Weeding the Web

How to Grow Food in Your Polytunnel by Mark Gatter and Andy McKee

Out this week is How to Grow Food in Your Polytunnel by experienced polytunnel owners Mark Gatter and Andy McKee.

I don’t usually recommend anything I haven’t yet read myself, but this is definitely worth a look. Not only is it published by Green Books, who release such useful and excellent tomes as Charles Dowding’s Organic Gardening The natural no-dig method (and, incidentally, currently offer 20% discount on purchases of £30 or more), but Andy writes the Hedgewizard’s Diary which I referred to as a useful resource in my last post, Dead Hedge and Leaf Fence.

If you haven’t visited Hedgewizard’s Diary yet, then do; recounting the experiences since 2006 of a pagan family’s “journey towards self-sufficiency in fruit and vegetables” in Dorset, Andy—“an optimistic idiot with a spade”—offers a very funny and engaging read.

And Amazon’s Look Inside facility on the Polytunnel Handbook, this time with authors’ names equitably swapped to Andy McKee and Mark Gatter, shows that their books are just as engaging as his blog.

Dead Hedge and Leaf Fence - composting wood and leaves

Autumn being the time for tidying and trimming, many gardens will soon be generating a lot of woody prunings and dead leaves.

Most garden trimmings should go in the compost, but thick branches and some leaves take forever to break down. Leaves are best composted separately to make leaf mould, and you can put some branches through a chipper but, if they’re a little too thick for that, and a bonfire is out of the question, then it looks as if all you’ve got left is a trip to the dump.

But how about a dead hedge? These days, much emphasis is placed on dead hedges as wildlife havens and for conservation. The Roseberry House Project in Dulwich Park has one, made up from trees cleared to make an educational allotment. And on Thursday 15th September, in Whitehouse Woods, Lea Valley and Waltham BCTV will be cutting down holly and making a dead hedge to act as a barrier around an area of regeneration.