Food for thought

11 Friday Mar 2016

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bird feeder, Edible Garden Show, innovations, new gardening products, raised beds, sauna, soil blockers, wormeries

Off to Warwickshire at the weekend to visit the Edible Garden Show, making a welcome return to its original home at Stoneleigh Park after an ill-advised foray into London for a year or two. That means the smallholding section is back (yay!) with proper pigs and a few chickens, some sheep and a few goats. Right up my street: when you start to grow your own food, assuming you’re not vegetarian, it’s not long before you start eyeing up a few livestock too.

Anyway: despite getting very distracted by piggies (my latest obsession: more later) I was really here for the kitchen gardening. Specifically, to see what’s new: this is a great show for tapping into the zeitgeist as anyone who has anything that’s a bit innovative to do with kitchen gardening shows up.

So here are a few things which caught my eye this year:

Sometimes the simple ideas are the best. Take an ordinary plastic drinks bottle: fill with birdseed: replace the lid with this handy little screw-on tray: turn it upside down and hey presto: you have a bird feeder.

About as luxury-end as the bird feeder was thrifty: but I did like the idea of a garden sauna. I had a sauna once, in Finland: it involved jumping into the Baltic Sea afterwards, which I could have done without, but the sauna bit was pretty fabulous and made you feel like you were playing a starring role in a Scandi-noir movie. This one retails for a shade short of £13k but that includes absolutely everything except the towels, and lets you choose from a range of finishes.

Now never mind all this fantasy gardening: let’s get down to the nitty gritty. I have for some time been agonising about the amount of plastic in my garden: in fact so much so that I’m on a bit of a crusade about it (I may shortly start banging on about it at more length on this very blog). So I was intrigued to see that soil blocks are now available in a more manageable size. Previously they’ve been whopping great tools requiring you to stand up to use them: for sedentary gardeners there are now these fantastic little gizmos. They make blocks up to 10cm across: no plastic module trays, no root disturbance. I will be giving these a try…

Whenever you see something and find yourself thinking, ‘Why hasn’t someone thought of this before?’ you know you’re onto a good thing. This is the Garden Tower: it might look like a big plastic planter: but in fact it’s a wormery. The central pipe is perforated: you fill it with kitchen waste and worms, and the outer pockets with compost to plant up as normal. Then the worms – as well as making worm poo compost and worm wee plant feed as they would in a conventional wormery – travel back and forth between compost and kitchen waste, pulling the nutrient-rich compost with them to feed your plants. Fantastic idea.

Now these caught my eye partly because they were circular – and I’m a sucker for a non-square bed – but also because there were people picking them up and walking off with them tucked under their arm. Not what you’d expect to do with a raised bed. But then most raised beds are made from heavy-duty scaffold boards and the like (part of the reason for the predilection for squares and rectangles): whereas Grow Rings are made from lightweight, flexible polypropylene. I wouldn’t like to vouch for their durability, but the man assured me they’ll last for five years. And you can stack them: put down a large (4ft diameter) one, fill with compost, then pop a smaller 55cm diameter one on top for a double-height tower effect with a much deeper root run in the centre. You can put them up in seconds, on a patio, a patch of grass, pretty much anywhere you want some growing space, really. Perfect for lazy gardeners – or just those who aren’t that good at woodwork.

Good ideas

03 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by sallynex in shows

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Edible Garden Show, good ideas

A week or so ago I was at the Edible Garden Show in London. It’s a must-attend show for me, being one of those earthy veg-growing types and a bit into my smallholding too: this is the only show of it’s size I know of that’s entirely dedicated to all things GYO.

Having said that, I’m having to convince myself of the need to go these days, as I rather agree with Emma Cooper’s take on the show. It is a shadow of its former self after moving from the National Agriculture Centre at Stoneleigh to the more confined (if better lit) surroundings of Alexandra Palace.

So I had to look a little harder for the good ideas this year: but good ideas I found. Here are just a few of the interesting, inspirational and occasionally just a little weird veggie innovations this year:

Feeding your plants with worm poo

Yep: you heard right. It does make sense, mind you: you breed lots of mealworms, plus a few beetles and suchlike, and harvest the frass (that’s what they’re calling it, and as euphemisms go it’s a good one). Then you use this plentiful but otherwise overlooked medium to feed your plants. You top-dress outdoor veg, or mix with potting compost; it’s basically your good old-fashioned manure, but a lot, lot smaller. www.ecothrive.co.uk

Unexpectedly edible flowers

I’ve come across these guys before, and they always surprise me with the number of flowers you can eat. I’ve already learned not to write off edible flowers as just a fad: I now actively encourage my rocket to bolt since tasting their sweet-and-peppery petals. Anyway, thanks to the Edible Flower Shop my list got a whole lot longer: this year I plan to taste cornflowers, daisies, dianthus and hyssop, too.

Collapsible bowls

Isn’t this a good idea? It’s a wooden bowl, but not just any old wooden bowl. Made of bamboo, cross-laminated for strength, it concertinas down flat when empty. They’ve even heat-treated the wood so it can double up as a trivet. Now that’s what I call handy. www.whotzhot.info

Seed rulers

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best. This beechwood ruler from Burgon & Ball is handsome and sturdy, marked up with clear measurements, but what I liked most about it was that it has handy little holes at regular intervals for perfect seed spacing. It wouldn’t work for all seeds – I’d like to see you get a courgette seed through that – but then you wouldn’t be sowing courgettes direct anyway, I hope.

Greenhouse space saver

I do like a pop-up solution, and this one caught my eye particularly because my greenhouse is currently at its usual crazy mid-spring logjam between seeds being sown, tender stuff not quite out in the garden yet, and seedlings waiting to be potted on. So to say space is at a premium is a little like saying they’re a bit partial to cars in Los Angeles. These fold-out shelves, each able to take six half-seed trays, might well free up the traffic jam just a little.

New ways of doing things

17 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by sallynex in kitchen garden

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Edible Garden Show, grafted vegetables, grow your own, new gardening products

I realised this weekend that I’ve been going to the Edible Garden Show every year since it started. In that time I’ve watched it grow from a tentative toe-in-the-water one room wonder (I still think they badly underestimated the popularity of their own show that first year) to the three-room-one-tent-and-a-bit-outdoors extravaganza it is today.

It’s still growing, too: they’re planning to move the whole thing south to Alexandra Palace in London next year. I can’t help feeling that’s a loss to the cause of having more shows further north than the Watford Gap; but on the other hand I can see why they’re doing it. At the moment this is a show for kitchen garden aficionados: you have to really want to go to make the trek to the National Agricultural Centre in Stoneleigh, Warwickshire. Plonk it inside the M25, though, and you’ve opened up a whole new potential audience of quite keen but not so much so they’d want to actually leave the city urban food growers too.

One of its great strengths, and one which I hope it won’t lose when it heads south, is that you always, always find something different there. Last year, if I remember rightly, it was a solar-powered automatic irrigation system; the year before, a water butt that looked startlingly like a urinal. Well: some ideas are more successful than others, I suppose.

This year, too, there were some intriguing, ingenious and occasionally incomprehensible new approaches to growing your own. Here are just some of them.

Not sure whether to call Veg Trugs a raised bed on legs, or a table: whatever, it’s a veg bed at waist height which is great if you’re growing in small spaces especially if you’re managing without any soil to plant into. And now they’ve brought out these crop covers which just zip into place over rugged frames which slot onto the sides. They’d work just as well partnered up with a conventional raised bed, too.	Having just about broken my back this spring sieving home-made compost so I didn’t end up spending all summer picking bits of half-rotted cardboard out of my mulch, this one really caught my eye. It’s from West Midlands based Castlefield, and like all the best ideas it’s really very simple. It’s a socking great big rectangular sieve, of the kind of quantity you need for barrowloads of compost, which slots over your wheelbarrow on a no-nonsense frame. Brilliant.
Collapsible water butts. I’m finding it impossible to make up my mind over whether this is bonkers or brilliant. Invented by a company called Colapz (see what they did there?) there is a watering can that folds up into a little disc, too. Fabulous if you’re short of space, though quite why you’d want to put away a water butt I’m not exactly sure.	Ooh I did like these gift cards (and bookmarks, and gift tags) from Big Tree, Little Tree. Each has a little applique flower on it which is ‘seeded’. Bury it in a pot of compost and… it’s a gift that lasts all year. There are strawberries, cabbages, leeks, lettuces and poppies in the range, too. My birthday’s coming up in about a month, by the way…
You’ve heard of obelisks – well, this one hangs in the air. It’s rather elegant, too: quite an original take on your run-of-the-mill hanging baskets, I thought. The people at Dr Growgood who sell these things recommend them for clematis and the like, but I’m not so sure: I can’t see your average Bill MacKenzie being happy with its roots trussed up in a sunny hanging basket. But I do think it would be perfect for annual climbers: perhaps some Spanish flag, or a morning glory tumbling up and over in a big blue waterfall. Now that would be a sight worth seeing.	Grafted veg are going from strength to strength. As ever, Suttons is leading the way: their range now includes grafted peppers, cucumbers, aubergines and even melons. And this year they’re offering plants with more than one variety grafted onto the same rootstock. This one is, or rather are, Tomato ‘Florryno’ and ‘Orangino’, both tiny little cherry varieties. While I’m a little sceptical about grafted veg – I’ve tried them, and the difference isn’t that remarkable – this I get. Who wouldn’t want twice the varieties from the same growing space? Inspired.

The post that wasn’t

24 Thursday Mar 2011

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Edible Garden Show, livestock, vegetables, water butts

I went to the Edible Garden Show last Friday.

I was going to tell you all about it. On, say, about Saturday.

Could have done with this advice this week, really

Then Sunday came along and it was lovely and sunny outside and my first earlies were just itching to get in the ground and… well….

So it turned into Monday. And there was a big deadline going on and panicky emails flying.

And then Tuesday came around and…. well, you get the picture.

A fine crop of forced rhubarb at the Potting Shed display

So I meant to write a much better, more pertinent, more insightful post; one which highlighted a few of the rather gorgeous things at the show, like Joy Michaud’s covetable dark purple leaved chilli seedlings (new variety: ‘Fairy Lights’ – one of which is now snuggled down in a 10cm pot in my greenhouse) and the funky (but possibly rather impractical) water butt on show at the Urban Allotment stand.

Funky… but wouldn’t survive five minutes in my hugger-mugger garden I’m afraid

I meant to give some pithy comments about how the show had a bit of growing into itself to do: the venue was small and a little on the gloomy side (taking pictures was an interesting exercise in holding the camera still long enough for the agonisingly slow shutter speed to go through its paces).

Yeeeesss…. photography was not easy in these conditions. In focus, these are the rather wonderful ‘Fairy Lights’ chillies I failed to resist

And it tried to be all things to all (wo)men: cookery shows jostled shoulders with James Wong and his Incredible Edibles, just a short stone’s throw from a tiny marquee full of snuffly pigs, impossibly fluffy chickens and slightly smelly goats (are there any other kind?). And for me there wasn’t enough of anything.

Inbuilt crop protection from Home Grown Revolution: practical, sturdy, but why do things made for allotments have to be so darn ugly?

I meant to express the hope that next year, they’ll do the same thing again, but this time they won’t dramatically underestimate the level of interest: when I arrived, ten minutes before the show even opened, the carpark was already packed and there was a queue out of the door. So much for the GYO movement peaking. Next year I’m hoping to see a venue triple the size (and preferably at least partly outside in deference to people taking photographs).

Uhh…. hello

Instead you will have to read the eminent Emma Cooper, who was also there and got her act together far better than me, as well as bagging the most adorable piggy photo ever (although I think her other half may have had something to do with that).

And if you didn’t make it to Stoneleigh Park yourself, you can be transported right there, courtesy of the National Farmers’ Union, with a little film which I shall now shamelessly borrow.

But although it’s a week out of date, and like too-old cheeses the joke is a little stale, I couldn’t resist sharing this: it tickled me pink (though I am easily tickled).

Well…. it does say ‘Invisible’, but I think they may be taking things a little literally…

Sally Nex

~ Sustainable food growing

Tag Archives: Edible Garden Show

Food for thought

Good ideas

New ways of doing things

The post that wasn’t