Articles: coopette.com

Composting Awareness Week

Worms doing their job in my worm compost bin

There’s still 2 days left of Compost Awareness Week, so here’s a round-up of some composty goodness:

A hot topic among the Oxfordshire Master Composters at the training sessions was how to keep rats out of your compost, something that many people worry about, but which need not be a problem.

If you can’t live without your caffeine fix, then you might want to consider composting your coffee – some coffee shops will even give you their waste coffee grounds to take home, for free.

Read my thoughts on Bokashi composting or my compost weeds clinic.

Or check out the Alternative Kitchen Garden podcast for information on general composting, worm composting and cold composting.

Posted May 8, 06:33 AM. Comment

Country Gardener: Companion planting

My copy of the May edition of Country Gardener magazine has arrived, with one of their new hessian bags! Perfect for carrying plants around, or doing a bit of shopping. They also do notecards and a 2009 Edible Garden calender. If you’re a fan then you can download a copy of the mail order form and buy your own. (I’m not on commission!)

This edition will be available in a farm shop or similar outlet near you from 1st May. This month the latest article in my Eco Garden series is on companion planting.

Posted Apr 28, 10:07 AM. Comment

The HowToDoThings Guide to Green Living

Over at How To Do Things they collected together a whole bunch of articles on green living topics for Earth Day.

Some of my articles are featured:

How to use urine as a fertilizer
How to control slugs without chemicals
and How to garden with wildlife in mind (which was aimed mainly at kids).

But if you pop over and check out the whole Guide to Green Living there’s plenty of other writers involved too, and you can learn about green spring cleaning, treating asthma in an earth-friendly way and packing an eco-friendly lunch, among other things.

Posted Apr 26, 10:29 AM. Comment

Container herbs for beginners

Increasingly, we’re being told that we can green up our lifestyle by growing some of our own food. Articles everywhere suggest that everyone can grow a few herbs on the windowsill, but if you’ve never gardened before then that’s not as simple as it sounds. Here is a basic run down of what you’ll need, and what you’ll need to know, to grow some easy culinary herbs in pots.

Firstly, you will need some containers. Herb plants are sold in small pots, which will quickly be outgrown. Look for some containers that are at least 15 cm in diameter (but they don’t need to be huge). If they don’t have drainage holes in the bottom then you’ll need to punch some yourself.

You’ll also need some compost – potting or multipurpose is fine for most herbs. Look out for ones that say they are peat-free. You won’t need a large bag to pot up a few herbs; your containers might have their volume printed on the bottom. If not, estimate how much compost you’ll need.

Herb plants can be divided into two main categories. Perennial herbs live for several years whilst for annual herbs you’ll need new plants each year.

Perennial culinary herbs include thyme, mint, rosemary and oregano. There are many different varieties of each, but the most useful varieties will be widely available. For perennial plants it’s easiest to buy a small plant from the garden centre and grow that on at home.

Thyme is a low-growing plant that likes sunny and dry conditions. Rosemary likes the same things, but makes a much larger plant. You can get upright rosemary and prostrate (which grows down over the side of the pot), but the flavour is the same. And oregano is another herb in this group (known as Mediterranean herbs, because they like it sunny and dry) and also grows quite tall, but oregano is much less woody than rosemary.

With all of these sun loving herbs, you will need to water them to start with when you plant them into your pots. But once they show signs of new growth you can leave it longer between watering and let the compost dry out. Never leave them sitting in water, because they will rot. They are tough plants and usually survive the winter, but you may want to bring them under cover in a wet winter.

Mint is different, it can handle a lot more water and more shade than the Mediterranean herbs. It’s also a thug – keep it in a container by itself, because it will push out anything else that’s planted with it.

With just a little bit of care, perennial herbs will provide all the fresh leaves you need for several years. If they start to look too big for their pots, you can either pot them into bigger pots, or tip them out and divide them into sections and replant the sections into different pots – so you’ll have more plants for your garden, or to share.

The cheapest way to grow annual herbs, like basil, coriander and parsley, is to buy some seeds and sow them yourself. If you sow them indoors, on the windowsill, the warmer conditions indoors will help them to germinate more quickly.

Parsley is best sown early in the spring, for summer harvests, and in late summer for autumn and winter harvests. Parsley will happily live indoors on the windowsill, or outside on the patio. The seeds can take a few weeks to germinate, though, so be patient. One or two parsley plants should be enough at any one time. Parsley likes sunny spots, but more water than the Mediterranean herbs.

Coriander likes warmer weather than parsley, so don’t put your plants outside until the weather has warmed up (usually May) or the cold will kill them. Keep harvesting leaves from your coriander, even if you don’t want to use them. Coriander runs to seed very quickly, and then the leaves taste bitter, but regular harvesting slows it down. Sow a pot of seeds every couple of weeks for a continuous supply throughout the summer. Bring a couple of pots indoors if you want fresh coriander through the winter.

Basil is a sun-loving herb, so don’t sow your seeds too early in the year unless the plants will be growing indoors – they don’t like cold weather. Keep your basil well watered, and harvest leaves even if you don’t use them, because (like coriander) this will stop the plants flowering too soon.

When your annual herbs are flowering, put them and their used potting compost onto the compost heap and start again with fresh seeds and fresh compost – used potting compost has no plant nutrients left in it to feed new plants. If you don’t have a compost bin yet then it’s time to start one so that you can turn your plant and kitchen waste into home made compost to feed your herbs next year!

Posted Apr 23, 04:44 PM. Comment

Spring green manures

Spring is a busy time for gardeners, with seeds to be sown, digging and planting to be done, and the first weeds making an appearance. Green manures may not be the first things that you think of to sow, but there are many green manures that are ideal for spring sowing and bring many benefits to your garden.

At this time of year there are two primary benefits to sowing a green manure. If you have bare ground that you’re not going to cultivate in the next few weeks then sowing a green manure helps to avoid weed problems and add fertility to the soil. Choose the green manure you sow according to the amount of time your soil will be fallow – there are varieties that mature in a few weeks and some that can be left in place for much longer times. This is an ideal way to get a new allotment under control – cultivate a small portion for now, and sow green manures on the rest until you’re ready for more.

Green manures are crops grown specifically to add nutrients to the soil. They are dug into the ground before they flower and get tough and woody, and left to rot down and add organic matter. Some green manures are also nitrogen fixers, able to actively add nitrogen to the soil and make it more fertile. If you’ve got a patch of soil that will be vacant for 2-3 months, then sowing a nitrogen-fixing green manure will give your next crop a big boost. Some green manures can even be used to undersow permanent plantings – adding fertility as they grow, without disturbing your perennials.

You can also grow a patch of green manure to cut and use as a mulch elsewhere, or to provide green material for the compost heap.

When you’re choosing a green manure to sow in spring, you need to take several factors into account. The first is the sowing time, as some can be sown earlier in the year than others. The second is the length of time that you want the green manure to be in place for. The third is what benefits you are hoping to achieve – do you need a nitrogen fixer, or are you looking for a green manure that gives excellent weed suppression? And last, but by no means least, if you are using green manures on your vegetable plot then you need to keep your crop rotation in mind – some green manures are from common vegetable families, and need to be used in accordance with the rotation.

Nitrogen fixers you can sow in early spring include Crimson clover and lupin. Both can be sown right through into summer, are left in place for 2 or 3 months and prefer lighter soils. Fenugreek is also a nitrogen fixer, if you have suitable bacteria in your soil, and prefers well-drained soil. Fenugreek will inhibit seed germination – good for weedy plots, but you will have to wait several weeks after digging it in before you can sow seeds. Transplants will be unaffected.

Trefoil is another nitrogen fixer. Its claim to fame is that it can tolerate some shade and is very low growing – ideal for undersowing hungry plants, and you can leave it in place for months (it may even survive the winter).

Mustard is quick growing, needing only 1 to 2 months in the soil. It’s a member of the Brassica family though, so be careful with your crop rotation. Phacelia needs a month longer, but isn’t related to vegetables. And if you can let a small patch flower, the bees around your patch will love you for it.

As spring moves on you can sow Essex red clover, a nitrogen fixer that can be left in place for up to 18 months. You can even sow winter tares for a quicker nitrogen boost – they take 2 to 3 months to mature.

And by late spring you can be sowing alfalfa, a nitrogen fixer that should be left in place for a year or longer to have the most effect. Buckwheat is the best choice for poor soils, giving a nutrient boost in 1 to 3 months.

Whichever green manure you choose, remember to dig it in (or cut it down, if you follow the No Dig approach) before it flowers, when the growth is softer and will be incorporated into the soil more easily. Then sit back and let the earthworms and other soil creatures do the rest of soil improvement for you.

If you’re interested in growing a permanent supply of fertility for your garden, then consider a comfrey patch.

A different selection of plants are grown as autumn green manures.

Here in the UK, the Organic Gardening Catalogue has one of the best selections of green manure seeds.

Posted Apr 9, 08:04 AM. Comment

Wanna be a nature writer?

If you’ve ever fancied being a nature writer, then check out this competition from BBC Wildlife Magazine and Earthwatch.

You’ve only got until the end of April to enter, but it looks like you can write on any (relevant) subject. You have to have had your 18th birthday before 1 January 2008 to qualify, but you can be a published writer.

The prize is publication of your article in BBC Wildlife and on the Love Earth website, plus a place on one of Earthwatch’s expeditions – to Spain, Vietnam or South Africa. And when you come back you get to write another article about your experiences.

It’s all a bit intrepid for me, but it’s a golden opportunity for a writer somewhere….

Posted Apr 9, 06:19 AM. Comment

Garden Footprints

With Earth Hour coming up tomorrow, it seems like a good time to look at the environmental impact of gardening.

Gardening is universally seen as an environmentally friendly pursuit – and it is, but that doesn’t mean that it is completely environmentally benign.

Last year I participated in one of Garden Organic’s members experiments, looking at the ecological footprint of gardening (ecological footprints are a way of estimating the environmental impacts of products and activities). They’re continuing their work this year – they sent me the report on last year’s experiment to read and comment on this year.

Garden Organic members are, pretty much by definition, people who garden organically, grow some of their own food and are environmentally conscious. But the report shows that growing some of your own fruit and vegetables can make a real saving on your overall environmental footprint – up to 6%, similar to installing double glazing, replacing an old boiler or cutting down on your car use.

The things which ramp up a garden footprint are buying in products that have a long supply chain, or use energy – like power tools. Making sure that you buy good quality tools, and maintaining them properly so that they last a long time, is a good way of cutting down on your garden footprint.

It’s also important to close nutrient cycles, by composting, and add fertility from home-made products such as comfrey liquid and green manures.

So the good news is that having a kitchen garden is environmentally friendly, but it’s important to keep an eye on what you buy. As in many other areas of life, adapting a frugal mindset in the garden will save the environment as well as your wallet.

Posted Mar 28, 10:51 AM. Comment

Caffeine Awareness Month

To celebrate Caffeine Awareness Month, How To Do Things have collected together a variety of articles about coffee.

You may already have read my contribution – How to Compost with Coffee – and my blog post on the coffee grounds I carried all the way home from Starbucks in London.

But if you pop along to How To Do Things you’ll be able to read all kinds of other interesting stuff about coffee, including the 10 top uses for coffee grounds and how to grow your own coffee plant.

Posted Mar 19, 06:49 AM. Comment

Frugal Gardening

Fruit seedlings, grown from pips

The lovely folks over at Peazyshop (a website and forum dedicated to saving money) asked me to write an article about frugal gardening.

With the rise of green consumerism, it sometimes seems as though the only thing we can do to save the planet is to spend money – on the latest eco-gadget, organic products or stylish recycling bins.

But the truth is that being eco-friendly and saving money often go hand in hand. Although there is a very strong link between poverty and environmental degradation, that isn’t an issue that most people in the Western world have to battle with.

If you would like more information about any of the subjects mentioned in the frugal gardening article, then have a look around the website, because they keep coming up. Here’s a selection of related pages to get you started:

Compost
Compost on the Alternative Kitchen Garden show
CAT ‘High Fibre’ Composting
Worm composting on the Alternative Kitchen Garden show
Harvesting worm compost

Water
Water-wise gardening on the Alternative Kitchen Garden Show
Make your own recycled weather station

Garden recycling
20 garden uses for a plastic bottle on the AKG
Using paper in the garden

Seeds
Seeds, an extra harvest from your garden
Seed saving on the AKG
Planting pips on the AKG
Seed swaps on the AKG

Posted Mar 12, 07:04 AM. Comment

Article round-up 2

Rhubarb leaves emerging

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last round up of articles that I’ve published elsewhere on the web.

At How To Do Things they’ve been collecting articles about coffee, so my contribution is How to Compost with Coffee, an article that has already been mentioned on about.com, which is very exciting (thanks to Madeleine for pointing that out).

And I’ve also been talking about making rosti, which is the latest thing we’ve mastered in our kitchen. If you follow the link to the article, it’s got a link to a great YouTube video about rosti at the end.

I’ve also been busy on Helium, talking about why I love each season, my ten favourite plants (all edible!), the importance of recycling and composting in the garden and how to start gardening early in the year.

Posted Feb 27, 07:51 AM. Comment

Eco Garden: Composting

Over the winter I’ve been beavering away on a series of green gardening articles for Country Gardener magazine. Country Gardener is free, with separate editions published in several southern UK regions. It gets distributed through various outlets – farm shops, garden centres, tourist board offices, etc. If you follow the above link you can find out exactly where to pick up a copy in your local area.

It’s also possible to subscribe – for £9.50 to cover P&P – to any of the editions. Ring 01872 247521 for further details.

Each edition is due to be published on the first of the month. My articles are due to appear as follows:

March – Composting
April – Dealing with pests
May – Companion planting
June – The green lawn
July – Fertilizers
August – Wildlife gardening
September – Seed saving
October – No Dig gardening
November – Water-wise gardening

Posted Feb 21, 11:29 AM. Comment

Using paper in the garden

Paper plant pots, for seedlings

A blog post on the Guardian website this morning says that only 1/3 of the paper used in Britain is currently recycled. The benefits of recycling paper are well known – preserving forests, cutting down on methane emissions from landfill and saving energy, water and pollution. Recycling is not without it’s controversies, of course, but in general it’s hard to argue that we shouldn’t be doing it.

We are very lucky because our local council has a good recycling scheme and we put our waste paper in our green bin each week and watch it being taken away for recycling. Considering we don’t take a daily newspaper (we tend to get our news online), refuse free newspapers, have signed up for the Mailing Preference Service to ditch junk mail and have a largely paperless home office, it’s amazing how much waste paper we still produce.

Some of it is recycled in the garden. Newspaper, when we get it, is a valuable resource in this household. We use it to line the nest box in the Eglu, making it much easier to clean the chickens out. I also use some of it to make paper pots for seedlings.

Sensitive paper waste, with personal details on it, is all shredded. We use some of the shredded paper for the chicken’s nest box. When we clean them out, the resulting mess goes on the compost heap. The rest of the shredded paper goes directly onto the compost heap, or into the worm bin, adding valuable carbon and dry material to balance nitrogen-rich plant and kitchen waste. I’m also considering using it as a mulch – a small-scale trial this summer is in order.

If you’ve got more ways of making use of ‘waste’ paper, particularly in the garden, then I’d love to hear them. In the meantime, we’ll carry on recycling and closing the loop by making sure that the paper products we do buy are made from recycled paper.

My latest article on Helium is also on this theme – have a look at ‘The importance of recycling and composting in the garden’.

Posted Feb 15, 08:20 AM. Comment

Article round-up

I have been busy working on a big writing project, which is Top Secret at the moment. I will be able to tell you all about it in a few weeks, but in the meantime I have written a couple of articles you may be interested in reading:

15 UK online stores for fruit and vegetable plants, a handy reference list if you’re going to be buying vegetable plants for your garden this year.

How to grow mustard and cress, a quick guide to growing a seedling crop (a nice rainy day project for kids!).

And How to buy plants, hints on how to get your money’s worth if you’re splashing out on plants at the garden centre or online.

Posted Feb 5, 07:34 AM. Comment

The AeroGarden

I haven’t written anything for Helium for a long time, but one of their latest article titles caught my eye this morning: AeroGrow’s AeroGarden.

I keep seeing pictures of the AeroGarden, and it has obviously been designed to make gardeners want one. It’s a table-top, computer-controlled growing system that guarantees a hearty crop of herbs, salad vegetables or even flowers with no mess and no fuss.

I’d love to say I don’t want one, or to be able to say it’s the worst thing that’s happened to gardening since the development of chemical pesticides, but it has appeared on the TreeHugger blog, so it can’t be that bad.

Apparently it uses less energy than a 60 Watt light bulb. The blurb on the AeroGarden American website says that the nutrient pods are ‘organic-based’, but I have no idea what that means. It is considerably more expensive than a packet of seeds and a bag of compost though. The UK distributor is selling them for £130 (excluding delivery) and extra seed pods are £15 – including the Master Gardener kit that makes it possible for you to grow your own seeds in the AeroGarden, with a year’s supply of seed pods and nutrients.

Has anyone got one an AeroGarden? It’s way out of my price range for the moment.

Posted Jan 18, 09:22 AM. Comment

Great Gardening Giveaways

If you want to get your hands on the latest gardening gear without spending a lot of money, then you could try entering some of the many garden-related competitions and giveaways that spring up online.

These are some of the ones that I’ve found – if you’ve got a good one, please leave a comment!

GardeningMags, updated monthly. Home of Garden Answers and Garden News. Not the prettiest website ever, but there are also articles and features online, with seasonal tips. Apparently you can also order a copy of the magazine with a personalized cover!
Gardeners’ World. New giveaways published with each new edition of the magazine. Not a bad site, with blogs from leading garden writers.
Kitchen Garden has regular monthly giveaways. You can also download a PDF of their shopping deals.
Organic Gardening has lost some of its personality now that it’s been taken over by the people who own Kitchen Garden, and the websites are practically identical. Giveaways are a bit erratic.
Grow Your Own has the largest selection of giveaways, updated monthly. Even so, it’s not as many as are available to people who buy the magazine. They list their current competition on a different page. Their Grapevine forum is pretty popular, too.
Dobies give a £25 gift voucher out each month to the sender of the best garden photograph.
Harrod Horticultural give away an item from their catalogue every month.
Gardening.co.uk offer regular competitions, and there’s a prize draw for all new members each month.
The Citrus Centre give away one of their plants each month to mailing list subscribers. You have to enter each month though.
Loquax is a good site for finding gardening competitions, although recent ones have included plastic plants (!) and any book prizes are listed separately.
If you’re in the US then it’s worth checking out Organic Gardening, who have a regular giveaway on their home page.
Canadian Gardening has a competitions page, but it’s currently on sabbatical for the winter.

Checkout Muppet’s Moolah for specific garden-related freebies and discounts.

Posted Jan 14, 09:59 AM. Comment [1]

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