the seedlings with some fleece or mesh if possible to keep pigeons at bay. Root vegetables like potatoes can also be planted and if already in the ground and sprouting, earth up around the leaves to keep the tubers safely out of harms way of cooler temperatures. May is also the time to start off more delicate vegetable crops indoors such as runner or French beans and summer or winter squash. Once these have grown to 15cm or so in height it is best to ‘harden them off’, leaving them outside during the day for a couple of days, whilst still bringing them in at night, to get them acclimatised to outside conditions before planting them out permanently outside. If this is too much faff, fear not, waiting until June to plant them outside should substantially reduce any risk of cold shock for these plants.

For those living in apartments though there is of course less worry about plants getting too chilly, this can be the perfect time to be moving your sun loving house plants such as aloe vera moved to spots that get the most light as the days get longer, or tucking away any delicate shade loving ones such as ferns. You can also grow some tasty edibles such as herbs or chillis, or for the adventurous, why not try a bush variety of French beans. As this species is self-fertile and does not need pollinators they will merrily fruit away in your window whether or not you happen to have a handy house bee on hand.​​​​​​​

In the next post we will look at what to do in the garden in the height of summer and we start to reward the fruits of our labours, in the form of tasty crops sown in spring and enjoying ornamental plants in full summer splendour. Until then, as always, happy gardening!

Mind the (Hungry) Gap

(March-April)

The rustlings of spring are on the horizon and as the days get longer the temptation to get planting is growing. At the same time, we must be cautious for there are two gaps to navigate.

On the one hand we can have a gap in wintery conditions with a ‘false spring’, where it warms up nicely, the crocuses come out and it looks as if spring is right around the corner, then it snows and kills your seedlings!

With the UK’s temperate, oceanic climate and high latitude, this feature of warmer, longer days, punctuated by surprise frosts and snows also leads to the Hungry Gap; a period in spring where there is little or no fresh produce available. Whilst potentially inconvenient in the modern day if shops run short of supplies, this was of course a much more serious problem in the past. Whilst the risk of starvation is thankfully now not something we need worry about too much in the UK there are still some handy tricks and tips to ensure we can still get some tasty fresh spring veggies and to make sure our lovely ornamental plants survive:

• Sowing seed for any frost sensitive ornamental plants or garden vegetable crops such as beetroot safely indoors is advised before mid-April. Once all risk of frost is passed you will be rewarded with healthy young plants that will have a head start on those sown outside whilst avoiding the loss of plants from over eager outside early planting.

• Sprouted seedlings of seeds, often described as ‘microgreens’, can be a fun, affordable way of producing some tasty greens for the kitchen. A range of plants can be used for this such as alfalfa or chickpeas. One tried and tested plant that is often overlooked are peas – dried peas purchased from the shop can be soaked overnight and then lain on damp kitchen roll in a tray or sown in a shallow tray of compost. Within a couple of weeks they will have produced a small forest of bean shoots which can then be harvested with a pair of scissors for fresh spring veggies.

• For the adventurous spring has also traditionally been a time for foraging for wild greens, most commonly nettles, wild garlic and dandelions. Relevant precautions should of course be taken to ensure you are certain of a plant’s species before consumption and harvesting any away from where any animals may be using plants for the bathroom. With that in mind, a fun failsafe plant to try harvesting in the spring is the humble stinging nettle. Whilst this may sound an odd choice, given that it has the word ‘stinging’ in its name it is a surprisingly delicious, and incredibly nutritious food. The key with nettles is to harvest the top 20cm or so of nettles in the spring when they have safely outgrown the height where any canines may make use of them. Wearing gloves is of course recommended, but with a pair of gloves, a bag and a pair of scissors you can harvest a feast! Once you get them home, if you dice them and cook them up you can make a delicious soup or even nettle pesto!
  

In the next post we’ll be looking at ideas for getting your beds and pots prepared for the coming growing season and other handy hints for verdant flower beds and bumper crops, in the meantime, happy gardening!

A Snow Garden?

(Jan-Feb) 

As we are still in the depths of winter the land is sleeping and spring feels a long way off, but it’s always nice to plan on what we might get growing in the months ahead. With gardening it's always best to think before you sow, making the middle of winter the ideal time to think what gardening project you might like to embark upon for the year. Whether you are a seasoned allotmenteer or a newbie apartment dweller with a free windowsill who just wants to try growing a cactus there is a plant for everyone.

As we wait for the long nights of winter to shorten there are some good principles to bear in mind with planning your project:

• Something that is not designed to be sustainable is almost certain to be unsustainable. It’s always tempting to want to go from nought to sixty and create a mini-farm or house jungle (I have done this enough times). Start small and build your way up, that way it stays manageable and most importantly, fun!

• If you are planning to grow food crops, it’s best to aim for some combination of the below:
  
  

1. Grow things you know you like and in quantities you know you can use; a large cabbage patch may look fantastic but if you aren’t a sauerkraut fan you may end up with more than you can manage. 
   
   
2. If you are looking to save money growing crops, those that are most expensive in the shops will help maximise your returns. If you have a small space this could be a nice windowsill herb garden or if you have a balcony or garden some salad crops and soft fruit. If you have a slightly larger space and you want to really cut down on the shopping bills you can also go for some staple crops that have high yields which in itself can save money by quantity. Homegrown tomatoes, for example, are hard to beat and if you can grow a few vines you can save a fortune!​
   
   

• If you are growing ornamentals, try not to be too optimistic with the Scottish climate:

 

1. Some remarkably exotic plants can be grown on a sunny window indoors but there are limits on what can live on the diffuse sunlight at our high latitude, even with our long summer days. A plant such as Aloe Vera will grow splendidly but many plants from equatorial regions may struggle.
   
   
2. Outdoor growing of course merits even greater caution for growing ornamentals. Some plants can be put out for the summer and overwintered indoors and others are hardy year-round, but always have a wee chat with the folks at your local garden centre when buying plants to double-check.

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In the next post we’ll be looking at ideas for getting your seedlings started and other fun tips for the spring and I hope you have fun with horticultural scheming in the meantime!

Adventures in Experimental Horticulture

Following on from my last piece about how far we may go in space, one thing that is key for any long term space mission is being able to grow your own food ‘in situ’ as to ship in food in any serious quantities would be cost prohibitive. In a more holistic sense what will be pivotal for any long term space exploration is what is called ‘bioregenerative life support’; essentially taking an ecosystem with you so that you are able to recycle your air, water and waste whilst producing required food in a closed loop system.

Some fascinating research is going on into real world applications of such technology and may one day provide the basis for humanity to live in locations across our solar system. Whilst this is of course all very interesting it is rather esoteric. However, It does bring to mind some rather more pressing, down to earth issues, namely that the systems our civilisation has built for the provision of our daily bread are somewhat odds with maintaining our planet’s bioregenerative life support system.

What this means in practical terms of course is not that all over the world plants will stop growing all of a sudden but that land degradation from unsustainable agricultural practices combined with increasingly extreme weather caused by rapid anthropogenic climate change will greatly reduce yields of key crops in the world’s breadbaskets. Add on top of that just in time supply chains and foreseeable economic turmoil and you have great potential for disruption to food supplies.

Whilst one answer to this may be to apply the techniques we are perfecting for those space faring settlements to create self-contained mini ecosystems in greenhouses this is not something that most people have the resources for or that is likely to be something that could be scaled up to provide large numbers of people with food.

Large scale agriculture, depending on certain cash crops in a few key regions for the majority of global calories is incredibly vulnerable to disruption and decentralising and diversifying food systems is the most straightforward way to achieve this. A range of techniques with great potential have been put forward to improve on industrial agriculture such as agroecological farming methods, permaculture and wider organic farming. Another piece in this puzzle is promoting small scale, local food production of the backyard ‘Dig for Victory’ vegetable gardening we saw during the Second World War. Needless to say such gardens also helped keep starvation at bay during the collapse of the USSR.

Unless you have at least ¼ of an acre it is sadly not really feasible to grow most of your own food year round, even in the tropics, but you can grow decent amounts of healthy food even with relatively limited space. With all this in mind over the past few years I have been experimenting with all sorts of different horticultural methods to see what is most effective in terms of sustainability, cost, yield and labour requirements.

I have tried growing a range of different crops using a variety of methods such as double digging and ‘no-dig’ beds, using raised beds and traditional garden beds, single crops and polycultures, using artificial fertiliser and making my own compost and fertiliser.

I have also tried a range of slightly more unconventional farming activities; I have reared quail for their eggs, kept fish, grown mushrooms and tried my hand at both hydroponics and aquaponics, I have even grown spirulina algae to assess the premise and whether it might be a useful and/or feasible system for home production.

From all of this experimentation, alongside study, I have come to some very useful conclusions, as well as having one heck of a lot of fun! So without further ado, let me have saved you some experimenting and provide some findings to make your life easier;

What may be best to avoid

•  Most grain crops are not feasible/not worth the effort for backyard horticulture
  
  
•  Unless you have dedicated space and resources livestock of any kind will yield insufficient return to be worth the investment and time required.
  
  
• Fruit crops are a pleasant distraction but do not provide serious food production, if treated as a supplemental extra, put in corners in place of ornamental shrubs though, combined with some wild foraging are an excellent resource for some lovely home made desserts and wines.
  
  
• Various esoteric activities like growing algae, growing mushrooms, aquaculture, aquaponics or hydroponics or growing plants under LEDs are all worthy hobbies but do not produce serious amounts of food and/or value if wanting  to ever sell anything - with the exceptions of rearing poultry for meat/eggs or carp for meat, IF you pretty much have a small holding.
  
  
•  Many typical allotment annual crops are well worth the effort for domestic production but a number of them are often too temperamental or low yielding to be worth the effort in most instances; namely a lot of root crops such as carrots, parsnips, swede and delicate bulbs or edible flowers like onions or  broccoli & cauliflower.
  
  
• Some perennials such as globe artichokes or asparagus are also too low yielding to provide a great deal of physical produce or sustenance.  All fine in their context of course but large scale production is best for a lot of these, beyond them being edible ornamentals.
  

• Full polyculture mixes such as food forests are lovely, but they take several years to establish and the yields are relatively low unless you have a lot of space for specific purposes such as nut tree farming, not the most efficient set up  for small scale horticulture.

 

What is most likely to be worth your time

• Making your own compost and fertiliser is easy to do and cheap, well worth it, though will need to be supplementary to soil already present or compost you purchase to fill raised beds or pots.
  
  
• Raised beds or pots are very efficient especially if you are limited on space and can lead to less weeding; I have found no-dig raised beds to be both the easiest and most productive method, with a fresh layer of compost /mulch every season, If you can combine this with a polytunnel, all the better!

• Greenhouses/polytunnels are excellent if you can access them as a resource, polytunnels in particular are great for covering a large area affordably. 
  

• For the humble backyard gardener, coldframes and row covers also offer wonderful smaller scale solutions. The trusty window sill is of course also perfectly fine for sprouting seedlings! 
  
  
• If you are fortunate enough to have decent sized windows, you can also get some indoor beans going for example, or a fine mini-herb garden even in the smallest window. In this context I would advise LED grow lights as a sound investment if you want a year round herb garden, though not scalable for any large scale food production, for some nice chives in January they are well worth it!
  
  
• Covered growing set ups such as polytunnels are particularly relevant in the context of climate change as they provide you with a nice stable growing environment and not only extend the growing season, but also provide you with a stable growing environment. Particularly useful if the rapidly changing climate decides that regular seasons are no longer a thing!
  
  
•  For me personally, leaving the area surrounding your plots semi-wild and/or with perennial fruit bushes and the like for maximum ecological diversity is also to be recommended. A pond, however small, is also invaluable. This draws in birds to come to drink, and handily eat some plant eating insects whilst they are at it. Abundant foliage and a good range of flowers of course also encourage and helps preserve our invaluable pollinators.

 

Will we leave the sun behind?

The denizens of the sun’s bosom swing hot and fast around their Goddess.

Mercury, a hardboiled egg of iron, lifeless as can be.

Venus, an angry earth, a little too much celestial love 

Has burnt her up into a fiery storm.

Mars feels his mother’s chill and scorn.

In between lies our home, a delicate, beautiful orb.

No perfect creation, 

Just the right mix of this and that for complicated things to happen.

A warm sloshing bath of rock and sea awash with the most complex chemistry,

Some of which can even see!

Some of these eyes look deep into the deepest dark,

Searching for meaning’s heart,

For the signature of a great mind’s work.

What can we see out in the deep, deep, dark?

A trillion lights beyond our grasp.

A billion, billion beaming orbs of light.

Swirling majesties, galaxies of great might.

Arcs of pure light, a million constellations to light up the night.

What though is in our grasp?
Out there in the deep deep dark, waiting for that human spark.

One of the main narratives of our age is that we are destined for the stars, to reach out and grasp the infinite, ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before’. The main current focus of our efforts is to explore and possibly colonise Mars. It is a very long way to Mars, a trip of several months spent in what is effectively a large baked bean tin living at constant risk of radiation poisoning before you even try to land on another planet. This is at the limits of current human technology but seems like a feasible possibility.

Whether or not we will ever travel much further than Mars though is another matter. Space generally, even just our own solar system, is far larger than much science fiction would have you believe. Even if people are able to colonise nearby rocky worlds, the outer solar system is as vast as it is icy, where even giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn slip in the void. As distant as these planets are though, the distances to other stars are staggering. For example, ff the entire solar system were modelled on the scale of a football pitch our nearest neighbouring star, Alpha Centauri, would be approximately 5,000 km away!

It seems most likely that faster than light travel will remain the stuff of science fiction and the sheer distances involved travelling between one star and another make it unlikely any civilisation would actually last long enough to travel such vast distances. It would therefore appear unlikely that humanity will leave the sun behind any time soon. This does raise another question, even if other stars are outside of our reach, what is within our grasp?

We will be looking at this in the next post..

Image credited to wikipedia

Is the King Dead or Does He Surf?

This is my second piece in a short series, following on from the last post 'Waves';

A famous phrase is, 'The King is Dead, long live the King', announcing the passing of a monarch and the succession to the throne of another. The phrase implies that an individual ruler is of course mortal but that the institution they represent is intended to long outlast them, they are merely the current representative of a monarchy. That such institutions often last significant periods of time is an interesting fact. The British monarchy, for example, has endured for centuries through great social tumult.

It may also be the case that even if a regime is deposed a similar social set up can re-form in its place:

I recently watched ‘The Death of Stalin’ by Armando Iannucci. It was a rather refreshing mix of ‘In the Thick of It’ style satire and quite poignant observations on power and the tragicomic history of Russia. Its release coincides with the centenary of the Russian revolution. A strikingly important event in world history. Even Marx himself observed that the Russians always seemed to go for the most extreme available doctrine. There are always contingencies in such matters though, had the Mensheviks not walked out during the October Revolution history may have turned out differently.

The U.S.S.R. of course came apart at the seams in 1989, a lumbering behemoth that finally ran out of steam and, groaning, crashed to the earth like some titanic tree. An autocratic empire that long ago had lost the plot of its original goals, staggered into senility and eventually collapsed. Taken in isolation, this empire would be an interesting historical artefact. However, when situated in the wider arc of Russian history it appears less unique. The initial revolution was a rebellion against an autocratic and unaccountable Tsar, who presided over a sclerotic and discontented empire. That Lenin’s dream metastasised into something comparable and has again been replaced by an authoritarian government is as interesting as it is tragic.

Reflecting on some of the themes in my last post, Waves, I am not one well qualified enough to pronounces that this is or is not due to some innate or inevitable cycle in Russian history. It may be more a series of waves of populism that fell on the same shores producing similar results. The likelihood of other European nations squabbling like cats in a sack on a regular basis also unfortunately appears to be just as high. I hold out some hope that this may not be the case and I am certainly no historical determinist. The role of non-violent resistance as pioneered by Ghandi, Martin Luther King and others is a powerful example of the ability of groups of concerned individuals to change the world. Indeed, to quote Margaret Mead, it is the only thing that ever does!

The interplay between the great trends of history, the agency of groups and individuals and the myriad other factors which affects how societies change over time are most likely impossible to disentangle. What can be said with some degree of certainty is that some things appear more likely than others and some trends look likely to crash onto shores as large waves. I have noted before and it has been cogently argued elsewhere that the United States may be in a similar position to the U.S.S.R. in the late 1980s, except with an Orangutan at the helm, rather than the relatively dignified figure of Mikhail Gorbachev. We shall have to see whether this comes to pass along with whether European nations re-commence with arguing or if the hydra of authoritarianism snakes out more widely into the world than at present. 

One of the major features of the oscillation of social waves is that those at the top of a social system are very good at preserving their status, even if the system superficially changes; kings, or more accurately, monarchies clearly know how to surf the social waves. What is unique about the present day and modern information technology is that the majority of us, not just a tiny minority, can have some understanding of the nature of some of these waves. We should of course use these insights to do what we can to hold the powerful to account & avoid some of the worse political possibilities and at the very least we can also learn to surf.

Image credited to wikipedia