Here we are in the odd position of celebrating Halloween, a festival that, in European tradition, marks the start of winter, when thoughts turn to mortality and all around are reminders that every living thing dies. But tonight I will light the fairy lights in the carport and dress up, I think perhaps as a dragonfly, or maybe a mud wasp? Some predatory insect anyway, and make a batch of…
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…