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Why do we eat like this?

There seems to be a lot of focus in the media this week about what British people eat – and why it’s making them fat. This morning’s shocker is that BBQs make you fat – if you insist on chowing down on sausages, burgers and mayonnaise-laden potato salad.

Yesterday I read that you’d have a similar problem with your Chinese take-away if you ate nothing but Sweet & Sour Chicken Balls, Prawn Crackers and Crispy Duck.

In this second article, the commenter points out that the Chinese actually have a long history of a food culture that backs balanced meals and healthy eating. The fact that, when presented with a menu of tasty treats, British people will mostly pounce on the fatttiest, sweetest and most calorie-dense foods rather than anything with vegetables in it is entirely down to us.

Which got me wondering, why is that so? Why, when we are presented with information on healthy choices at every turn, are our diets so rarely balanced? Pete spent the weekend with a collection of photographers on a photography workshop, and the food choices he was faced with at their hotel made healthy eating very difficult. He noticed that for one of the group the only meals that didn’t involve chips were breakfasts. Where Western diets are introduced to countries like China, obesity rates soar – so it’s not an entirely cultural thing.

No doubt there are many factors involved. Many people blame the constant bombardment of advertisements that encourage us to eat unhealthy foods and fail to warn of us of the dangers. Others comment on the fact that, since the end of WW2, we have become increasingly distanced from our food production, to the point where there are children who don’t know that milk comes from cows and can’t recognise a potato in its natural state. There are no doubt people from other countries that sneer that British food was pretty rubbish to begin with.

I’ve seen it in action myself. In the office where I last worked, pastries and fruit were laid on for elevenses. The pastries usually disappeared first, although there were plenty of people who snaffled fruit. Eventually doughnuts were banned – not because the workforce was getting noticeably heavier (which is was) but because the jam stained the carpet. In the early days they provided Jaffa cakes as well, but gave that up because the staff ate through an entire month’s supply in a couple of days.

I have a lovely garden that produces fruit and vegetables. The courgettes shown above (Rugosa friulana) are unusual-looking, but very tasty. I have two plants; I harvested that selection on one day. Even with this bounty, Pete and I find it harder to incorporate fresh fruit and veg into our diet that carbs and meat.

It’s not that we don’t buy the stuff – we just don’t eat it. According to Love Food Hate Waste, we throw away nearly £3 billion worth of perfectly good fruit and vegetables each year.

Why are we, as a nation, so rubbish at this?

Gardening Bloggers have lower risk of dementia

Monkey’s reading habits, and fruity diet, stand him in good stead

There’s a piece in the Guardian this morning about how to avoid dementia, based on a new scientific report that nearly 40% of dementia cases could be avoided – by reducing the incidence of diabetes and depression (or treating these diseases quickly), increasing the amount of fruit and vegetables consumed and increasing literacy.

It’s not too much of a leap to realise that garden blogging is therefore the perfect way to reduce the risk of dementia. You spend time outside in the garden getting your hands dirty, which has been proven to reduce depression. You grow your own fruit and vegetables, which leads you to eat more of them, and a healthy diet is the best way to avoid diabetes.

If you combine that with keeping a gardening diary or writing a blog, and reading blogs or gardening books, then you’ve ticked all the boxes! Healthy body, healthy mind, healthy garden :)

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I am guest blogging for Soilman today, on Cats: How to keep their shit out of your garden. It’s a bit of a rude rant, so don’t head over there if you’re offended by strong language.

Test card

Just ignore this – it’s needed for techy purposes :)

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Elspeth

Ever since I reported the sad death of Elspeth Thompson, people have found their way to this blog by searching for things like “how did Elspeth Thompson die”. I never wanted to know, it didn’t seem to matter, but her husband Frank has reached the point where he felt able to give an interview and if you do want to know more about the details then you can read them over on the Telegraph website.

Like so many people, in so many walks of life, Elspeth suffered from depression. For the most part it seems as though she kept her mental health problems to herself – a common occurrence that can be brought about by the fact that discrimination against people with mental health issues is still rife in our society. Gardeners know that getting their hands dirty makes them feel better, and indeed that’s one of the reasons that many tend a garden, but even so it can be difficult to come out and say that you have mental health issues.

I am happy to say that I do. I have suffered from depression in the past. Gardening does help me, but I still have dark days. I made my pledge to with the Time To Change campaign – to end the discrimination and allow people with mental health issues access to the support they need – back in June (something we’ve been talking about on the Emma and Pete Show). If you have experienced mental health problems then please consider doing so yourself.

The Telegraph (for whom Elspeth was a regular columnist) have created the Gardening Against the Odds awards in her memory, to celebrate gardeners who are gardening in difficult environments, battling physcial health problems or struggling with mental health issues.

You can nominate your own garden, or someone else’s. The closing date for entries this year is 17th September, so you have time to get your garden looking its best for the photos. More details can be found on the website.

Trays

When you have plants in pots, trays are great. For indoor plants they keep your surfaces clean. You can fill them with gravel to create a humid microclimate and stop the leaves falling off your fussy plants. Bigger ones are fantastic for carrying lots of pots of seedlings around the garden. Most importantly, when you water your plants they catch the water that drains straight through dry compost and give it time to soak in.

I am reducing the number of plants in containers in my garden for next year, but there will always be some. I am moving them towards bigger containers, but even so there are still issues with watering in the summer, especially when whatever water you give them drains straight through and escapes onto the floor. Every time I go out into the garden and water I think about getting more trays to put under the larger pots (I only have 3 garden trays of any size), and then I forget. This morning I came back inside to make a note.

For indoor use and carrying pots, I have cat litter trays. They’re the perfect size and a good depth, easy to find and cheap. Garden trays from garden centres are – for a mass-produced piece of plastic – frighteningly expensive. But they won’t be suitable for all the pots in the garden, as their rectangular shape isn’t right for big, round pots. And they tend to come in garish colours, although the last batch I bought were silver or black.

I am quite prepared to invest in some more garden trays, because they do last and they will help the plants for the rest of this season and in future years. But before I do that, I thought I would ask you what you use. Do you shell out for garden trays, or do you buy something else that does the job? Have you found something that you can recycle that is perfect? Or is there another solution to this problem that I haven’t thought of? Do let me know!

New Plan

Claytonia sibirica, Pink Purslane, an unusual salad plant that loves dappled shade

It is finally raining, and both the garden and I are sighing with relief, but for some plants the long days of relentless sun have proved fatal. Every year there are casualties in the garden – drought, pests, a complete lack of sunshine, diseases – and that is an inevitable part of being a gardener. But there is often guilt that life and a lack of time spent in the garden means we have allowed plants to die that could have been saved.

I love being in my garden and I wouldn’t want to replace it with a ‘low maintenance’ horror that meant I had nothing to do outside except sit, but I am useless in hot weather and even watering is sometimes beyond me – so I have come up with a new garden plan for next year.

The idea is to have a productive garden which is never overwhelming, but still holds plenty of interest for me and our occasional visitors. I would like to cut down on the work during the busy seasons – sowing less seeds during the spring would mean less potting up and planting out later on. I would like the garden to need less watering in the summer and to avoid common pest and disease problems like the blackfly which attached themselves to my broad beans and have now spread to the oca.

And so the new garden plan for 2011 (which I am currently putting into effect out in the garden) is as follows:

• Concentrate on perennials, self-seeding annuals and biennials and ‘easy’ crops that give a good yield for minimum effort.


• Cut down on the number of plants in containers, particularly small containers


• Limit the number of plants that require TLC due to being marginal in my climate


• Look into different ways or places for growing plants that need TLC to cut down on the amount they need


• Split the load. Many plants (particularly flowers) can be sown in autumn rather than spring; other crops can be sown outside of the busy spring sowing period


• Experiment with unusual edibles that are easy to grow

So, that’s the new plan. I have already made a few changes, and bought a few new plants, and I will talk about those in coming posts. I also have a to do list of things to get around to once the weather cools down :)

Refugee Week: Grow Your Own

Three years ago, Pete and I were lucky enough to be invited to London for a special screening of the movie Grow Your Own – I blogged about it at the time, on the original Fluffius Muppetus blog.

It didn’t get a wide release and so I know there are a lot of people who have never seen it, but it’s a wonderful film and it deserves to be seen and so I’m very glad that it’s available until the end of the week on iPlayer as part of Refugee Week. And so here’s my contribution to Refugee Week – a review of the film that I wrote 3 days after I saw it.

I know that readers of this blog love to garden, on whatever scale, and appreciate the healing power that nature has over the down and depressed. Grow Your Own shows the power it can have over the disenfranchised and distressed. It’s not to be sniffed at.

A British indie film in the unlikely setting of an allotment (community garden) could well be the cult movie of the year.

“Grow Your Own” is set amid the mud and clutter of an allotment garden. Run by hidebound traditionalists who ignore the occasional dissenting voice, the status quo is threatened by the arrival of a handful of asylum seekers who are given plots in the hope that outdoor work and fresh food will help them heal their broken lives.

This is not a film about gardening; it’s a story of prejudice and pain in a garden setting. Expertly written and brilliantly rendered by the actors, the film takes you on a journey of hope and despair with many insights into the lives of those less fortunate than ourselves.

Benedict Wong gives a remarkable performance as the traumatized, and largely silent, Kung Sang. To a large extent the movie is his story, as we try to imagine what has happened to him and join his children in hoping he can find his way back to happiness. Will he be able to find his voice in such a hostile environment?

Philip Jackson gives us a believable villain in Big John, a man who firmly believes he can and should speak for everyone. Omid Djalili’s charming performance as an immigrant who is accepted merely because he is useful opens the gates to a change of heart.

It’s not all doom and gloom. There are some genuinely funny, laugh-out-loud moments and a wry look at the British obsession with the weather. The comedy comes from a raft of supporting actors, and only the talents of Olivia Colman appear to be wasted in a small part that goes nowhere.

Although the allotment is the stage and not the star, gardeners in the audience will not be disappointed. The film opens with some very funny vignettes of the lengths that obsessed “allotmenteers” go to for their plots. Slices of allotment life appear with numerous scenes set in sheds and the on site shop, fueled by copious cups of tea.

Those with a less horticultural mindset will be able to spot the gardening fanatics in the audience – they will be unable to suppress their outrage when one of the plots is bulldozed mid-season (which one will it be?) and the ones murmuring “sharks fin melons, sharks fin melons” as they leave.

With comedy, poignancy and some heartrending moments Grow Your Own is well worth seeking out. The film aims to plant the seeds of tolerance and hope in its audience; it’s up to us to help them grow.

Gardening myths

I’m catching uo on my reading today, and have been flicking through the latest edition of Kew magazine (summer 2010). I was interested to see that scientists have been checking the very widely held gardening belief that it is important not to water in the heat of the day, because the sun’s fierce rays will be focused by the water drops and burn holes in plant leaves.

It turns out that it’s not true. Although the scientists were able to burn holes using the sun and spherical glass beads, they could not achieve the same effect with water droplets – partly because they are never spherical and partly because of the cooling effect of the water itself.

The only circumstances under which it was possible was where hairs on the plant’s leaves held the water drops above the leaf surface – helping them to remain more spherical and removing the cooling effect. But even this is unlikely to occur naturally because the drops don’t remain in place for long enough.

So that’s one less thing to worry about, although of course it is till better to avoid watering during the heat of the day as more water will evaporate and less will make it down to the plant roots where it is needed.

Have you come across a piece of gardening ‘wisdom’ that you later discovered to be false?

Goat Bridge

We had some youthful visitors yesterday, and so we took them on a trip to Millets Farm Centre, which is a few miles away and has (as well as a farm shop and a garden centre) a play area and animals on display. I promised them woolly pigs, but they were taking a nap in their barn and were too far away for a good look.

And so it was great that there was a new innovation that we hadn’t seen to take their place. There was once a guinea pig enclosure that looked a bit like TellyTubby land – a mound with lots of tunnels and hideaways and it looked like a lovely place to be a guinea pig. But it had stood empty for some time – until now.

They have built a magnificent wooden bridge, which links the guinea pig pen with the goat enclosure!

The goats seem to love it. They climb up, sit on on the top for a while and watch the world go by, and then climb down the other side to see if there’s something tasty to nibble. Then they do the same in reverse.

The goats are tame, and happy to be stroked. While I was taking this one’s photo it was snuffling at my arm. But then it decided it wanted to eat my sleeve! All they need now is a troll :)

Overtime

The crimson flowered broad beans are one of the garden highlights this month

There’s so much to do in the garden at the moment that I can see why people give up in despair. Every time I go out there I work solidly for at least an hour, do good work and then come back in with a To Do list as least as long, if not longer.

In some ways, it’s just bad planning on my part. I should have dug out the compost heaps and sorted out the wormeries earlier in the year, but I didn’t have the energy. I could have dealt with some of the weed problems then, too, it would have been easier.

In other ways, it’s just the way things are. I wanted a garden chock full of plants this year, and that’s what I’ve got – but they all need planting out or potting up, watering and weeding and feeding. Some of the new arrivals are perennials, and will be less work (or, more specifically, less work at this time of year) in future years, but an annual vegetable patch is always time consuming.

I don’t mind. I love being outside with the plants and even though I can’t get everything done at once I am making progress.

On Friday I was potting up luffa and watermelon seedlings. They are getting used to life in the Grow Dome, and then I will plant them out in there. I spent an hour doing that, and then later in the day Pete joined me to spend another hour potting up new arrivals from Rocket Gardens. I got some free ‘gardens’ from them this year (for attending a customer focus group) – a Salad Garden, a Herb Garden and a Windowbox Garden.

At some point over the Bank Holiday weekend I dug out one of the compost heaps and used most of the compost to remake the shallow Grow Dome bed, which will be home to at least one of the watermelons. It gets very dry, so I have lined it with black plastic and also covered it in black plastic as a mulch. I will plant the melon(s) through the plastic and hope that keeps them warm and damp.

Today I have planted out a few more things – parsley seedlings, 3 Friulana courgettes and 2 Alberello courgettes. I potted up some volunteer seedlings – wonderberries that self-seeded from last year’s plants. And I cleaned up a pile of cat poo, which unfortunately is a regular occurrence. It’s easier to smell than to see, but I have come to the conclusion that if I don’t find at least one pile of cat poo while I’m out in the garden then I’m just not looking hard enough!

Back to the land

Since last summer I have been playing the Facebook game FarmVille. It started out reasonably simply – you sowed and harvested crops, and tended animals. I enjoyed watching the plants ‘grow’ and the interactions with my FarmVille Neighbors. I could scare away unwanted animals from their farms and send them animals as gifts. Later on I could fertilize their crops.

I turned my farm into a little Permaculture plot, but later on all of the clicking to plough, sow and harvest an ever-increasing area became too much and I succumbed to an intensive farm with petrol-powered machinery.

For a while that was fun, but then I became disenchanted. As other people sold their trees (having gained all the Ribbons that growing trees moved them towards) I made mine the stars of my farm and turned it into the beautiful Food Forest shown above. It didn’t need as much work, to I stopped by less and less. I still enjoyed seeing which unusual crops the developers would add in, but many of them were only available for a very limited time.

I tried to get involved when they added in farming co-ops, but these were geared very firmly at industrialized farms (fast and furious yields being the only real goal) and my food forest didn’t operate on the same level. The constantly changing themes with decorations to add to your farm, and different gifts being demanded by Neighbors, mostly passed me by.

I have looked at FarmVille today and they’ve added another new dimension – as you harvest your crops you collect special bushels to sell in your own little farmer’s market. The game requires a considerable investment of time to keep up with what’s going on and be a good Neighbor, and I find I would rather be outside in my real garden, tending my real plants. Despite the odd weather we’ve been having this year (it’s hammering down with rain today, which is going to be good for the plants) I feel there’s a real chance of the garden flourishing, provided I give it enough attention.

And so I have finally made the decision to give up my FarmVille farm. I hope some of my good Neighbors remain my friends. I will be sticking around on Facebook, and if you’d like to keep up with me there then there is a Facebook page for my book and a new one for the podcast. There’s also an AKG Facebook group. And last, but not least, I am happy to befriend FB users who read my blog or listen to the show. This is my profile, but please do introduce yourself when you send the friend request :)

Grow Your Own iPhone App

Unfortunately you can’t push a seed into the ground and wait for it to grow into an iPhone app for you, but the RHS have come up with an app that you might find useful if you’re growing your own fruit and vegetables for the first time this year.

Their Grow Your Own app is pretty basic at the moment. It has a list of crops, information about how to grow them, and the ability to add them to ‘My Garden’ – bascially to bookmark the information so that you can find it easily when you want to look something up.

There’s also a feature that help you to choose which crops would be best for your garden, and links through to the RHS online shop if you want to buy their recommended varieties. And it links to the RHS forums if you want to connect with other people doing the same thing.

Although the functionality is far too basic to be of interest to seasoned growers at the moment, they are promising updates – including a calendar function with reminders, so you don’t forget time-sensitive tasks , and a private area of the website for app users.

Early reviews point out that it doesn’t currently include any herbs, so perhaps they are on their way.

A point to note is that the RHS are saying that this is only a free iTunes download for a limited time, so if you think it would be useful (or will be, when the updates roll out) then now is the time to get your hands on your copy.

Theme Gardens: The Zombie Garden

The ultimate macabre garden decoration – The Zombie of Montclaire Moors Statue by Alan Dickinson.

Because of death and new life I have been run ragged for the past week, and I when I got up at sunrise yesterday morning I felt like a zombie. So I pretended to be a zombie all day (I had scrambled eyeballs and brain burgers for lunch), which made me feel better.

And then I thought – what would a zombie’s garden look like? So if you’ll excuse a little bit of sleep-deprived whimsy, here are some thoughts about how to turn your garden into a zombie paradise. The first stage, of course, is to get yourself one of the lovely zombie statues shown above – a snip at under $90 from design Toscano, and equivalent to putting up a sign that says “Zombies Welcome Here”.

For zombie attraction you’ll also want to get the stench right, so why not see if one of the plants that smell like rotting flesh will grow in your garden? The giant Titun arum might be a tall order, but apparently you might get away with something from the Smilax genus.

Your zombies will be hungry, and they’ll want brains. You have to love the internet, because the topic of plants that look like brains has already been discussed. Apparently your best bet is the Mammilaria cacti, some of which are remarkably reminiscent of our grey matter. Environmental Graffiti have a lovely picture of a plant brain in an article about ‘vegetables that look suspiciously animal’, and there’s also a shot of a plant with terrifying jaws and one of Devil’s Fingers – a fungus that looks just like a zombie hand growing out of the earth, which would go nicely alongside your statue.

Now that you’ve attracted your zombies and given them some vegetable brains to snack on, it’s time to make them feel right at home. Why not plant up a selection of the carnivorous plants native to your area? Not only will they add to the ambience, but they’ll cut down on the nuisance factor of the flies attracted by your carrion plants. Not that the zombies will mind the flies, mind you, but you’ll be glad they’re under control when you pop out to do a spot of weeding!

And when you’re tucked up in bed, enjoying the sounds of the zombies munching on their brains and shuffling off round the neighbourhood, you’ll need to gen up on your poisonous and narcotic plants – for which there is no better book that Amy Stewart’s Wicked Plants. In no time you’ll have a garden that The Addams Family will want to visit.

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If you’d rather be on the side of sunshine and flowers then have a look at PopCap Games’ Plants vs Zombies, which I discovered yesterday when I was doing my zombie garden research and have been glued to ever since. There are versions for PC, Mac, iPhone and iPad; you get 60 minutes of free game time so you can decide whether you like it, they accept PayPal and you can save 10% by using the coupon code SAVE10PERCENT when you checkout.

Updated 4th May

I have just come across a very lovely post on Plants are the Strangest People, which goes the other way and talks about the houseplants you would need to invest in to survive a zombie apocalypse :)

Kelly Kettle: Tea Time

Pete and I are planning to spend more time outside this year. I haven’t been camping since I was a teenager; Pete has been to a couple of festivals, but that’s about it. We bought a new tent last year, but never got around to using it. We’re hoping this year will be different.

Our first scheduled outdoor event is an appearance at the Hampshire Green Fair on May 9th (it also has it’s own Facebook group).

I’m going to be signing books and running a plant and seedling swap and the plan is to camp out at the Sustainability Centre for a couple of days.

As May 9th will soon be upon us, and the weather this week has been kind, I thought it was about time we attempted some outdoor cooking. We started simple, firing up the Kelly Kettle for the first time and making a cup of tea. It’s an impressive piece of kit – boiling a litre of water in a couple of minutes fuelled by garden twigs and newspaper. Our fire-making abilities are less impressive, but that’s why we’re practicing ;)

If you have a Kelly/ storm kettle and have any hints, tips or campfire recipes to share then please leave a comment or send me an email. We need all the help we can get! :D

Product Review: Garland Super 7 Windowsill propagator

Up until last year I’d never used a heated propagator – I’ve always found that seeds germinate at room temperature, although they may take a little bit longer. Even pepper seeds, supposedly easier to germinate with ‘bottom heat’ came up just fine on my windowsills.

But last summer I succumbed to temptation and ordered myself a Garland Super 7 Windowsill propagator. I tried it pretty much straightaway, with the fairly predictable result that my seeds fried in the hot days with extra heat. I put it away.

I got it out again a couple of weeks ago and decided to give it a second chance during cooler weather. I sowed seven different pepper seeds in its little trays, and switched it on.

I also sowed one pepper seed in a pot, in an unheated propagator, as a control – and that’s how I know that the seeds in the propagator aren’t going to germinate. The one in the pot, the one which should take longer, came up a couple of days ago. There are no signs of plant life in the propagator trays – all it seems to have encouraged is fungus gnats, whose maggoty offspring have no doubt eaten any roots that did manage to emerge.

I had doubts as soon as I opened the propagator box. It’s a low-cost model, which means that it doesn’t have a thermostat. It’s either on, or it’s not – but it doesn’t even have an indicator light to show that it’s working. The plastic lids don’t grip onto the plastic trays, which makes it almost impossible to move the trays about without knocking the lids off. There’s no space for labels, and you’re not supposed to get the base unit wet, so you have to remove the trays to water them. I may have been able to live with all of those issues if it actually helped raised seedlings, but it doesn’t.

So my electric propagator is being cleaned up so that it can find a new home and I’m going back to the low cost, low tech and carbon neutral method of my non-electric propagators. If you really, really, really want an electric propagator then my advice would be to save your pennies long enough to buy a decent one with temperature controls.

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