Food for thought

11 Friday Mar 2016

Tags

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.

New ways of doing things

17 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by sallynex in kitchen garden

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Tags

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.