clearing perennial weeds organically

We have removed barren cherry trees from our reclaimed 'hidden orchard' and now want to create a vegetable garden using raised beds.

But the soil is infested with nettles and brambles as well as a network of roots remaining after tree stumps have been removed. How can this ground be turned into a weed free, productive garden?

I will clear a lot of it by hand, but digging perennial weeds from large areas of ground is hard, tiring and unpopular work.

And there are so many other, competing priorities that clearing all of this ground with mattock and garden fork is not an option. And using weedkillers won't be considered.

Some time ago, Garden Organic suggested an alternative method in their magazine.

They showed how an area infested with perennial weeds could be cleared by covering the ground with a layer of cardboard and weighing this down with organic matter.

The light is excluded from the perennial weeds and over time these die, allowing the gardener to plant through the mulch of organic matter into the soil below.

So, I'm embarking on an experiment.

I need large quantities of cardboard but friends are supplying this. More cardboard needed!!

I need large quantities of organic matter - and neighbours with stables are providing this.

Here you see two trailers of manure applied to a layer of cardboard.

The photo shows progress so far. It doesn't show the vast area still to cover!!

But as Chairman Mao told his followers before the long march:
'The longest journey begins with a single step'.

Weed free vegetable garden, here we come!!

Top ten blogs!

My advice to you last week was not to coincide two of the most stressful events in your life into one week: dismally moving home and telling staff team, children, parents and governors you are leaving.

I guess I could add to this advice not to have a children's disco's on the Friday after school too.
I felt like a sucked and spat out smartie at the end of it all. But those kids had fun and I did show to myself that despite a stiff knee, I still had some of that sinuous grace that has been commented on so many times in the past. I say I showed myself because an observer described my 'moonwalk' as more closely resembling a man trying to remove mud from boots.

So, comatose and supine by Friday evening I tapped into the iphone to see whether anyone had been looking at the blog and was puzzled to find a number of people arriving from The Ecologist magazine website.

I was surprised to find myself listed number 2 in an article about the top ten gardening blogs chosen by their writer!!

And this was ahead of amazing and respected blogs I've dipped into for years like the North American 'Cold Climate Gardening'.

Blimey O'Riley!

The good news (in case you think this has become a moanfest) is that we have moved into our little rental house and the upstairs is now like home. Just wish the roller blinds I put up at the weekend didn't fall onto me when I pull the cord to close them!!!

Can't wait to live in the house I built!!!

good books

A perfect evening after the hectic Christmas and Boxing days: supine on the sofa luxuriating in good books.

Our visit to the Lowdham Apple Day alerted me to to 'Success with apples and pears to eat and drink' by Alan Rowe (Groundnut). I put it on my Christmas list and Santa was kind! Wonderfully subjective, irascible, opinionated and quirky, I made loads of pencil notes throughout the book and finished it in one sitting. Particularly interesting were his sections on the history of apples, his sections on recommended varieties and his descriptions of cider and fruit juice making.

Began a new find for me - Roger Deakin whose 'Notes from Walnut Tree Farm' (Penguin) was another Christmas pressie. His writing about the environment is lyrical, erudite and readable - some gift! His references to other writers have done that marvellous thing - opened unexpected pathways for me to follow in 2011.

Made good progress on Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' (Vintage) which is another of those bleak futuristic novels that chimed with Kazou Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go' read earlier this year. A compelling and completely believable narrative and one that will be recommended.

five hundred posts - and a new beginning..

500 posts on this blog since beginning it in 2006.

The blog began as we were starting the redevelopment of our home garden but quickly drew in the work we were doing on our allotment.

Perhaps this 500 figure is auspicious: we completed today on the purchase of the site that will become home and garden over the coming fifteen months. We have sold our house (subject to contract) and are buying a six acre site that was a former mushroom farm on the edge of Nottingham. This is what we call in the UK a 'brownfield' site - one that was formerly used. In our case we have over 8000m2 of concrete and hard-standing to clear, nearly three hundred metres of fencing to put up along an unsecured boundary and have no services on site. We plan to build two bungalows on the site which we will share with my sister and her partner. I have said previously on this blog that 'a man likes a project'!

We expect to leave our family home in January 2011 and live in temporary, rented accommodation until March 2012.

Between now and then, we must prepare the site for building, agree plans for our new homes with architect and planners, put together plans for landscaping .....and much much more.

In future this blog will not only cover allotment gardening but accompany us through our home building and the site development.The theme will, once again, be sustainability and living in harmony with the environment.

I hope that you enjoy the ride!

climate change?

News this week that is no surprise.

There has been a shift in British public attitude to global warming - with an increased number considering themselves sceptical.

This should come as no surprise.

We have seen our world leaders fail to unequivocally give us a direction on climate change at Copenhagen. We need to leadership, and in the absence of a strong commitment, there will be those who question.

In Britain, we have just come through a cold spell (the coldest in thirty years) and people may ask how our world can be warming when the winter is so cold.
the answer to this latter point is the difference between weather and climate: weather will change frequently but climate relates to much longer term change.

And we now live in an urban world where the connection between the natural world and our day-to-day worlds has been fractured. It is a minority of people who grow their own food or whose lives have any contact with the environment in any meaningful way. People do not see how rapidly plant and animal populations have changed over a short time period - significant indicators. The threat is not immediate and the causal link between greenhouse gasses and a warming world are too long in time for us to comprehend.

For me this is no problem. I do not live in sub-Saharan Africa where it now difficult to provide food for the family. I do not rely for my life on Polar Ice. My own home is not at risk of flooding as rivers struggle to hold the run off from flash floods.

But for many of our world population of people, plants and animals the change in our climate is real and far reaching.

In Australia, where they have just seen the worst drought in living memory and terrible bush fires raging out of control, there is now a rising political denial of climate change.

We have some real convincing to do to ensure that sufficient pressure is kept on our leaders by an informed population. The alternative is too frightening to think about. The challenge goes on.

peat free potting compost

Spring is here .... and with it all of that wonderful anticipation as seeds are sown.

But there is a problem for the sustainable gardener - which growing medium to use?

Last year we moved to using peat free compost. Peat bogs are increasingly threatened habitats and the horticultural industry is denuding the bogs of peat at an alarming rate.

The problem for the gardener is complicated by the fact that peat free composts are simply not as good as their peat based cousins. We have found that germination is not as good and young plants fail to thrive in the way we had become used with peat based composts. Hanging baskets and pots retain water less well in peat free media and the plants are less vigorous.

This year there is a new product on the market. It is West plus peat free multipurpose compost. I understand that it is made from bi-products of the forestry industry.

The compost is quite fibrous as you can see. But so far results are encouraging. Pictured are Feltham First early peas germinating in it.

The drawback is its cost. At £5.99 a bag it is twice the price of other composts.

5,000,000 spuds wasted in UK each day!!!!!

As we are now in the very middle of our winter feasting season, it came as a rotten shock to discover how much food waste there is in this country.

The WRAP site brought this home like a great clunking fist.
The table below shows the top five of avoidable food waste.
This should be national headlines!

Well, if it's not worth reporting by the BBC, this blogger is determined to help get the message across.
5 million spuds, 4 million apples plus the wasted bananas, tomatoes and oranges.

Top 5 of avoidable fruit & vegetables wasted in UK	Estimated tonnage of waste per annum	Numbers of avoidable fruit & vegetables wasted per day
Apples	179000	4,400,000
Potatoes	177000	5,100,000
Bananas	78000	1,600,000
Tomatoes	46000	2,800,000
Oranges	45000	1,200,000

So, not only should we be concerned about the environmental impact of intensive food production and the food miles incurred in importing so much........ we now learn that we then throw it away!!!!!! All of that unnecessary carbon emitted in production, packaging and transportation.

'I wake up every morning and I get my brief
I stare at the world in complete disbelief' Van Morrison

BBC Gardeners' World

Christmas flu. Bah!

But, bravo BBC because your BBCi player is an absolute boon for the feverish and curmudgeonly male who has neither slept, or eaten a proper meal, in days!!

So, in the darkest hours I bumped into the Christmas edition of BBC Gardeners' World. Our BBC is often knocked, but let me tell you, we are the envy of the world in having such a treasure.

And new lead presenter Toby Buckland was superb. When Geoff Hamilton died, his great work of reaching out to the everyday gardener and advancing the causes of sustainability and organics in a practical, down to earth way rather lost its way.

Although accomplished TV presenters, Alan Titchmarsh and Monty Don never made the connections that Geoff did. Alan, in particular, never convinced as an organic or sustainable gardener.
The programmes became vehicles for the presenters' own personalities. The camera seemed to play on them so adoringly......

Do you remember the series Monty did before moving onto Gardeners' World, when we had to watch his muscular and perspiring body as he drove in stakes for a hazel edging to his vegetable beds.
Geoff would have reused scaffolding boarding. Not nearly as sexy I'm sure, but a damn site more practical.

On a separate note, how sad that Monty has suffered illness that now prevents him from presenting.

I remember Alan's natural history series and enjoyed it but do recall one episode about rivers when we had to watch him, in camouflage gear, holding a stick for a kingfisher to land on. He was probably badly advised.

For me, Geoff was a convincing and passionate supporter of the Wildlife Trusts movement. Sustainable Garden blog is a reaction to that whole 'makeover and damn the environmental consequences' culture.

So, in my fevered state, I thought Toby achieved that excellent balance between authority and humilty that so recalled Geoff. And, how refreshing, to see Toby's contraption using a car jack for pressing apples. You could almost see Geoff smiling down from above.

campaign against leaf blowers!

We are seeing the final leaves coming away from the trees. Introduced species usually lose their leaves first, and our indigenous oaks hold on to theirs longest.

Now, the oaks of Sherwood are almost bare – and lucky Nottinghamshire gardeners can reap the benefit.

Pictured is our stash of leaves swept from the roads and parks of Gedling Borough and deposited at the allotments.

I had already barrowed many loads across, and today there was a steaming pile of oak leaves from Arnot Hill Park waiting to complete my pile.

Leaves are nature’s treasure and fit comfortably within a philosophy of ‘slow gardening’. This years leaves should be left for a couple of years or longer and make a friable organic soil conditioner when they have broken down into leaf mould. They are greedily grabbed by those who understand this and who can see beyond today.

Yet there are people who do not welcome leaf fall. It depresses me to see bags of leaves left out for collection by householders and not stored away to improve our sandy soils. I am astonished to see that people do not even have the energy to sweep or rake the leaves away but use air blowers.

These blowers should become the symbol of the sustainable gardening movement. Not only do they consume energy in their production and distribution, they use electricity to operate. What ever happened to the besom broom made from birch twigs and fastened to a thin, straight branch? It was used until worn out and then another made. No carbon footprint and perfectly fit for purpose!

Now I know, I know. They say that the environmental movement is full of puritans whose whole desire is to take the fun out of everything. In this case you're too dang right! I am happy to be the Oliver Cromwell of sustainability if these ridiculous and unnecessary machines are removed from the High Street.

I was delighted to read in a back issue of Organic Matters that a Canadian councillor is trying to ban leaf blowers. Well done Oliver.

You're bringing sanity to a world of madness!!!!!!!!!!!

is grass green?

Michelle and Susan made me think in their pieces on Garden Rant.

Here in wet England, we have perfect pastureland. When our forbears’ opinions were formed, there were fields of grass all around us and great landscapers creating parks full of trees and lush sward. I think that this is when we became imprinted with the idea that gardens need lawns. Lawns grew so easily and cheaply and had been created for the wealthy. I want one!

As the British Empire spread, the colonialists took with them the mental pictures of their native land and tried to create it wherever they were, no matter how inappropriate it was. Lawns were synonymous with the mother country. The establishment of a lush green sward in places where it was clearly incongruous became a huge status symbol.

And that was how the myth began, that a garden must have a lawn. And, not any kind of lawn, but a perfect lawn, where the blades of grass are all the same height, colour and shape. It is now the status of a major world religion: lawn worship!

It’s a right old load of rubbish in my opinion!

Grass should only grow where it grows naturally. If it needs inputs of energy, fertilisers, weedkillers and water it is not a lawn –it is a huge, flat, boring great green weed. A weed is a plant that is growing in the wrong place.

Monoculture or diversity? I vote for diversity every time. I like buttercups, daisies and clover. Our industrial farmers have decimated wildlife in their drive for uniform crops. Monoculture has no place in a garden. I demand a mixture of plants in my lawn!

Wildlife hates pesticides and herbicides. The food chain is poisoned and the consequence is silence when we should hear the song of the song thrush and the snuffle of the hedgehog.

And these lush lawns produce a mountain of clippings. Some are toxic following applications of weedkillers and so can’t even be incorporated in the compost or used as a mulch. When they are not poisonous, many people give no thought to how they should use this waste they have created. The clippings go into the dustbin or trash.

And then we get onto the whole business of reducing inputs and the carbon footprint of our gardens. Powered mowers have a carbon footprint that is unnecessary. Fertilisers and weedkillers have a carbon footprint that is unnecessary.

And water! A scarce commodity in most parts of the world. Even where it isn’t as scarce, great dams and water cleaning and filtration systems are needed. To produce water that is then wasted on a lawn. In Perth, in desiccated Australia, they pump water from the underground aquifers to water the lawns.

Is grass green?

what a waste

Here in England the rain comes down, the sun shines and the grass grows.

What a pity to see people bagging their grass cuttings and putting them in the bin. This unnecessary waste can be stopped and the fertility of the garden improved by using the grass cuttings to boost soil fertility.

Here, clematis 'arabella' has had a mulch of grass cuttings.

The mulch will retain moisture in the soil. As the grass cuttings are easily incorporated by worms and full of nutrients, the clematis will get an extra fertility boost.

And the garden is not creating waste for someone else to manage. We all win.

did ye get healed?

What is sustainable gardening?

Susan asks in Garden Rant for a definition.

"Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children." Native American Indian saying.

Sustainable gardening is about respect.

It is respect shown for the environment by only using organic methods. No weed and feeds, no watering of the lawn, no roundup. So, no poisoning of hedgehogs or song thrushes. No residues washed through the soil into water courses.

Respect for the environment too by reducing waste. Prunings and lawn clippings are not carted away, but used as mulches and sources of compost. Planting schemes are thought through to avoid large amounts of waste plant material that go to landfill or require plant, machinery and energy to convert into compost.

Reduction too, in the environmental impact of landscaping schemes. Reclaimed materials mean that energy isn’t used to manufacture the latest garden craze. Natural, regenerating materials or reclaimed materials are chosen. Large areas of lawn requiring powered mowing are designed out, so that the area can be maintained by a renovated old push mower.

Each of us can grow some of our own food, no matter how small our balcony, patio, yard or garden. Growing our own organic food reduces food miles, tastes better and does us more good. Our lives are better, our lifestyle more sustainable.

And the wildlife that we have displaced by building our homes and gardens must not be ignored. Use of the locally-occurring flora in the garden will mean that your garden has a natural feel and that the plants are a ‘best-fit’ with your soil and local climate. These will benefit local insect, bird and animal life. In England, allowing garlic mustard to grow will provide food for orange tip butterflies. A buckthorn bush will provide food for brimstone butterfly caterpillars. A small garden pond will provide water and bathing for birds and a place for newts and frogs to breed. They will go on to eat the slugs that are spoiling your hostas!

But it is also about respecting me. 21^st century living has become toxic for many of us. Our working hours are too long, our budgets stretched, our families given insufficient priority. Sustainable gardening sustains the spirit. I feel better for being in my garden. I do feel a real sense of healing as I tend the garden or sit in it on my own or with family and friends..

It is sustaining me.

‘… and the healing has begun’. Van Morrison

chipping away at the weed problem

The allotment gates open and the word 'Chippings' is mouthed.

Allotments digest all kinds of organic and inorganic material and chippings have recently been added to the specials board.

And the resourceful allotment holder can make great use of them, I can tell you.

This unprepossessing pile is about ten barrowloads of leylandii shreddings. Highly acidic, these are the ones that remain after other eager gardeners have barrowed away the best. But, when when rotted they would make a good ericacious compost or could be used to mulch blueberries.

This lot will help make paths between the four beds. The grass paths have become havens for couch grass and bindweed and so we plan to dig them up and replace with a path of chippings. Weeds don't like it acid so the chippings inhibit their growth.

That's my theory!!!!!

plaggy bags - you're doomed!!!!!!

Yesterday a fantastic step forward was made toward a national tax on plastic bags. The 33 London councils voted unanimously to ban the handing out of free plastic bags. Green England have been working closely with the London councils, and the petition was used as evidence for popular support for the levy.What happens now?The London Councils will deposit a private bill to the Houses of Parliament on 27th November. This will then be debated, voted on by MPs, and will hopefully come into law within 18 months.What can I do?Firstly, please keep encouraging others to sign the petition. It has already had an impact on the London councils' decision, and over the next 18 months could make a big difference on the MPs' votes. Secondly, please lobby your MP to request that they support the tax. Their contact details can be found at www.writetothem.com. It is their decision at the end of the day, so a quick letter, email or phone call from you could change their vote, and indeed the final outcome.When you write to you MP, it would be a good idea to mention both the London Councils' decision and the petition, to give them a guide as to the level of popular support for the campaign. There are around 10,000 people on this email list, and only 647 MPs in the English parliament. If we all wrote to our MP, on average each would receive fifteen letters! That would lend a huge amount of credibility and support to the issue, so please take five minutes to call, email or write to your MP. A sample letter can be found at www.green-england.co.uk/sampleletter.php.Thank you so much for your support - the issue is rapidly becoming high profile (it is on the front page of the Independent today). More information can be found here.Robwww.green-england.co.uk

Is Brown green?

The arrival of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister has seen a reappraisal of government priorities. Education is Gordon's passion and our health service his priority, we are told.
But what of sustainability?
I was disappointed to read that his right hand man, Cabinet Office minister Ed Milliband, had not placed climate change as a priority in his writing of the new Labour Party manifesto. I was further dismayed by the apparent 'downgrading' of the government's sustainability committee (Energy and the Environment) as reported in the Independent on Sunday. It is now a sub committee.
Our previous Prime Minister flitted from one thing to the next without seeing anything through. I can understand that Mr Brown wants to focus in on priorities. It is a crying shame that sustainability is not his priority.

7000 miles from home-or when does organic food stop being organic?

When does organic food stop being organic?
I wrote on 13 March about organic onions for sale in Tesco that had travelled 7000 miles from Argentina.
My concern was that air freighted food that had travelled this huge distance was not truly sustainable since the carbon emissions needed to get it to us were massive. For me 'organic' is about achieving a balance with nature that is not only good for me, but good for the environment. My dilemma was - should I buy this kind of 'organic' produce at all or buy local, non-organic vegetables? We've resolved it by using fewer onions and buying from our local shop when only non-EU organic onions are available.
I was pleased to hear on the radio yesterday that our Soil Association has weighed into this argument, questioning whether 'organic' status should be given to this kind of air-freighted import.
My view is that it shouldn't. Think global, act local seems to say it all.
So, the answer to my own question is that organic food stops being organic when it has had to be air-freighted thousands of miles.