Articles: coopette.com

August Gardening Offers

You can order a copy of ‘Plot, pots or growbags – the A-Z guide to growing and cooking farm-fresh food’ for £6.60 (RRP £9.99) plus free P&P from GrowVeggies.net.

Grow Sheffield have published The Abundance Handbook as a free PDF download – it’s a a guide to harvesting fruit in the city.

Jungle Seeds have now extended their summer plant sale to all plants showing on both www.junglegardens.co.uk and www.jungleseeds.com and are also now offering FREE Post & Packing on all UK plant orders over £35. They’re continuing their 25% discount on seeds, too.

Ronaash are having a summer, sale with 25% off Rootrainers during August, and the current crop of special offers from Suttons include an autumn brassica collection, blueberries and goji berries.

Posted 1 August 2009, 18:51. Comment

Putting away childlish things

There’s a lot of articles in the media at the moment about encouraging children to start gardening, and little projects to help them get their hands dirty and develop a life-long interest in plants and growing their own food and to encourage them to eat their vegetables.

It’s lovely, and we need to pass on gardening skills to future generations, but what if you’ve been sharing your garden with the little darlings for years and now that they’ve moved out you’re left with a pile of childish clutter to clear out so that you can have a proper garden? If you’re strapped for cash, or don’t want to throw away their play things, then how about recycling them into something useful? Here are my ideas – by all means add yours in the comments, or leave a link to photos if you’ve finished your own project!

If your children or grandchildren have flown the coop then why not modify their playhouse in a home for chickens? Keeping hens at home is all the range at the moment, and they don’t need pricey 5-star accommodation, just somewhere safe and dry to roost and lay their eggs.
Swings and climbing frames would make a really sturdy support for runner beans, vines, squash or any number of other climbing plants that are edible or otherwise useful.
A paddling pool or a sandpit makes a great watertight container for a patio pond, or if you could try growing your own rice or watercress.
If the kids were footy fans then how about turning that old goal post into a fruit cage?
And if you have one of those little todder slides, it might make a nice water feature with water tumbling down!
Lots of kids items could be used as plant pots, from wellies to wagons. This one is only limited by your imagination :)

Don’t forget to leave your ideas and links in the comments, or you can email me a link for me to add here.

Posted 1 August 2009, 17:36. Comment

Growing Sorrel

Sorrel is usually described as a herb, but it is a leafy green that can be used as a vegetable. As sorrel is perennial, and available for much of the year, this can be a great addition to a kitchen garden – it’s really easy to grow, doesn’t need replacing every year and can be a good source of greens during cold weather and the infamous ‘hungry gap’ in spring.

Growing sorrel is simply a matter of sowing seeds in spring (I sowed mine in modules to transplant, but you could sow where you want it to grow). It’s not particularly fussy about site or soil, and generally romps away with very little attention.

The young leaves can be eaten raw in salads and have a lemony flavour – try them first to make sure they’re not too overpowering! And sorrel is one of the plants that can contain high levels of oxalic acid, so enjoy it in moderation. Older leaves can be cooked – traditionally they’re made into soup, but they can also be stir-fried or used like a lemony spinach. In the tv series Wild Food, Ray Mears used wild sorrel to make dessert tarts.

The biggest consumers of sorrel in our house are the chickens – they love it, and it’s a good source of greens for them when there’s not much else growing.

In summer, sorrel sends up tall flower shoots and sets seeds. When they’re brown the seeds are ripe, but you have to remove them from their papery cases. My method was to rub the stems together to encourage the seed cases off the stems and the seeds out of the cases, then I winnowed (blew away!) the seed cases while most of the heavier seeds stayed on my tray.

My plants are Sorrel ‘Shchavel’ from the Heritage Seed Library. There are lots of different sorrel species – see PFAF for more details.

Posted 23 July 2009, 16:55. Comment

July Gardening Offers

New Covent Garden Foods are giving away a Wiggly Wigglers beehive composter this month. The closing date for entries is 31st July. They’re also offering £5 off your first order with Wiggly Wigglers – enter the discount code CGS78 at the checkout by the end of July.

Harrod Horticultural are offering 10% off all their netting saver packs when you use the discount code ECODE180.

The current special offers from Suttons include lots of fruit – blueberries, strawberries, raspberries and goji berries – plus spawn plugs for shiitake and oyster mushrooms.

Posted 8 July 2009, 15:58. Comment

The Young Person's Environmental Innovation Award

Are you a future UK sustainable superstar with a passion for environmental innovation?

Have you got a budding business bubbling away with an eco-friendly focus?

Do you think you could be the young environmental entrepreneur of the year?

If you can say ‘YES’ to one of these and you’re 21 or under Valpak want to hear from you!

Tell us about yourself and the environmental work you’ve been involved in, before Friday 24 July 2009, and you could become a winner of an impressive environmental award from the UK’s leading provider of producer responsibility and recycling solutions!

The Valpak Awards are giving young people the chance to be recognised and rewarded for exceptional efforts in environmental activities, business ventures and projects from a young age through the Young Person’s Environmental Innovation Award, sponsored by BPI Recycled Products.

Log on now to www.recycle-more.co.uk for full details of how to enter. All short listed entrants will be invited to take five FREE seats at the Awards dinner on 24 September 2009.

Posted 7 July 2009, 00:00. Comment

Growing marigolds

Marigolds aren’t really in fashion at the moment – their simple flowers and brash colours don’t seem to fit in modern gardens. But they’re worth growing in a kitchen garden for two reasons. The first is that these simple flowers are the sort that bees and other beneficial insects love. And the second reason is that marigolds are known to be pest-repelling plants – good companions.

After an initial error with marigolds towering over the peppers they were supposed to be protecting, I stick to dwarf marigolds. I grow them in window boxes, and in amongst my tomatoes – they’re supposed to deter whitefly. It might not be scientific, but I’ve never had whitefly on my tomatoes!

Marigolds have nice big seeds that make them easy to sow. Sow them indoors early in spring for transplating outside later, or directly where you want them to flower from mid-spring onwards. They don’t need any special soil, aren’t fussy about position and don’t need much feeding, but will bloom throughout the summer.

Remove the faded blooms (dead head) to keep them flowering; towards the end of the summer you can leave some to set seed. You will get a lot of seed, and it’s easily detached from the flower heads and collected and stored. Marigolds are half-hardy annuals, so at the end of the summer you’ll need to pull them up – but you’ll never need to buy marigold seed again!

Posted 1 July 2009, 20:32.

Growing Good King Henry

Good King Henry is a perennial herb in the family Chenopodiaceae – the same plant family as some familiar vegetables (including beetroot and chard), some familiar weeds (e.g. Fat Hen) and some other useful but more unusual plants – including quinoa and tree spinach.

Good King Henry forms a clump, about 12-18 inches wide (less than 50 cm), and can grow up to 2 ft tall (60 cm). It’s an easy plant to grow, fully hardy and not fussy about soil or position.

Good King Henry is grown for its edible shoots and leaves. The leaves can be used as a spinach substitute, the flowers are edible and the young shoots are known as ‘poor man’s asparagus’.

If the plant has some shelter it will provide a green crop throughout all but the harshest winter weather; in summer it will appreciate being watered in dry spells.

Seeds can be sown throughout the sprin. They’re tiny and not the easiest things to handle, but seedlings are easily thinned. Collecting seed is simply a matter of collecting ripe seed heads and shaking the seed out into a bag. Cleaning the seed up to remove other plant matter is the most tedious part. If you get a lot of seed you can grind it and add it to flour – see PFAF for more details.

Posted 30 June 2009, 19:49. Comment

Growing Nasturtiums

Nasturtiums make a great addition to a kitchen garden, for several reasons. Firstly, they come in lots of hot, bright colours, and really cheer the place up when there’s a lot of green around. Secondly, they’re edible – you can add the leaves and flowers to salads (they have a peppery flavour, best used in moderation) and if you pickle the seeds you have a good substitute for capers. Thirdly, they act as sacrificial plants, drawing blackfly and other pests away from more valuable crops. And finally, they’re really easy to grow, to the point where after the first year they’re likely to grow themselves.

Nasturtiums are hardy annuals, meaning that they’re not afraid of the cold and they complete their whole lifecycle (from seed, to plant, to flower, to seed) in one season. They come in a range of colours, and in several forms – trailing, climbing, and dwarf. If you choose the right sort they can fit in most gardens, scrambling up screens, tumbling down from hanging baskets or ranging underneath taller plants.

Nasturtiums have big seeds and grow quickly, which makes them ideal for children to try sowing. They can be sown outdoors (where you want them to flower) from early spring to around midsummer, and if you want them earlier you can start them indoors from late winter and transplant them outside in spring (they will need hardening off).

Nasturtiums aren’t fussy about soil, and don’t need to be fed – giving them fertilizer encourages more green growth than flowers. They do need to be watered in dry weather, but are pretty tolerant and self-reliant.

If you don’t eat all the flowers then seeds will start to form from summer onwards. If you want to pickle them you need to harvest the seeds when they’re fresh and green (see Garden Organic’s information on pickling the seeds). If you want to save seed to grow next year, then wait until the seeds ripen and turn brown. If they fall off the plant it doesn’t matter – their size makes them easy to collect from the ground. Store them somewhere cool and dry and you can use them for next year’s seed or swap them with your friends.

Nasturtiums have a tendency to self-seed, that is they will grow without your help if the seeds fall on the ground. If you don’t want them where they grow then the seedlings are easy to pull up and compost; otherwise you can have nastutiums in your garden every year when you only sowed them once!

Posted 29 June 2009, 18:50.

Seed Saving

This is a repository for all the information on this site about seed saving. If you want to start saving your own seeds, or you’ve picked up one of my seed packets from a seed swap and need instructions on how to grow the plants, then this is the place to look.

(I am planning a seed swap at the Big Green Gathering 2009.)

Alternative Kitchen Garden episodes:
20 – Welsh Onions
28 – Seed Saving
41 – Planting Pips
50 – Seed Swaps
63 – Achocha

Articles:
Seeds – an extra harvest from your garden
Growing achocha
Growing nasturtiums
Growing Good King Henry
Growing marigolds
Growing sorrel

Useful links:
Bloggers Seed Network
The Heritage Seed Library (HSL)
Real Seeds
Seedy Sunday
The Seed Site

Posted 29 June 2009, 17:42. Comment

My Dream Farm

From Permaculture Works, the newsletter of the Permaculture Association:

“Are you setting up your own dream farm?

Channel 4 are making a brand new primetime series called My Dream Farm and they’re looking for people who have decided to leave their 9 to 5 jobs and set up a smallholding.

They want to find people who are leaving or have already left behind their former lives to start up farms in the country. The series will offer the new smallholders advice and guidance from agricultural experts. Whether your passion is pigs, chickens, carrots, fruit, goats, or even alpacas, get in touch to find out more!

chris.mclaughlin@betty.co.uk
020 79070872 (over 18s only).”

Posted 11 June 2009, 21:26. Comment

June 2009 gardening offers

Comfrey flowers

GYO have teamed up with the Heritage Seed Library to offer a year’s membership for just £18 – that’s a saving of 10% on the normal membership price. One year’s membership of the HSL will provide you with up to six heritage varieties to grow.

To take advantage of this great offer call 02476 308 210 and quote GYO09.

The current special offers from Suttons include lots of fruit – blueberries, strawberries, raspberries and goji berries – plus a half price bay tree with every order.

The Jungle Seeds Summer Sale offers a 25% discount across all seed items! This is a good time of year to sow many tropical seeds- partly for larger plants next year but also the warmth and light levels may help germination and the after care of the young tropical species seedlings. Order from JungleSeeds.co.uk. (Note: if ordering from JungleSeeds.com use the promotional code Jungle to get your 25% discount)

And save 40% on your copy of Growing Stuff: An Alternative Guide to Gardening with Mad About Herbs – to take advantage of this offer, email jess@blackdogonline.com with the subject line ‘Mad About Herbs Discount’.

Dorset Cereals are running a couple of gardening competitions for schools on their Edible Playgrounds site. The first offers the chance of winning a flip camera by entering your film of cress heads growing, which sounds like a lot of fun. The closing date for entries is 20th October, so there’s plenty of time to make your film.

You can also enter your school in a draw to win a magazine subscription for either Grow Your Own or Teach Primary.

Posted 1 June 2009, 13:34. Comment

the nef / Ecologist essay competition

“On hearing of the death while riding of one his more stubborn ideological opponents, the champion of evolutionary theory, T H Huxley, said that it was the first time that the man’s head made contact with reality, and the experience had obviously proved fatal. Gordon Brown claims that the world needs “a new paradigm that moves the environmental challenge to the centre of policy”, and yet, in spite of the fact that both the UK and the world as a whole are already in ecological debt due to overconsumption, he remains convinced that the global economy can double in size over the next twenty years.

A lot of faith is being put into carbon markets to tackle climate change. But the markets we do have, like the European Emissions Trading Scheme, are out-of-line with the carbon cuts that science tells us is necessary. In other words, without much more dramatic caps on emissions, we could end up trading ourselves over a global warming cliff. It’s the paradox of environmental economics. Sometimes in well-intentioned attempts to put a price on natural resources, we can miss the bigger picture.

So, to connect our politicians with reality before it is too late, we’ve come up with a question. And, we’d like to know what you think. nef has teamed up with the Ecologist to run an essay competition. The question is:

“How do you price the extra tonne of carbon that, once burned, tips the balance
and triggers potentially catastrophic, irreversible global warming?”

All submissions must be under 1,000 words, submitted electronically to mark@theecologist.org and andrew.simms@neweconomics.org and be received by June 30th.

The winner will receive a copy of Andrew Simms’ book, Ecological Debt: Global Warming and the Wealth of Nations, and will be considered for publication in the Ecologist.”

(from the new economics foundation)

Posted 21 May 2009, 17:21. Comment

The Crunch Bunch

If you’ve just decided to grow your own vegetables to save money, then where do you start? A visit to the garden centre, or a quick flick through the seed catalogue, can be daunting – especially if you don’t have a lot of space for your vegetable patch. What’s going to give you the most bang for your buck?

Salads

Salad leaves are one of the easiest crops to grow, don’t take up much space and can provide a big return on your initial investment. For the price of one of those bags of packed salad in the supermarket, you can buy a packet of lettuce seeds that will keep you in lettuce all summer – or even longer. And if you want a more exciting salad you can buy salad seed mixes. The best varieties to go for are the ones described as ‘cut and come again’, which means that you can harvest leaves as and when you need them over several weeks, rather than having to pull up a whole lettuce at once. Salad leaves do well in containers, too, as long as you water them regularly.

Stir-fries

Another leafy crop that’s easy to grow and does well in small spaces is leaves for stir-fries. Again, you could grow a single crop like spinach or pak choi, or a ready-made mix. If you can sow a few seeds every couple of weeks then you’ll have fresh supplies throughout the summer and right into the autumn.

Tomatoes

If summer wouldn’t be summer without juicy, ripe tomatoes, then trying growing your own. Cherry tomatoes are sweet and tasty and very easy to grow. The plants are bushy, ideal for containers and crop earlier and for longer than plants with larger fruits. They’re also bushy, which means you don’t have to worry about supporting them or pinching out the side shoots to keep them under control. A packet of seeds will last you for several years, or you could buy one or two plants – it’s a bit more expensive, but you’ll be quids in when they crop.

Strawberries

Strawberries are another summer favourite. If you buy a plant this year, it may grow a few fruits, but in late summer it will start growing runners – long stems that have baby plants growing on the end. Peg those down or pot them up and you’ll have more strawberry plants next year without spending any more money. Strawberry plants are generally most fruitful in their second and third years. Growing two or more different varieties of strawberries extends the growing season – some fruit earlier, and some later.

Herbs

A small packet of fresh herbs from the supermarket costs a couple of pounds and, at most, is enough for one or two meals. A herb plant costs about the same and will keep you in fresh herbs all year. And many herbs are perennial – which means that one plant will provide herbs for several years. Most are perfectly happy in containers, and the sun-loving herbs like rosemary and thyme don’t even need much watering.

The key points to remember are to choose things that you’re going to enjoy eating – otherwise you’re spending money rather than saving it! And don’t go too mad to start with. Try growing a few plants, or starting a small vegetable patch, and expand once you’ve got the hang of it. And don’t’ forget to start a compost heap, so that you can turn all of your kitchen and garden waste into free compost for next year’s garden.

Posted 11 May 2009, 16:24.

May 2009 gardening offers

Rhubarb flowers

Organic Gardening magazine have lots of giveaways open at the moment – you could be in with a chance of winning books, socks, slug rings and skin cream.

The current special offers from Suttons include an interesting experimental grafted vegetables collection of 5 plants – Cucumber Passandra, Pepper Plenty, Pepper Derby, Chilli Pepper Serenade and Aubergine Ritmo – for greenhouse growing. They also have collections of pot-ready plants on offer for Pumpkin Becky, Sunflower Paquito, Tomato Hundreds & Thousands and Runner Bean Yard Long – with a special deal if you buy all four collections.

And save 10% on watering products from Harrod Horticultural by using the discount code ECODE219.

Posted 3 May 2009, 14:40.

April 2009 gardening offers

The BBC are giving away free vegetable seeds (tomato, beetroot, lettuce, butternut squash and carrot).

Good Life Press are having a book sale, with up to 50% off selected products and free P&P.

Save £2 on advance tickets to Gardeners’ World Live by using the discount code GWN. Or try and win a pair of tickets.

JungleSeeds are offering 25% off new plant orders placed in April, with the aim of helping gardeners replace stock lost to the cold weather over winter. They also have a new vegetable seed online shop with some interesting varieties.

Eco-Logic Books have a special offer on their new all-colour Asian Vegetables by Sally Cunningham (read my review). If you enter the discount code DUDI in the notes section of the order form you can buy it for £9.99 – that saves you a £5 and you get it post free.

And the current Suttons special offers include blight resistant potatoes, a bumper vegetable plant collection and and olive tree at less than half price! And they’ve got a new Grow Your Own section on their website, too.

Posted 3 April 2009, 19:41.

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