My potato crop last year was very sad. The plants wilted before they flowered, and the potatoes hadn’t finished developing. The largest were only golf ball size. We don’t eat a lot of potatoes – I tend to regard them as a seasonal vegetable rather than a storage staple – but new potatoes are such a treat I was determined to get a yield this year.
My broad beans have aphids. Judging by my social media, everyone else’s broadbeans have aphids too. The trigger with little insects stealing my food is they must die! But must they? Most of the ways of waging war on aphids involve either pollutants or a lot of effort. Is there something easier?
Mike Hoag (of Permaculture in Action: Transformative Adventures – one of my favourite groups), used the term “keystone human”, and that’s my ambition in life…
I have to admit, I am fickle with my vegetable love. But tromboncino has been up there for quite a while now. This morning I…
Hanging baskets, pots, edges, all the little unused spaces. It is a little bit ironic that the beds I harvest most often are the smallest…
Designing new buildings for passive solar is a no-brainer – possibly the the easiest, most efficient way to reduce energy costs and make a place so much more liveable. It stuns me that so many houses in suburbia are built with no thought to where the sun is. But if you are doing a retrosuburban refit, you have to work with what you have, and in our case, that meant…
The more gardens there are in my neighbourhood, the less likely mine will get raided. So I’m all in for encouraging, supporting, and contributing to that. And a very easy way to do it is to share seeds. Locally adapted saved seed, fresh and in season, in small quantities, bred from heirloom gardeners’ varieties rather than commercial varieties – it’s a treasure as a gift to anyone starting a food…