Articles: coopette.com

Eco Garden: Green lawns

The front lawn at Kingston Bagpuize House

It is one of the big ironies of gardening that the pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers we use to keep our lawns green make them one of the least ‘green’ areas of the garden. Many gardeners put a lot of effort into maintaining their lawns, and this diligence can be a real asset if you want to go green, because it requires a fair amount of work to keep your lawn in top-notch condition using organic methods. The good news is that a more relaxed approach rewards you with a beautiful, wildlife-friendly lawn.

The main lawn maintenance task in summer is mowing. For a neat lawn you need to mow twice a week throughout the summer, but don’t mow too low – 2.5 cm is low enough for a play area, 3 cm for everywhere else. If the weather is dry then raise the blades on the mower – longer grass stays greener for longer. Grass clippings can be left on the lawn as a mulch, to conserve water.

In a relaxed lawn, allow some weeds to thrive and appreciate the splashes of colour they bring. If you want to remove them, dig them out by hand, filling in the holes with potting compost and sowing some grass seed on top. Trim the edges of the lawn, and rake out moss.

In autumn, rake up falling leaves and remove them from the lawn. Consider using them as a mulch elsewhere, or starting a leaf mould heap, rather than consigning them to the dustbin. If your lawn is very compacted then autumn is a good time to aerate it – use a hollow-tined aerator for the best results, and brush sand into the holes. Aeration improves soil structure and drainage.

You may need to scarify the lawn by raking it to remove the build up of organic material on the soil surface. This encourages the grass to send out side-shoots, but any bare areas that are uncovered should be re-seeded.

Later in the season you can cut down on mowing and raise the mower blades. It is also time to apply an organic top-dressing mix, using a rake or broom, and to plant bulbs if you want a display of spring flowers.

Winter is a quiet time for lawns, as they only need to be lightly mown during mild spells to keep them tidy. This is a good time to have your mower serviced and to test the underlying soil – apply lime if the pH is below 6.0, with the aim of bringing it back to neutral. Try to avoid walking on the grass when it’s frosty.

In spring, scarify and aerate again if necessary and use a stiff broom to disperse worm casts. Feed only if grass growth is poor, using an organic general fertilizer or complete lawn feed. Bring the mower out again, but consider leaving an area of longer grass as a wildlife habitat.

Tips for organic lawns

Consider sowing clover through your lawn. Clover stays green for much longer during droughts, adds nitrogen to the soil and provides nectar for bees if allowed to flower.

Raise the height of the mower blades. Scalping a lawn weakens the grass and encourages weeds.

Moss growth indicates that the conditions are wrong for good grass growth. You may be cutting the grass too short, or have problems with drainage. Feeding and liming at the appropriate time of year will also help.

If you rake out moss in spring then leave some lying around – garden birds may use it for nest building.

This article first appeared in Country Gardener in June 2008. If keeping your lawn green is a chore, consider turning some of it into a vegetable bed and growing something you can eat instead.

Posted 12 March 2010, 07:53. Comment

Eco Garden: Dealing with pests

If there’s one thing that makes gardeners gnash their teeth with frustration, it’s watching their favourite plants being eaten by pests. We’ve moved on from the ‘any bug is a bad bug’ mentality, and many chemical controls are being removed from sale amid safety fears, but this doesn’t mean that we have to abandon hope of an attractive and productive garden.

The organic approach to pest control is a holistic one. It begins (as with everything in organic gardening) with the soil. Keeping your soil in good health allows an extensive ecosystem to develop, and many soil microorganisms are beneficial to plant health. Pesticides and chemical fertilizers disrupt this ecosystem and prevent it from functioning properly, which is why they have no place in an organic garden. Feed the soil with compost and manure and the ecosystem, and your plants, will thrive.

Gardens have a huge advantage over farms in terms of pest control because they don’t, as a rule, have large areas of the same plant. Mixed planting helps to prevent some pests finding a home in your garden and adding flowers to your vegetable plot will attract beneficial insects.

Making your garden more attractive to wildlife draws in birds and animals that eat garden pests. Nooks and crannies for spiders and beetles, damp places for frogs and toads and food and nesting sites for birds are all easily achievable even in small gardens. If you can add trees, a source of water and some untidy areas your garden will be a wildlife haven.

Even so, a garden is not a natural ecosystem and a balance between pests and their predators is hard to build and maintain. There will be times when the gardener needs to intervene – not to wipe out the pests, but to reduce their population and help restore the natural balance.

The simplest chemical-free option for controlling pests is removing them by hand. This is easy enough to do for large pests, such as slugs and snails, but more difficult for aphids – a jet of water from the hosepipe will dislodge larger populations without harming plants. Yellow sticky traps are ideal in greenhouses and conservatories. They may not look attractive, but they catch many flying insects and will give you advance warning of which creatures are trying to attack your plants.

Traps and barriers are more often seen in the vegetable garden than flowerbeds. Everyone is familiar with the use of ‘slug pubs’, but a ring of bran around vulnerable plants may also offer some protection. Insect netting is perfect for preventing moths and butterflies from laying eggs that develop into caterpillars, but you need to check regularly that none have found a way inside and also that birds and other wildlife haven’t become entangled.

As a last resort, there are organic products available for controlling pest attacks. Biological controls introduce more predators (usually microscopic) into your environment to help restore the balance. Biological controls are targeted to specific pests, such as red spider mite or slugs. More general insect sprays will deal with aphids and other flying insects, but need to be applied carefully to avoid killing beneficial insects at the same time. And if slugs are your nemesis then you can even buy environmentally friendly slug pellets that aren’t harmful to other wildlife, pets or children.

Chemical-free slug control

Slugs and snails won’t cross copper barriers. Copper rings are ideal for protecting individual plants, copper tape can be applied to the rims of containers, or you can stand pots on copper mats.

Cloches made from clear plastic drinks bottles will shelter seedlings from bad weather and protect them from slug and snail attacks.

Rings of coffee grounds and other gritty substances encourage slugs to look elsewhere for a meal.

Collecting slugs by hand is not everyone’s idea of fun but can be very successful. Looks for slugs hiding under stones or leave grapefruit peel out for them to congregate underneath. Planting a row of sacrificial lettuces will ensure you know exactly where your slugs are, but you will then have to find a way to dispose of them. If your compost heap has a lid then try confining them inside, where they can help decompose your plant wastes.

This article first appeared in Country Gardener in April 2008. See how I deal with pest problems in my garden on my blog.

Posted 26 February 2010, 07:43. Comment

Recreating the Good Life - Press

Halfway through the second series of the Good Life, Jerry comes up with a way to help the Goods get some free stuff. When a journalist wants to interview them and write an article on their alternative lifestyle, Jerry persuades them to endorse local businesses in return for things they can use (or things that Jerry can use!).

The whole plan backfires when it turns out that the article is going to appear in a small local newspaper rather than the national press, as Jerry has envisaged, but now that we have the internet, social networking and a media clamouring for articles on people who are going green, it should be much easier to cash in.

It’s certainly true if you have a blog or website of any standing (i.e. one which has been around a while, had good content and a regular supply of visitors) – companies may come knocking at your door to offer you goods to review, or want to rent advertising space from you. It pays to be clear with your readership what form of deals you have accepted, though, as nothing turns people off quicker than obvious advertorials that don’t offer honest opinions or are off-topic. You should also be careful which advertisers you get into bed with – spammy adverts for things like fake degrees are disturbing, and off-topic adverts just annoying. It has to be said, though, that unless your website is about high revenue items like insurance or gadgets it’s hard to make money from advertising unless your site is extremely popular. Many website owners go for Google Adsense, which is highly respected, easy to use and provides context-sensitive adverts.

If you want to be in the mainstream media then you’ll need to keep an eye out for (usually unpaid) opportunities. BBC Countryfile Magazine currently has a ‘blog of the month’ featuring blogs on suitable topics, and a mention there could get you a lot of readers. Established gardening bloggers regularly contribute to the Guardian Gardening Blog in return for a high-profile link to their site.

If you have a self-sufficiency story to tell (especially if you gave good photos) then pitch it to Home Farmer magazine. Permaculture Magazine accepts articles on a wide range of permaculture-related topics, and barters for magazine copies or books.

To really make it into the big media leagues, though, it pays to be ancient. 2008 was the year of the Green Granny – with everyone from Oxfam, the Daily Mail and The Evening Standard running features on various eco-friendly OAPs.

Articles in the ‘Recreating the Good Life series’:
Recreating the Good Life: Cash Crops
Recreating the Good Life: Energy
Recreating the Good Life: Food Waste and Chickens
Recreating the Good Life: Pigs and Barter
Recreating the Good Life: Press

Posted 19 February 2010, 11:16. Comment

Eco Garden: Creating a new vegetable bed

A new raised bed

Whether you made a New Year’s resolution to cut your carbon footprint, or the credit crunch is putting pressure on your food budget, now is the perfect time to try growing some of your own vegetables. You don’t need a lot of space, or expensive kit, to get started – and it doesn’t need to take up a lot of your time.

Finding a space
First of all you’ll need to find some space for your vegetable patch. Most vegetables and fruits need a sunny spot, so think about which areas of your garden get the most light during the spring and summer (the peak growing times). Perhaps there’s a section of lawn that you could dig over, or room on the patio for a raised bed or some containers. Maybe you could grow some vegetables in your flower beds instead of splashing out on bedding plants – there are some varieties that look very ornamental. And don’t forget to look at your vertical spaces. Runner beans would look lovely clambering up a pergola, and you can train fruit bushes against walls and fences.

Try starting off with a small space, and think about expansion plans next year once you’ve got the hang of it.

Choosing crops
There are two golden rules when you’re starting a new kitchen garden. The first is that you should only grow things that you’re going to eat. It doesn’t matter what the latest trend in vegetables is, or what exciting new varieties are listed in the seed catalogues – if no one in your family likes turnips, or sprouts, or even carrots, then you’re wasting valuable space by growing them.

The second rule is not to try to grow everything at once. You need to be realistic about how much space you have. Being self-sufficient in potatoes is a pipe dream unless you have an allotment, but it’s easy to grow enough herbs and salads to last you all summer. A handful of home grown strawberries will be a treat on summer days, cherry tomatoes do well in containers and hanging baskets and if you’ve got a sunny spot or a greenhouse then red hot chilli peppers are fun and very attractive.

Courgettes are easy to grow and can provide huge harvests even when grown in a container. Don’t grow more than one or two plants unless you’re planning on feeding the whole street!

Water and compost
The last couple of years have been very wet, but the weather is unpredictable and it’s always worth being prepared for a hosepipe ban by installing a water butt or two in the garden. Fixed to the down pipe on the guttering, they collect water when it rains that is great for watering thirsty plants and washing cars. It’s something to think about now, before the weather really warms up.

When you start your new vegetable patch you might need to buy in some top soil or some potting compost, but if you start a compost heap at the same time then next year you will have your own compost – completely free. You could buy a plastic compost bin from your local council (prices generally rise in April, so order early) or from the garden centre, but if you’re handy then you can build your own out of wood.

Add garden waste, vegetable kitchen waste, cardboard and newspaper as and when you have them – and they’ll turn into compost over several months. If you only have a patio then investigate wormeries, which turn kitchen waste into compost and don’t take up much space.

This article first appeared in Country Gardener in March 2009. For more information on raised beds, listen to episode 9 of the Alternative Kitchen Garden Show.

Posted 12 February 2010, 07:34. Comment

Green Valentine Gifts

I’m sure you’ve noticed that Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. Shops are full of gifts – chocolates, roses, cuddly toys and lingerie are all perennial favourites, but usually not very eco-friendly or ethical. There are lots of ways to show your love that don’t involve physical gifts, but if you want to offer a token of your affection then try these greener ideas.

Flowers
It’s not rose season here in the UK, so roses either have to be flown in or grown in heated greenhouses. The florists as Wiggly Wigglers create magnificient displays from seasonal English flowers and foliage – much of it grown on the Wiggly Wigglers farm itself. For lower Flower Miles this year, check out their Valentine bouquets.

Chocolate
If you want to be sure that your chocolate is as environmentally friendly and ethical as possible then you need to choose Fair Trade or organic. You should be able to pick some up at your usual supermarket, but you can also order a nice selection from online shops such as Wiggly Wigglers and
Ethical Superstore.

Cuddly animals
For animal lovers, why not adopt an animal? The WWF has a range of plush toys that finance conservation work. You could also sponsor an animal at your local zoo or safari park – mine is Cotswold Wildlife Park, and they also offer a range of soft toys that you could team up with an adoption and you can also arrange to be a zookeeper for a day (which I’ve just done and can thoroughly recommend as a gift for someone who is not nervous with animals) and special animal encounters at the park.

Lingerie
Ethical Superstore offer fair trade cotton underwear for men and women; for something a bit more fancy try Green Knickers or People Tree.

Gardening Valentines
If the love of your life is a gardener then their ideal Valentine’s Day gift might look slightly different. Instead of giving them a bunch of roses, why not give them a rose to plant in the garden? It’s still the season to plant bare root roses, or those grown in pots, and the resulting plant will bloom for many years. Or perhaps some chocolate plants would go down well.

Suttons have teamed up with Breakthrough Breast Cancer this year with a range of special pink gardening items. Each sale of their pink potato planters, rhubarb crowns, hanging basket plants and speedy veg seed collections comes complete with a donation to the breast cancer charity.

And over at Harrod Horticultural you can buy a heart-shaped trowel and have it engraved with a special message (but you have to order by 9th February to guarantee a timely delivery).

Plan ahead! There’s nothing romantic about buying the last card and box of chocolates in the shop because you forgot!

Posted 7 February 2010, 09:51. Comment

Recreating the Good Life - Cash Crops

A full trug

After overcoming a potential disaster at the end of the first season of The Good Life, Tom has another pressing issue on hand – turning his surplus crops into the cash they’ll need to make it through until their next harvest. Although the Goods have reduced their consumption, and gone into bartering in a big way, they need hard cash to pay their rates (local taxes) and the feed bills for the animals. Tom reckons it will be easy to sell his surplus to a local restaurant, but soon finds it is harder than he thinks.

Smallholders these days might find life a little easier, as self-sufficiency becomes more mainstream and there’s lots of advice available on selling surplus allotment crops and farmers markets springing up all over the place. If you’re interested in starting your own local food project, then it’s worth getting your hands on a copy of ‘Local Food’ (you can read my review from Permaculture Magazine over at Transition Culture). You may also be able to barter produce for other services via a local LETS scheme.

And there’s always the option of a garden gate stall. I would recommend reading The Cottage Smallholder for inspiration on what might sell well.

Given that every plant and animal is vital to their household economy, Tom gets understandably upset when he finds out that they have a leek thief – every night someone swipes a handful of leeks. Tom takes matters into his own hands to deal with this two-legged pest, and ends up in prison for a few days! Hopefully that’s a drama that most people interested in self-sufficiency can avoid, but it’s fair to say that allotment crime is an issue that many have to deal with, whether it’s theft or vandalism. And the contaminated manure issue has affected, and no doubt will continue to affect, many people who are trying to live the good life.

Posted 5 February 2010, 10:53. Comment

Eco Garden: Composting

Gardeners are privileged to witness miracles on a daily basis – seeds germinating, buds unfurling and bees pollinating flowers. No less miraculous are the quiet miracles that take place in the compost heap, where tiny organisms turn waste products into compost, allowing the cycle of life to begin again.

To the uninitiated, the composting process looks complicated. Television gardeners often do nothing to dispel this myth, with sprawling heaps and endless vigour that allows them to turn their compost almost daily. But composting is a natural process that happens everywhere, daily, without interference. With a little help from us it can happen in our gardens almost as effortlessly.

Many gardeners’ first encounter with composting is with a plastic composter. Plastic composters are fantastic, but are not without their faults. Their plastic walls catch the sun and keep heat in, speeding the composting process, but are unattractive and often relegated to shady areas of the garden. They are easily assembled, but their steep sides and small openings make it hard to get a spade inside to turn the compost or extract it. A steady diet of kitchen waste and grass cuttings guarantees a slimy, smelly mess and many would-be composters must be discouraged by their first attempts.

CAT cold composting
The Centre for Alternative Technology has developed a cold composting process that is ideal for use in small gardens, and for plastic composters. This ‘high fibre’ method involves mixing kitchen and garden waste with crumpled paper and torn cardboard. Waste is added to the heap as and when it is available, creating a continuous composting process. The compost is never turned and will not heat up enough to kill weed seeds and plant diseases, but produces high quality compost with minimal effort.

Add crumpled waste paper and torn cardboard to the compost heap with kitchen and garden waste as they become available. The exact ratio doesn’t matter – the idea is to avoid thick layers of any one material.

There’s no need to turn the heap.

Don’t add diseased plant material or seeding weeds.

The compost will be ready to use within a couple of months in the summer, but will take longer in cold weather.

If you have access to the bottom of the heap then you can extract finished compost as and when you need it.

Worm composting
A worm composter is ideal for small gardens. Composting worms eat their way through much of our kitchen waste, producing a small amount of very rich compost and a large amount of liquid plant feed. Many people are squeamish about worms, but once they are settled into the wormery you rarely encounter them. Children have no such qualms and wormeries are an ideal introduction to composting for them.

Worm composters are living environments and need some care and protection. Worms freeze if exposed to cold weather, and drown if the wormery is not properly drained, but when properly managed a worm composter easily disposes of a family’s kitchen waste.

Bokashi bins
Compost heaps and wormeries will not deal with meat, dairy products or large amounts of cooked food. One solution is to invest in a Bokashi system, also known as EM (Effective Microorganism) composting. Food waste is added to airtight buckets with a sprinkling of EM-enriched bran. The microorganisms effectively pickle the waste and when you remove it from the bucket it will look exactly the same as when it went in – and smell strongly of vinegar. When added to a compost heap at this stage, the waste rapidly decomposes – with no danger of attracting rodents.

This makes Bokashi buckets ideal for collecting food waste from flats for community composting, but requires a continuous supply of Bokashi bran. The buckets used can be quite expensive.

Green cones
An alternative for people with access to an area of soil is a green cone. The green cone has a basket that is placed in a hole in the soil. The cone itself fits on top and should exclude vermin. A green cone can deal with any sort of kitchen waste, and also with animal faeces, but is not recommended for use with garden waste. The basket underneath the cone is emptied no more than once a year.

This article first appeared in Country Gardener in March 2008. If you’d like to know more about composting, there are various articles and podcasts available on this site – click here for links.

Posted 29 January 2010, 07:17. Comment

Recreating the Good Life - Energy

A big old heap of manure

Like many UK tv programs, each Good Life series was short – 7 episodes. I’m rounding up my look at the first series by seeing how the Goods dealt with their energy needs. Fairly early on they bartered their unwanted electrical appliances for a wood-burning range that heated their water and cooked their food. They can sometimes be seen bringing home fallen wood to feed it.

But they’re not without electricity for long, as Tom builds ‘the beast in the cellar’ – an effluence digester that turns animal manure into methane that he uses to fuel a generator. I don’t think they ever mention that the other output from an effluence digester is fertilizer (essentially compost) for the garden.

During one of my Open University courses I learned that these biogas digesters are quite common in households and smallholdings in China (particularly those that keep pigs, with the resulting waste problem), but as far as I know they’re few and far between here in the UK. If you want to be self-sufficient in energy here you’re more likely to be interested in micro-generation: photovoltaic solar panels and wind turbines for electricity generation and passive solar panels for water and space heating. Even in our not-so-sunny climate, it’s possible to generate a fair amount of your own energy using the right technology for your home. You can even export your surplus energy to the national grid if you have a certified set-up: see the Good Energy website for more information.

Even if you’re not in a position to generate your own energy, you can switch to a 100% renewable energy supplier. If you sign up for Good Energy and quote the offer code 104669 then you’ll get £25 off your first bill*.

The show never touches on the more delicate subject of human waste (can you imagine the look on Margot’s face?), but these days if you want to be self-sufficient, off-grid or simply more environmentally friendly then it’s worth looking into composting toilets. The seminal work on the subject, The Humanure Handbook is available online for free (in various formats), and I covered the use of urine in the garden in episode 29 of the Alternative Kitchen Garden Show. It has proved to be one of the most popular episodes!

Season 1 of The Good Life ends in disaster. A change in the weather turns the garden into a quagmire are harvest time, and Tom hurts his back into the bargain. There’s no way Barbara can bring the harvest in before it rots on her own, but Margo and Jerry come to the rescue – although Jerry has his leg in plaster and Margo is… Margo! It brings home an interesting point – that being self-sufficient or self-reliant doesn’t mean that you have no dealings with the outside world, just that the nature of your interactions changes. No man is an island, indeed.

There was an interesting article on Treehugger recently asking whether volunteerism is the permaculture version of cheap oil, because many permaculture projects rely on volunteers to get them off the ground and keep them running. The Goods also rely on the 1970s version of the WWOOF project (Willing Workers on Organic Farms) in season 2, when they offer board and lodging to a student couple in return for help on their allotment. Smaller schemes are springing up all over the world, like GroFun in Bristol, which has a community allotment but also provides gangs of workers to get vegetable plots up and running in private gardens.

Resources
You can buy all kinds of books on sustainable energy and appropriate technology from the Green Shopping Catalogue, as well as energy saving gadgets – cutting your energy use is the first step towards energy self-sufficiency. They also have a number of books on dealing with human waste, including the print version of the ‘Humanure Handbook’, ‘The Toilet Papers’ and the ever popular ‘How to Shit in the Woods’.

*If you use that code and save money then I make a little bit of money too, but we’ve been Good Energy customers for years and are more than happy with their service.

Posted 22 January 2010, 10:00. Comment

Eco Garden: Organic Fertilizers

In most gardens the compost heap is smaller than this!

Organic gardeners aim to feed the soil, and let a healthy soil take care of the plants. The best way to add fertility to your garden is to make compost, but in most gardens there is never enough compost to go around and there will be times when supplementary feeding is needed.

An obvious choice is to find a source of animal manure, but this is becoming increasingly difficult – many farmers and stables have realised that their waste products are a valuable resource. And if the animals are not organically raised then there are issues with chemical contamination.

If you do use manure then allow it to compost fully, in a separate heap, for three to six months before using it. Not only does this stabilize the nutrients (so that they’re not washed out by rain), but it also helps to reduce any contamination. Well-rotted manure can be dug into soil or applied to the surface as a mulch. It’s usually possible to buy well-rotted manure and ready-made compost in bags from garden centres.

Cultivating a comfrey patch in your garden can add considerably to its fertility. Comfrey draws up nutrients from the subsoil, and stores them in leaves. Comfrey is a vigorous plant and can be cut several times each year. The leaves are used as a compost activator, as a mulch or to make a liquid feed.

The standard method for making a liquid feed is to cover comfrey leaves in water and leave them for several weeks to decompose. The resulting brew is then watered down before use. However, there’s a real problem with this method – the liquid feeds it produces reek.

A better method is to allow the comfrey leaves to decompose without added water. A bucket with a tap is ideal for this, as it allows you to drain off the finished liquid; the remains of the comfrey leaves can go on the compost heap. This method is almost odourless. The resulting liquid can be diluted 15:1 with water before use.

Comfrey liquid is an ideal food for flowers and for fruiting vegetables such as tomatoes – rich in potassium and phosphorous, but low in nitrogen that would promote leafy growth.

There is a good range of commercially available organic fertilizers, although you may need to find an online retailer if your local garden centre doesn’t stock them. Many products use seaweed because it contains many trace nutrients, making it a balanced feed for plants that promotes strong growth. Seaweed meal is slow acting, dug in before planting. Seaweed extract is a great tonic or booster, used as a liquid or foliar feed.

Pelleted organic poultry manure is also widely available. This is potent stuff, very rich in nitrogen, and should be used sparingly.

N, P & K

Commercial fertilizers will have their NPK content listed on the label. Choose the right fertilizer for the job, and apply it at the rate suggested on the packaging.

Nitrogen (N) is the main nutrient involved in leafy growth. A fertilizer that is high in nitrogen can be used on leafy vegetables and to promote rapid growth in spring. Organic sources include poultry manure and hoof & horn. Too much nitrogen can encourage soft plant growth that is susceptible to pests and diseases.

Phosphate (P) is needed for good root growth. Organic sources include bonemeal and rock phosphate, but phosphate-only fertilizers are generally only applied to correct a known deficiency.

Potassium (K) promotes fruiting and flowering and organic products are generally made from plant sources. On its own potassium is best applied at the beginning of the season.

This article first appeared in Country Gardener in July 2008. For more information on organic fertilizers, listen to episode 88 of the Alternative Kitchen Garden Show.

Posted 15 January 2010, 07:08. Comment

Eco Garden: No Dig Gardening

The No Dig Garden at Garden Organic Ryton in June 2006

Every spring there’s an outbreak of bad backs across the country as gardeners, who have mostly been tucked up in the warm all winter, go out to dig their vegetable gardens. No doubt there are many more who stay inside, believing that they should be digging their plots but unable to muster up any enthusiasm. And what about the non-gardeners, who would love to grow some of their own food but are put off by the hard work they believe it entails?

One possible solution to all of these problems is No Dig gardening. No Dig gardening is one of the most controversial topics in gardening. There are passionate Diggers and committed No Diggers who all believe that they are following the One True Path to soil fertility.

The truth is that, done properly, either digging your garden or following No Dig principles will yield good results. Which you choose should depend on which works best for you.

The main advantage of a No Dig system is obvious – it does away with the heavy digging that many people simply can’t manage. This leaves you with more time and energy to devote to other gardening tasks.

When you stop disturbing your soil by digging, you stop disrupting the complex ecosystem that exists in your soil – allowing earthworms and a lot of other soil organisms to flourish. They then take over some of the garden work for you. Earthworms naturally distribute organic matter through the entire layer of topsoil, leaving behind tunnels that aerate the soil as they go. Other soil organisms help to break down organic matter into plant nutrients, and their actions make it easier for plants to access the fertility they need.

These natural improvements to the soil improve drainage and minimize water loss. Soil improvers are added to the surface as mulches, which slows evaporation and reduces the need to water. The use of mulches also helps to control weeds – another big time saver.

There are some disadvantages to the No Dig method, of course. With badly compacted or poor soils there may be a need for an initial dig to make the soil workable. And although No Dig methods are great for reducing the amount of annual weed seeds that come to the surface and germinate, perennial weeds need to be removed before you start or they become a big problem. Soil improvement is a more gradual process, and there are some underground pests that are normally kept under control by exposing them to birds by digging.

If you love digging and are happy with your garden then No Dig is not for you. But if you find digging a chore and would rather spend your time mulching, then give it a go – you’ve got nothing to lose except the back ache!

The Golden Rules of No Dig Gardening

Don’t walk on the soil. If you compact your soil by walking on it then digging is the only rapid way to fix the problem. No Dig gardening is easiest if you have a system of beds and paths.

Use mulches to cover the soil. Mulches add fertility, reduce evaporation and soil erosion and help to control weeds.

Minimize soil disturbance. Some disturbance is inevitable, for example when planting out and harvesting, but disturbing the soil brings weed seeds to the surface.

Remove perennial weeds first, by digging them out if necessary. They are hard to control in a No Dig system.

Try to deal with problems organically – when you disrupt the soil ecosystem with chemicals, it has trouble doing its job properly.

This article first appeared in Country Gardener magazine in October 2008. If you would like to know more about soil, listen to episode 44 of the Alternative Kitchen Garden Show on soil composition.

Posted 1 January 2010, 06:52. Comment [1]

December Gardening Offers

With Christmas coming up, there are lots of gardening offers coming and going.

You can save 10% on all the gardening and eco goodes in the CAT shop by quoting the discount code CLSX09. If you’d like to give a CAT membership as a gift then you can save 15% – call 01654 705988 and quote xmas0974. If you are a CAT member yourself then they’ll give you a 2 month extension on your membership for free, too. These offers are valid until 31 December 2009.

Jekka’s Herb Farm is offering free delivery on their Winter Salad and Chef’s Delight herb plant collections. You can also now become a fan on their Facebook page and follow their updates on Twitter.

Order before 11 December 2009 at Plants4Presents and you can save £2 if you quote the code Earlybird – it’s valid for online and telephone orders and they have some edible plants on offer, including tea bushes, cranberries and limes.

And the Green Shopping Catalogue is offering a free copy of ‘Through the Eye of a Needle’ to all customers who spend over £30. They have a lovely selection of gardening tools and books (including mine!), as well as other eco-friendly stuff. And you’ll get free P&P on orders over £15 as well. The free book offer is valid while stocks last, or until 28 February 2010.

Posted 2 December 2009, 10:21. Comment [2]

November Gardening Offers

Summer is long gone and we’re into the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Or cold weather and rain, if you’re not a big fan of autumn and winter!

If you’re still gathering in your crops then you can save 10% on harvesting and storage equipment at Harrod Horticultural if you use the discount code ECODE266 when you checkout.

Wiggly Wigglers have extended the deadline on their offers for new customers to 31st December. They’re valid online and over the phone, and you could bag yourself a free book and/ or save £10 on your first order.

And the latest crop of offers from Suttons includes plenty of fruit and nut trees, soft fruit and mushroom kits.

Posted 9 November 2009, 12:24. Comment

Recreating The Good Life - Pigs and barter

Rodney, a Gloucester Old Spot boar

I’m carrying on my look at self-sufficiency in the 21st century, looking back at The Good Life sitcom from the 1970s (in the first article I looked at food waste and chickens).

Today’s topics come from episodes 3 and 4 (‘The Weaker Sex’ and ‘Pig’s Lib’). The beginning of episode 3 is lovely if you’re a gardener – the Goods are out in their front garden, taking photos of their almost invisible pea seedlings, so proud of producing new life and having their first crops underway. A visit by the rag and bone man allows Tom to swap some of their unwanted gadgets for something much more useful – a range that they can cook on when the electricity is shut off.

There aren’t many rag and bone men still inoperation today, I shouldn’t think, but there has been a resurgence in recycling and in reusing things that in recent years would have been thrown away. The digital age has given us Freecycle, which allows us to give away unwanted items to people from our community who can make use of them, and receive their unwanted items in return. It’s a great way to turn trash into treasure. A range might be a tall order, but you never know! Some local action groups run swap shops, so keep an eye out for those; and, of course, charity shops and jumble sales retain their appeal.

The subject of barter comes up in episode 4, as Tom exchanges fresh eggs for his copy of a pig keeping magazine. Urban pig keeping was popular during the war, when streets clubbed together to feed their kitchen waste to a pig that then provided them with a share of its meat when it was sent to slaughter. Something similar was shown on River Cottage when a group of families in Bristol took on a communal smallholding, complete with a pair of piggies.

Urban pigkeeping may be a step too far for many of us, who simply don’t have the space, but apparently it is becoming more popular – with at least one DIY chain stocking pigsties. But there’s a lot of paperwork involved these days, and you can’t find your pigs (or other livestock) on kitchen scraps since the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak (see the DEFRA website for more information).

Resources: websites
River Cottage is a great resource for people interested in food issues, including keeping livestock and making the most of your ingredients. They publish handbooks and run courses on many aspects of self-sufficiency, including foraging and preserving.
Self-Sufficientish is a website for people who would like to be self-sufficient but don’t have the space to do it all.
The Accidental Smallholder has a nice introduction to keeping pigs, and there’s a lot more into on The Pig Site.
LETS is an upgrade on barter that uses a local currency to facilitiate the exchange of goods and services; local currencies are also springing up as part of the Transition Towns movement towards relocalization.

Feel free to leave other useful links in the Comments.

Posted 9 November 2009, 11:47.

Recreating The Good Life - Food Waste and Chickens

The Good Life was a sitcom shown on the BBC in the mid-70s (when shown in the US it was re-titled Good Neighbors). Although it got off to a slow start it ran to four seasons and became an incredibly popular show with lasting appeal.

The Good Life follows the life of Tom and Barbara Good after Tom turns 40. In the first episode, ‘Plough Your Own Furrow’, Tom’s stagnating career in a meaningless design job provokes a mid-life crisis. Discussing the mysterious ‘it’ that is missing from their life, the couple decide that they need to break the cirle of working to earn money to buy things that then break, sending them back to work for more money. Since they don’t aspire to owning a lot of ‘things’, they decide to have a go at self-sufficiency in their own back garden, in the upmarket suburb of Surbiton.

Although the sets might be dated, the idea of self-sufficiency is currently undergoing a resurgence. Many people find themselves in meaningless jobs; many more have found themselves without work as a result of the recession. And even among those who are content in their day jobs, there is a significant drive towards living more sustainable lives – growing some of your own food, generating some of your own energy, embracing alternative lifestyles and economies, recycling and thrift. The Goods were lucky in that they owned their house outright, and had a large garden – both things that modern urban gardeners are likely to struggle with. So how easy would it be to recreate the Good Life in the 21st century?

By the end of the first episode, Tom has resigned from his job, swapped the car for a rotary cultivator (a rotivator) and started to dig up the front garden. A surprising step in Surbiton, this would still raise eyebrows in most UK communities – and in many North American towns would be against the rules governing what people can and can’t grow in their front yard (although there is a movement towards Food, Not Lawns).

In episode 2 – ‘Say Little Hen…’ – the first of the livestock arrives. Tom takes the goat down to the common for some free grazing – something that is still legal where common land exists. Meanwhile, Barbara is tearing down a perfectly good greenhouse to turn it into a chicken run. These days urban farmers are more likely to be investing in a greenhouse or polytunnel so that they can grow the marginal crops like tomatoes and peppers that have become an indispensable part of the modern diet, and also extend the season to have fresh produce year-round rather than rely on stored food all through the winter.

The couple are also economising – cutting out all the luxury expenditure so that their savings will last them through until their first harvest provides them with a surplus to sell or barter. And they’re recycling their waste (“refuse is not rubbish”) and leftovers – two trends that have resurfaced of late. The BBC have been showing Economy Gastronomy and teaching people how to shop properly and cook basic meals to save on their food bills, and we’re being encouraged to Love Food, Hate Waste to keep food out of landfill while keeping our money in our wallets. Retailers were quick to bring back old-fashioned joints of meat as people moved away from premium lines.

Once the chickens arrived, the Goods eagerly awaited their first harvest – but the hens were disinclined to lay. The couple face the dilemma of whether (and how) to kill a chicken, something that urban farmers still face today. An advantage that we have that the Goods didn’t have is the profusion of information available to us – on the internet and in books and magazines published on every imaginable topic. We may not have the skills our farming forbears took for granted, but we can learn them, and there are plenty of courses and workshops springing up all over the place as more people become interested.

So this is just the first article in a new series. I’m going to look at the challenges the Goods faced through their four years on television, and see how different (or similar) our modern attempts at urban self-sufficiency are – because I truly believe that the time is coming when we’re all going to need to know how to produce some of our own food and energy, consume less and produce far less waste than we do now.

Resources: magazines
Permaculture Magazine, the leading environmental magazine dedicated to sustainable living and self-sufficiency in the 21st century.
Mother Earth News, an American magazine devoted to homesteading, organic gardening, renewable energy and green homes, real food and DIY – with a vast archive of material available via their website.
Home Farmer covers everything to do with living ‘the good life’, from kitchen gardening and keeping livestock through to cooking and preserving.
Grow Your Own is one of the best titles if you’re into growing veggies – it’s great for beginners and hasn’t been running as long as some of the other magazines available on this topic and so isn’t stuck in a gardening rut.

These are just my favourites of the available titles – if you have a favourite then leave the link in the comments :) I will cover other resources in future articles.

Posted 26 October 2009, 15:35.

Ooffoo Laureate 2010

It’s Ooffoo Laureate time again. If you remember, last time I was shortlisted for my article on worm composting (there’s a badge over in the sidebar :)

This time the requirement is to write a letter to a world leader, or a person of global significance. The award will go to the person who is judged to have written the most impressive and inspiring letter – one that offers hope or encouragement and is aimed at helping to change things for the better. The closing date for entries is 31st Demember 2009 and the prize is £1000!

You can enter as many letters as you like. Check out my first entry – Dig for Victory, a letter supporting Michelle Obama’s decision to start a White House vegetable garden. If you like it, please click on the little heart symbol near the top to show your appreciation!

Posted 17 September 2009, 17:50.

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