Category Archives: climate change

This month in the garden…

05 Saturday Nov 2016

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Just-planted garlic

…it is getting cold. Seriously, properly cold.

Actually I can’t remember being cold before Christmas before (well, a bit chilly, perhaps, but not cold of the three layers and double socks kind just yet).

We have, I think, become a bit soft in recent years what with all this global warming malarkey. Things may be a little extreme in this respect at my end of the country, around 20 miles from the south coast and never the coldest of places generally.

But since the epic winter of 2010 (when we had about 10 winters’ worth of snow, hoarfrost and ice for a memorable three or four months from November to February) we’ve been lucky to get a frost at all. Last year the lowest temperature I recorded was around 1°C, in February; the previous year we dipped to an adventurous -2°C for one night only. It was hardly the second ice age.

Anyway, all this is by way of saying that this month in the garden I have had to get my skates on (not quite literally but you never know) in a way I have not been accustomed to doing, and do all those getting-ready-for-winter things I’ve previously been putting off till about January. So here’s what I’ll be up to…

Planting garlic I have had a bit of a garlic crisis this year: every last plant succumbed to rust. I am therefore launching an experiment: I’m replanting the bulbs from the garlic which survived the longest, in an attempt to select a strain that copes better with the (now endemic) garlic rust in my garden. I will report back with results.

Collecting leaves There are so many leaves. So, so many leaves. I watched them rain down the other day like a golden snowstorm. And so to work with my trusty rake and wheelbarrow to fill as many leafmould bins as I can before they all run out.

Putting the veg garden to bed The endless task continues: clear crops, cart off to compost heap, weed, mulch, cover, repeat. I am still only halfway down the veg garden and I’ve already run out of soil improver.

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Spring cabbage still going strong after around ten straight months of harvesting

Picking spring cabbage Yes, you read that right: spring cabbage. I planted it last August (that’s August 2015) and it has been going strong ever since, mainly through my laziness in not getting around to pulling it out, so it just sprouts again. A happy accidental discovery: I shall be doing this again…

Clearing the greenhouse The cucumbers are spent; the green peppers picked. Time to strip out the last of the summer crops and get the greenhouse ready for its winter role. I have only one this year, as we’re having to move the other: I am bereft.

Lining said greenhouse with bubblewrap insulation You save around 25% on the average heating bill by insulating your greenhouse, so they say. I know it keeps things much cosier, and often means I don’t have to turn on the heater at all.

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Winter lettuces, ‘White Lisbon Winter Hardy’ spring onions, American land cress and a couple of rows of corn salad and radish seedlings tucked up safely in their plumbing pipe cloche

Planting winter salads under cloches Since I am deprived of my winter salads greenhouse this year I am resorting to planting out my greenery under cloches instead (or rather, one massive cloche made of blue plumbing pipe and clear polythene).

Wrapping bananas The Musa basjoo in the back garden has been going great guns this year, so the plan is to wrap it in the time-honoured way (chop leaves off, wrap in straw and hessian or fleece, big bubblewrap hat) and leave it outside for the first time.

Digging up pelargoniums My scented-leaf pelargonium collection is expanding all the time: I do need to bring it in for winter, though. This year they’ve been in containers on the front steps, making this particular job much easier.

Planting tulips Ah yes: there is some joy to be had this month. This year’s order includes ‘Ballerina’, ‘Jan Reus’, ‘Purple Prince’, ‘Violet Beauty’ and ‘White Triumphator’. I am looking forward to spring very much.

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Putting Biochar through its paces

07 Friday Oct 2016

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I’m mostly a peat-free gardener: life’s too short and the world too precious to ruin a peat bog for beans and lettuces, and besides I kind of accidentally started peat-free (long before it became a hot topic in gardening) so I learned to garden without peat without even particularly knowing the environmental implications. You do treat peat-free composts differently: they’re more open, for one thing, so I’m used to watering my pot-grown seedlings a little more often. I had a go at growing stuff in a peat-based compost once, just to see if I was missing out on anything, and everything drowned.

But that word ‘mostly’ is in there for a reason. I’ve never been able to escape the use of peat in seed composts: I’m kind of fussy about what I start my seeds in, mainly because it can be the difference between modest success and abject failure, so I’ve always taken the safe course of action and plumped for John Innes seed compost blends. These are soil based – but they also have a proportion of peat. I’ve not been able to find out what proportion (compost makers are notoriously cagey about exactly what goes into their recipes) though some John Innes style mixes give it at one part sphagnum moss peat to two parts loam. Still too much for comfort as far as I’m concerned.

I had been turning a blind eye to this, reasoning (slightly uneasily) that since I don’t use as much seed compost as potting compost in an average year it was only a small proportion of the compost I get through. I’ve been stewing up a plan to make my own as an alternative, but haven’t quite got the leafmould together yet (one year done, one year left to do) and I never have enough garden compost.

And then I came across Carbon Gold. It’s got two very of-the-moment things in it: the first is mycorrhizal fungi, which is to say types of fungal organism which can form symbiotic relationships with roots, plugging them in to the soil around them so they access nutrients and moisture better. And the other is biochar: basically, charcoal.

Biochar comes in soil improver as well as seed composts; it acts like a sponge in soils, absorbing moisture and opening up the soil (rather like any kind of organic matter). And best of all, it acts like a carbon sink – so you’re doing your little tiny bit to help the environment by gardening, instead of carving it up.

I thought all this sounded rather wonderful: so I decided to try it out for myself and see if it really worked as a seed compost (the acid test: whatever it’s got in it, there’s no point in using a seed compost if your seeds don’t actually grow in it). And I (or rather the hubster) filmed the results: click play for the lowdown, courtesy of the crocus.co.uk Youtube channel.

Confused.com

19 Saturday Dec 2015

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sweetrocket

This weather though!*

We don’t quite have daffodils up and blooming here, like they do in all points from Cornwall to Cheshire apparently: but we do have a lot of confused flowers.

Never mind spring flowers, either: we have summer flowers in bloom here. Asparagus peas in brick red, marigolds and celandines, pretty little pinks and neon-coloured salvias still going strong. The sweet rocket has been in bloom since April; we have hellebores and strawberry flowers and even the tree chilli is gamely putting out a few purple blossoms.

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I don’t blame them: I’m confused myself. The temperatures we’ve got right now, in the mid-teens, are more akin to what you’d get in June.

Mind you, the torrential rain and stormy weather is of more normal December quantities, so you still get the horizontal rain blowing your hat into the next county and ankle-deep mud to slosh through on your way to get up the veg garden to pick the kale for tea. Only difference is, you’re doing it in a t-shirt (bare arms dry so much quicker than jumpers, don’t you think?)

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Apparently it’s something to do with the Azores, a straggle of half-forgotten islands about four hours’ travel off the west coast of Portugal. Maybe they’re getting their own back for nobody knowing or much caring where they are on the map. I can’t help noticing their weather is more-or-less exactly the same as ours right now. Rather worryingly it goes up to 18°C next week. Hope that’s not coming our way.

It’s not going to stop till at least the middle of next month. After that, who knows: maybe we’ll get the deep freeze the Express was screaming about last month (rather laughably, as it turns out).

I do hope so, or we won’t have any apples, blackcurrants or garlic next year. All three depend on a prolonged spell of chilling: 7°C day and night for three weeks is the figure generally bandied about.

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Rhubarb and strawberries need chilling for good crops, too: and goodness knows what’s going to happen to my strawbs this year. They were flowering in November, then we had one atypical night of hard frost and all the centres turned black. I thought that was it, but no: they’re off again.

At the moment my inclination is to pick off the flowers to persuade the plants to keep their energies for themselves for the time being: let’s just hope they’re not exhausted by spring.

The daffs are unlikely to be back, though: they have a once-only performance, so once you’ve had it, you’ve had it. This, though, is the new normal: for we have forgotten what the old normal even means any more. So we’d better get used to it, I’m afraid.

*Apologies to those of you who prefer their sentences grammatically correct: my ability to write in adult is dwindling the longer I live with two teenagers. Roughly translated, for those of you over the age of, oh, 15, this means ‘Goodness, isn’t the weather remarkable for the time of year!’ Which makes you sound like Hyacinth Bucket instead.

Power to the people

31 Saturday May 2014

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(c) Jeffrey Tischart, Jr

(c) Jeffrey Tischart, Jr

You won’t be gardening long before you feel the need for a little electricity.

I don’t mean excitement: goodness, there’s quite enough of that what with mouse invasions and that branch falling on my greenhouse roof and stoving in several panes at once. And positive things too, like the gorgeous Ensete ventricosa (deep purple banana) which arrived on my doorstep as a foundling (unwanted gift from a non-gardener); or the loquat tree which miraculously survived losing every single branch in the heavy snows of winter 2011.

No, I mean power: the juice which runs your greenhouse heater, or lets you install a pump in your water butt so you can run a hose off it, or makes a heated propagator and thus transformation of your seed-sowing life possible. [read more…]

And now I’ve seen it all…

31 Monday Mar 2014

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Just when you thought there was nothing new under the sun, they go and invent a sunflower that’s actually a table lamp.

Well actually it’s not that new, as it’s the same technology as you used at school when you plugged a couple of electrodes into a potato and made a little lightbulb glow. In every piece of vegetative matter there is a chemical energy created by photosynthesis which can be converted into a small current: which is why you can make an electric circuit out of a potato, or a tomato, or a sunflower.

Anything green can be persuaded to generate electricity: even grass clippings. In 2012 some scientists in America created a solar cell from a few fragments of vegetation. The technical term is biophotovoltaics.

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I can’t pretend to know much about the science, but I do know this is pretty cool: the electricity you generate from plugging into a sunflower is enough to charge a mobile phone battery, or a computer (after a while, I’d have thought). Imagine what a field of sunflowers could do. Looks a whole lot nicer than a power station, too.

I may be acquiring one of these from those nice people at Thompson & Morgan later in the summer, so I’ll let you know what happens. Should be electrifying (sorry, couldn’t resist).

**STOP PRESS**: Have just heard that T&M are so taken with this particular technology breakthrough they’re going to start a new energy company to harness all that sunflower power. Word has it the new company will be known as Avril Fuel. Now that’s one to watch out for.

A glimpse into the future

20 Wednesday Mar 2013

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Breakfast?

The other day on the radio, a scientist was making a convincing case for the fact that we should all eat more insects.

You can listen to the programme again here. The basic premise is that for the majority of the world, which is to say everyone who doesn’t live in the developed West, the main source of protein is six-legged: the likes of deep-fried bee larvae, baked termites and mealworm meatballs.

Hmm. They’ve got a bit of a PR mountain to climb before they convince us all to give up our lamb chops in favour of cockroach sandwiches.

But they’ve also, surely, got a point. I use up a couple of acres of good grassland to raise my sheep, and they provide us, plus maybe a couple of other families if lambing goes well, with about a year’s worth of meat. The same amount of land could grow vegetables for a small village; and hold hundreds, if not thousands of insect farms, feeding hundreds of people, not just half a dozen. It’s much more efficient, too: 10kg of feed produces 1kg of cow, but 7kg of insects. They even poo more cleanly, with all that implies for greenhouse gases and climate change.

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Then I came across Helen Howard’s Kent-based snail farm at the Edible Garden Show and discovered a whole new way of replacing protein in our diet in super-efficient, space-saving ways.

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You can eat snails’ eggs, too: they’re known as snail caviar

Farmed snails grow twice as fast as garden snails (even though they’re the same species), reaching maturity in six months. You can keep six in a box the size of a propagator, and the only maintenance they need is a quick spray with water and a powdered feed mixed with chalk once a day.

Before you want to eat them, just remove the food for a few days, then drop them in boiling water, slow cook for at least 1 1/2 hours and there you go: escargots on toast. They’re particularly good on pizza, apparently.

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Snails at home in their propagator-sized case

You can start your own snail farm for £30, which buys you a breeder pack of six snails, food and housing. Add a cage full of crickets and a bag of mealworms and you can be self-sufficient from your spare room. As long as you can get over the yuck factor, that is.

Roses in November

31 Saturday Oct 2009

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When the Irish poet Thomas Moore went on in a lamenting sort of way about ‘the last rose of summer’ it was 1805 and I’d guess he wasn’t looking at routine double-figure temperatures in November.

There is no last rose of summer any more. There might be a last rose of late winter at some point, I suppose, but this is, these days, a late summer or autumn flower. If not a winter one.

Certainly here it is, November tomorrow, and my garden is full of roses.

An unidentified miniature patio rose growing in the kids’ garden.

Rosa ‘Perpetually Yours’

A budding Rosa ‘Dublin Bay’

Lots of buds on my container-grown Rosa ‘Wildeve’


and the Rosa ‘New Dawn’ on the front of the house is flowering its heart out still.
I just can’t make my mind up if I like it.
I love that my garden is full of roses: who couldn’t like that? But they look all wrong among the autumn leaves somehow.
And can you imagine having roses on the table for Christmas dinner?

Growing against the odds

11 Saturday Jul 2009

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While I was at Hampton Court I met a very nice man called Mark Diacono, who was telling me all about his olive crop.

He doesn’t live in Italy, or in France, or anywhere warmer than rainy old Devon, where he has a 17-acre farm where for the last three years he’s been experimenting with what you can do in a world where the climate is changing. These days, life in Devon is a good few degrees warmer overall than it used to be, allowing Mark to really push the boundaries and grow all sorts of borderline fruit which most of us wouldn’t dare to try outside the greenhouse. As well as his olives, he grows apricots, peaches and pecans, all stuff we’re used to thinking of as exotics here in the UK.

It’s a real vision of the future. If what the government and the Met Office are predicting about the climate comes to pass, apricots and olives will become normal British fare. Mind you, like most trailblazers, Mark isn’t having a straightforward time of it: the last two wet and gloomy summers did their best to bludgeon his olives into submission, and then we had last winter. It turns out, luckily for Mark, that olives are incredibly tough trees and despite losing pretty nearly all their leaves they came back again and have been flourishing in this year’s heatwave. Now, if you didn’t have people like Mark doing what he’s doing you wouldn’t believe olives could survive last winter outside in this country, would you? It makes me think I might try planting mine outside in the garden instead of making it languish in a pot all year round.

The other wonderful thing he’s doing is reviving old near-forgotten English fruits such as medlars, quince and mulberries. If you want to read more about his extraordinary project, visit the Otter Farm website here, and Mark’s blog which is here.

Collateral damage

20 Tuesday Jan 2009

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Oh dear.

A quick tour of my so-called jungle garden (i.e. the place I so optimistically planted up with climate change anticipation plants last summer) reveals I didn’t exactly get out of the recent cold snap scot free.

This is (or was) a purple cordyline. I was rather fond of it as it made a snazzy contrast with the libertias and hostas, to say nothing of a canna behind it, and gave me the pleasant illusion that I was quite good at putting plants together. I thought they were meant to be bone hardy, too.

The remains of a Melianthus major that was just getting into its stride last autumn…


…and my poor Astelia chathamica ‘Silver Spear’, lately of Chelsea 2008, which also looks to be less hardy than you would think.
Some of these might – just – come back, though I’m not sure they’ll ever be quite the same again. Now, here’s a quandary. do I press on and insist on a jungly area at the bottom of my garden anyway? (I’ll have my banana-mad eight-year-old daughter to answer to if I don’t). Do I resort to drought-tolerant Mediterranean plants only to have them washed away and drowned in a sea of mud every winter? Or do I plant a sea of English flowers and water them every five minutes all summer, also risking the customary deluge turning to a desert-like scorcher and the whole lot frazzling to a crisp as soon as I turn my back?
You know, this gardening lark isn’t as straightforward as it looks.

First frost of the season!

06 Monday Oct 2008

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I can’t believe it… we had our first frost of the year at the weekend.

This is the first time I can remember having a frost before November down here. We’re an energetic spit from the M25 after all and what with global warming I was looking forward to comfortably making it through to Christmas before turning on the greenhouse heater before many years had gone by.

But no – we woke to a lawn frosted with ice. I raced off down the garden, heart in my mouth to have a look at the Ensete ventricosum that my father-in-law lovingly raised from seed and then gave to me (or rather my eight-year-old daughter); it’s been growing like topsy all year and is now a good 10ft high and still heading skywards. It’s been my pride and joy, and I was just getting ready to dig it up for winter and snuggle it down in the greenhouse, but here I was, caught short.

I was so relieved to find that that Colutea arborescens which arches over it had kindly protected it from the frost and it was still intact and as robust as ever. Lucky escape. Not so fortunate were the crops up at the allotment – the Sarpo Mira potatoes had all the tops frosted (not such a big deal as I was already harvesting them) and more upsettingly the sweetcorn I rescued from rat attack with the help of my feline friends had been totally clobbered, as had the butternut squash underneath. I had a nice big squash ripening up too. That’s got an ominous grey patch on it but I’m hoping I can salvage at least some for my favourite roast veg dish.

Blimey, I can’t keep up with this climate thing. I can cope with daffs in November; I can even see the bright side over these ridiculous amounts of rain over summer (I haven’t had to water the allotment for a whole two years now). But the unpredictability is a little unnerving at times like these. I just wish it would make its mind up and stay like that for a bit.