Weeding the Web

Will James Wong get gardeners excited?

Have you noticed how everything has to be exciting?

This struck me anew as I read the Horticultural Trade Association's interview with James Wong. He'll be speaking at the HTA National Plant Show today about engaging the younger generation. "My talk will cover my own - very personal - views on strategies that I believe garden retail (and in fact the whole industry) must adopt if it is to speak to younger audiences in an exciting, fun & relevant way. Whether it's to get 'em to pick a course at college or to secure a purchase at a garden centre."

(Oh, yes: "fun". I forgot that everything has to be fun as well.)

Now, two points. First, why is there a general assumption that no one will be able to raise a jot of enthusiasm about anything unless it's presented as - yes - exciting?  James is merely on trend with marketing speak, but I'm beginning to find it patronising. I don't need to be excited to find something interesting, and while I might not be the demographic that James is talking about, I know I never did. Children, in particular, are targets of this approach. Cue this month's RHS page for families.

"June has the longest day in the year and so is an exciting time of year to get out in the garden and enjoy early summer flowers.  Sow clarkia flowers for summer colour and radishes too for a vegetable with bite."

The rest of us do not escape. Get Your Grown-Ups Growing is promoted by the RHS :

"As part of the RHS Campaign for School Gardening this exciting new project encourages schools to get local grown-ups involved in their garden providing valuable resources and much needed help."

Pause for thought. Enjoying flowers - exciting? Sowing clarkia and radishes - exciting? Getting grown-ups in to do your digging - exciting? Hmm.

And this is my second point. How would you describe gardening? Absorbing, yes. Engaging, yes. Addictive - certainly for some. Satisfying, gratifying, comforting, soothing, puzzling, frustrating, intellectually challenging. All sorts of adjectives spring to mind. But not exciting - at least, not until you've become so absorbed, engaged, etc., etc., that the arrival of a new blight-resistant potato makes you buzz with anticipation.  Excitement does not come first.

Of course, there are prospects within gardening which most non-gardeners might recognise as potentially raising the pulse-rate: designing a show garden for Chelsea, for example; launching your own gardening business. But ordinary, everyday, suburban soil-delving comprising the main activity of all those youthful wallets that James Wong wants to wedge open at garden centres? I don't think so.

And there's the rub for the garden industry. Gardening isn't exciting. Gardening is the epitome of delayed gratification. We wait; we nurture. People who need excitement in the quantities that gardening marketing departments would like to serve up go sky-diving, bungie-jumping, or throw all their savings into a once-in-lifetime venture. Those of us who garden find it has exciting moments, but we do not do it for excitement.

I'm sorry I'm going to miss James's talk. He believes that "garden centres will begin to need to look and feel more like plant 'food halls' than factory outlets in the very near future". At least that might moderate the vast expanses of lifestyle products that I first mentioned in A Concession to Gardening and which have become the mainstay in many garden centres.

But he envisages what sounds to be an exhausting pitch of excitement, and a dizzying round of innovation.

"If our industry is going to survive it will need to take a leaf out of the books of ruthlessly innovative supermarkets, who are constantly striving to surprise and excite an increasingly discerning customer, instead of just churning out more of the same...

"Rewarding these horti-customers with a spread of exciting, novel varieties, quirky in-store displays and useful point of sale 'how to' advice - just like food and clothes retailers do as standard - is a guaranteed way to keep plant geeks (novices and veterans alike) wanting more."

What do you think? The horticultural industry is a tiny proportion of GDP. That's because gardening is not an inherently consumerist activity, unlike the food and clothes industry, where food gets eaten or perishes and clothes fall apart or out of fashion.

Picture yourself confronted by the panoply of novel varieties described above. Plant geeks grabbing more or, as the "increasingly discerning" customer whom James envisages, choosing the odd plant to try in that awkward corner? 

Those who might be drawn in are those who aren't discerning, those who are just starting off with the garden when, for a short time, you're like a kid in a sweetie shop - should I buy that? That looks good. Let's try that. But you buy your plants, you put them in, some die, some get replaced, and, unless you become absorbed, engaged etc., that's pretty much it.

If you do become absorbed, engaged etc., I can't help feeling that you won't be jumping up and down in the garden centre with excitement at a dozen novel varieties. You'll think about your garden, seek out a particular cultivar, choose with care.

And when that's done, you won't be in the shop, you'll be in the garden - growing, not consuming - and doing what you like best.



A Good Weed? Square Metre Gardening by Mel Bartholomew

There came a point, as I read Square Metre Gardening, when everything fell into place. On page 35, author Mel Bartholomew reveals he was once an army officer. Aha!

Vegetables, Raised Beds, for the growing of,

Build unit. (‘Shun!) Recruit more units (Line up! Line up!). Grow veg (Squo-ad, fall in!)

I’m being a bit unfair. Follow Mel's methods to the letter and you'll have very logical system, spelt out step by step, with a range of equipment at the ready. But there's one thing I don't feel easy about...

First, though, let's make something clear. Square Metre Gardening (SMG) is not Square Foot Gardening writ large (as I originally thought). This is a revamp for a metric market. It works quite neatly (a metre, being 3ft 3inches, divides nicely into one-foot squares with an inch-wide divider between each) but it's still Square Foot Gardening.

Most people know the principle (divide bed into squares, plant one crop per square at a closer spacing than normal), but Mel's honed the practice over many years. His aim is to reduce work to an absolute minimum, get maximum results, and restore faith in those veg gardeners who have previously failed with conventional methods.

If you've already tried SMG without Mel's guidance, chances are that you've set up square-foot beds along the lines of those pictured on Vegetable Garden Direct's blog. Nip over and have a quick look because, with apologies to “novice square-footer” Sarah Smith, they provide an ideal opportunity to examine the refinements Mel brings to the system.

Spacing

Squares any size other than a foot mean you have to think for yourself. Adhere to Mel's measurements and you'll always sow or plant one, four, nine or sixteen of something in a square: one cauliflower, for example; four lettuce or kale; nine spinach; sixteen radish.  The book includes an At a Glance chapter that makes it easy to find this information on all the veg a beginner is likely to grow.

Spacing veg correctly, and sowing only the same number of seeds as you want plants to grow puts an end to thinning and to wondering if that sprout growing in the wrong position is a weed or not.

Dividers

Without a grid, it's not an SMG. And string and nails don’t count. "When you have no grid, your garden has no character," says Mel. He’s also playing with your mind. Mel explains: "If you had to clean all the windows in your house, that would be a huge chore and you may keep putting it off... But if you adopt the attitude of, 'All I’m going to do is one window,” get out the supplies, and in 5 to 10 minutes it’s done." 

Large, upwardly mobile plants

Courgettes, too big for a square foot, might be allotted two squares and a netted frame to train them upwards. Other veg require our throwing in the trowel and allotting one square-metre bed to one plant (squash, perhaps) or a whole crop (sweetcorn or asparagus).

Soil

While the soil in Sarah's beds looks perfectly good, Mel would surely despair. He really doesn’t want you to bother with garden soil. It might not be free-draining, it might not be the right pH, it might be too heavy... Chances are, he feels, you've tried your own soil and the crop failed.

The answer is Mel’s Mix - a loose, moisture-retaining, free-draining, nutrient-rich soil that is weed-free. It also needs to be bought in. While he gives quite a bit of detail on making compost (one component of M’s M), you also need vermiculite and peat moss (or a peat-free equivalent) and, as you’ll need quite a bit of compost to help fill the beds, probably commercially produced compost as well. (Though, Mel comments that the Mix lasts a long time and after the initial outlay you’re mostly adding small amounts of garden compost.)

What you’ll find in the book

This repudiation of soil is why SMG, at least the way Mel prescribes it, makes me uneasy. There’s no reference to improving soil, no reference to the rest of the garden, just a prescription for a purchased growing matrix that replaces an abundant resource. In the long term, I believe in improving the soil you've got.

However, there are plenty of nuggets for gardeners who don’t want to SMG just  like Mel. He suggests calculating exactly what you're likely to eat, which saves over-planting (what is Claire going to do with 50 cabbages?!). Harvesting from individual squares makes successional planting easier to plan.

Useful planting charts make clear what to grow when, helping you through the seasons, and ending with a planting schedule for autumn harvests or overwintering.

Mel draws attention to vegetable families. His assertion that "your plants are just like your children and should be treated as such" is a bit whimsical, but getting to know what is related to which is not. Celery and carrot? Same family; both are attacked by carrot root fly. It's another instance of that reductionist army thinking - "If you become familiar with the plant families, you won't have to learn and digest as much information about individual crops...Each family member usually has the same frost resistance and pretty much the same type of care."

If you’re thinking of SMGing, with or without Mel’s Mix, this is definitely worth buying. If you’re not, he still provides food for thought (in this case, I’d recommend getting it out of a library), though you’ll probably find his condemnation of “normal” gardening a touch irritating.

He provides an answer for those who have failed to the point of giving up, or whose only growing space is on concrete.  I’d even venture that this is a book aimed squarely (oops, sorry) at making veg growing really easy for those who don’t want to garden.

This book was provided for review by Frances Lincoln, publisher.

For a useful review of Square Metre Gardening with a different approach, see Emma Cooper's Book Review: One Magic Square

Visit Dreaming of Roses for more links to gardening book reviews this month.

A comma (butterfly) brings me to a full-stop

Never think that sci-fi writers are original. They just look at Nature and copy shamelessly. The Last of Us, a video game just launched, takes a quite revolting fungus attack on ants in the Amazon and transposes the idea to humans.

And surely it can't be long before someone weaves some fiction from last week's skin-crawling pictures of the cherry trees in Cambridge enwebbed by ermine moth caterpillars. (Perhaps they have; I'm far too squeamish to know much about sci-fi horror.)

So, when I saw this spiky, stripy caterpillar, resembling bird poo, I wondered with trepidation what had taken up residence.  The tufts must be there to put birds off but they do a good job on me too. I was torn between excitement at the possibility of a rare and dangerous creature taking a fancy to my gooseberry bushes, and the likelihood that, as it was actually on my gooseberry bush, it couldn't be rare at all.

And it isn't.

However, the ID was quite hard to track down, so, just in case you're wondering what a brown and black, stripy caterpillar, with tufts of white hair and a white splash on its back might be, I can now, thanks to the useful caterpillar guide from Moths Count, say categorically that it is the caterpillar of the Comma Butterfly, most commonly seen from May to August.

The comma has raised some excitement in recent years as it has returned to Scotland, having died out there in 1870s. Butterfly Conservation considers it rather fascinating, especially as its numbers declined sharply and are now increasing strongly. The caterpillar is indeed designed to look like a bird dropping, while the scalloped edges of the butterfly's wing (also brown and black) allow it to hibernate more safely among autumn leaves.

One of the few weeds I don't have in the garden is stinging nettles, and elms are obviously few and far between (was the demise of the elm a factor in its decline?), but it does also feed on species of Ribes. Hence the gooseberry.

It doesn't seem to be much of a pest, though. The bush has lost a few leaves, but this is nothing like an attack by the gooseberry sawfly and it has not been stripped naked.

 

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day: summery and strong

This combination of Johnson's Blue geranium and a venerable double-flowered pink peony (unknown) look stunning in the sunlight. Can't really do them justice.

To see who else is enjoying what, visit May Dreams Gardens for this month's round-up of Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day.

Which is best - shoes or boots for gardening?

There are those who Make Do, and those who Make Right.

Putting up with a a hot tap, for six months, that needs rebuilding each time you turn it on is definitely Making Do [blush].  Researching thoroughly to find the perfect remedy to a problem is not (read: fundamental difference between Husband and self).

So, as I stepped back from the flowerbed onto uneven paving and fell off my garden clogs for the umpteenth time, I thought perhaps I should borrow some husbandly application before I twisted something.

What is the ideal gardening footware? A shoe challenge at May Dreams Gardens got people thinking (ouch to Ellie's favourites on my brambly bits) and, chances are, like them, you're building an ever-growing pile of old shoes by the backdoor. I spotted the flaw early on. Old shoes leak.

For some time, I used lace-up leather walking boots that someone had given me. Too much work.  I fear I wasn't up to the constant cleaning, polishing and dubbin-application that they desperately needed after being toe-down in mud.

Laces become unpleasantly soggy when jammed into wet clay (I garden mostly on my knees). And having to labour to get shoes off just encouraged me, in opposition to my admonishing self, to tread mud into the house when the doorbell rang.

No, gardening shoes need to be low-maintenance, easy to put on, easy to shuck off.

Clogs (I do love them) tick these boxes and are great for slipping on to cross the garden, but their soles feel unequal to the narrow edge of a spade, so I don't use them for digging, and (vide my undignified sprawl on the grass) support-wise they leave a bit to be desired.

What about wellies? All boxes ticked, not to mention trousers protected. But - how shall I put this? - some girls are more developed than others. I'm talking calves here! Give me an average welly and it jams halfway to my knee. (Although, more sophisticated models have an  adjustable girth.)

And memories of sweaty heels left naked by socks inching past my toes aren't enticing (though, of course, now you can get socks that tuck over welly tops).

Then I got another childhood flash.

My mother's Wellington boots weren't, to my hide-bound childish gaze, quite proper. They were white when they should have been black. And calf-length when they should have been knee-high (my calves, you realise, are Not My Fault). But now they make perfect sense. Easier to kick off, easier to access socks, easier to tuck in trousers.

So are calf-length wellies the answer? I'd have to try them. For now, I'd love to know what shoes/boots you favour, so please leave a comment and let us know what works for you in the garden.

Meanwhile, that quiet sobbing is me, as I realise I'm turning into my mother.

That scream of terror is my husband...

This post is sponsored by Burnhills. 

The Bloggers' Cut: Coffee and Walnut at Rose Cottage

Oh, duplicity!

[Me, 3 days ago, knowing it better to creep ideas up behind Husband]: Brand-new NGS garden opens Sunday.

[Husband]: Hmm?

[Me, 2 days ago, casually interested]: That new garden has a veg plot.

[Husband]: Hmm.

[Me, yesterday]: Lovely day. We could visit that garden and have coffee. And cake.

[Husband, puzzled]: You've only just had breakfast.

An hour later, we were negotiating the extremely rutted mud track to Rose Cottage and worrying about the exhaust system, while my aged Mother bounced on the back seat.  It wasn't my moment to tell them we were there to take a photo of cake. 

Yesterday saw The Bloggers' Cut, a virtual Chelsea Fringe event, encouraging garden bloggers around the country to get fat pamper a sweet tooth in a garden. What cake would we have? Would it live up to expectations?

Rose Cottage is the sort of garden that ticks all the boxes for garden visitors: a pergola, archways, a pond, a stream, lots of lawn, herb beds, veg beds, tucked-away corners (and teas!) - and none of the tickboxes that Helen Yemm surmises appear on the Chelsea judges' clipboards. 

It wouldn't have got a look in with the judges, but would have had a chance with the People's Choice. Giving the impression of having nurtured generations of growing children, it was actually created only 16 years ago. At the same time that the garden was laid out, the exterior of the house was built around the dilapidated 18th century interior. But for the too-clean, only-slightly-too-red brickwork, however, you wouldn't spot its youth. Ivy sprawls over the garden walls. The narrow approach of aged-looking York Stone widens across the front of the house, edges hidden under a froth of aquilegia and euphorbia. The house looks the epitome of centuries-old Surrey vernacular architecture.

Particular highlights were a planting combination I haven't seen before:

 

 Alliums:

 

 A pond:

 

And a (short) laburnam walk:

 

 The Cake? Coffee and Walnut.

 

This has been a stalwart sustenance of garden visiting but I think I have to review my choice. Many C&Ws, like this one, now have icing so sweet it makes your teeth bleed - something to do with a fashion for butter icing (instead of that hard-top, thin layer of icing-made-with-water), and it generally contains too little butter.  Husband said I should have gone for the strawberry/cream flan affair, but with the filling oozing the way it was, three forks between us didn't seem adequate equipment.

This new-found discernment (and I prefer that description to "criticism") is something I'm beginning to bring to NGS gardens. Quite why I hadn't done so before is a mystery, but the realisation dawned when reading a discussion on Anne Wareham's Veddw Blog.  Until recently, NGS gardens were just a nice day out, with the added pleasure of snooping on private property without the threat of trespass, the possibility of a few interesting plants and (of course!) cake. 

Now I look specifically for the bits that work (that laburnum pergola and statue, those alliums) and the bits that don't (a long border, with blocks of planting, all the same height, and an overwhelming bushing of geraniums in front of the alliums), rather than just interesting plant combinations. 

I'm looking forward to bringing equal interest to the quest for new flavours of cake...

The Bloggers' Cut was the brainchild of Vegplotting, where you'll find round-up of the other participants in this, the first ever Virtual Chelsea Fringe event. (Thank you, Michelle. Any excuse to eat cake!)