Weeding the Web

Does digging affect nutritional levels in vegetables? Research seeks crowdfunding by 4th March

 

GREEN - The Garden for Research, Education and Nutrition, Stroud

There are just a few days left to contribute to research that could help to change our thinking on how soil should be cultivated.

For eight years, Matt Adams, who has a BSc in Environmental Quality and Resource Management, and is a former CEO of the Good Gardeners' Assocation, has been researching the effects of digging on the nutritional content of vegetables.

In 2004 in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in conjunction with the Biodynamic Agricultural Association (BDAA) and the Hiram Trust, an educational charity, he established GREEN, the organically certified Garden for Research, Education and Nutrition.

Here Matt conducted a lengthy experiment growing the same crops on plots treated in several different ways. The theory was that digging disrupts the relationship between plants and the micro-organisms in the soil, reducing the flow of nutrients between them and making any vegetables grown less nutritious. 

 

Matt Adams at GREEN in 2005

Of the millions of bacteria, thousands of protozoa and fungi and hundreds of nematodes found in a teaspoon of good soil, Matt says:

They form a diverse ecosystem in the soil, making available the naturally occurring chemicals present in rocks and the atmosphere, and recycling wastes and dead organisms into their constituent chemicals so they, also are available to plants.

If we eat plants (which we do), we depend on these micro-organisms for nutrition too. "Yet every time we turn over the soil," added Matt, "we kill them in their trillions without giving it a thought."

Some years ago, when I first wrote an article about this as forthcoming research, I spoke to Sally Smith who was then Head of Information and Training at Garden Organic. By then, there had been a no-dig bed at Ryton for some years and Sally said that no-dig certainly developed a better, more natural structure, providing channels for earthworms, roots and water.

In the experiment at GREEN, each year the crops were grown in single-dig, double-dig and no-dig plots, harvested and analysed for 23 naturally occurring minerals (such as calcium, selenium and lead). Microbial life in the soil was also measured each year, with results provided by professional laboratories and universities.

 

Another view of GREEN

Marked differences were noticed in some of the harvests but the results have yet to be properly analysed to understand the implications.  This is where the Crowdfunder project comes in. Much of the funding that enabled the research was used to pay for the plant and soil analyses and much of the effort involved otherwise was voluntary.

Now Matt wants to collate the eight years of data collected between 2004 and 2011, analyse the results and get them into the public domain.  It involves concentrated work and the funding is requested to support him while he does this. Will the research back up the theory? Says Matt:

There is no guarantee of finding anything significant at all but until we go through the process of studying the data we will never know! However, it is very rare that research has no value at all. It is always progressive and by the very fact that it has been done can itself act as a catalyst for inspiring new ideas and further research. 

The original limited budget, combined with the cost of this research, means that no replicas were created of the experiment and findings from this study would need to be verified with further research. But it certainly brings up fascinating possibilities. Matthew adds:

From my personal networks at least one university has so far expressed an interest in this project.

If you'd like to see the results from this eight-year-long experiment reach the light of day and maybe help start a chain of research that radically changes approaches to veg-growing, then find out more (and see a video of Matt talking about his project) on the Crowdfunder website. 

 

Trend growing for garden-ready plants

A garden-ready chrysanthemum plug from Woolmans

It's always tempting to anticipate a trend, but I reckon I'm on pretty safe ground in saying that we're going to see more and more "garden-ready" plants arrive on the market. 

Plant Me Now is a company that has made a virtue from its start of selling plants that can be put straight out into the garden but other companies, more used to selling seeds and plug plants that you pot on before planting out, are expanding into the market.

Suttons has had ready-to-plant options for a few years, with the range now including plants such as Ageratum and Cleome, which were only available as plugs and for pots a few years ago.  Thompson and Morgan also offers quite a choice with Bellis, tomatoes, and a couple of collections on offer for the first time.

Van Meuwen, in their Spring catalogue, say they've bowed to popular demand and are offering a range of begonias, pelargoniums, petunias, gazanias and lobelias from some of their most popular cultivars. They also offer sweet william, stocks and polyanthus, among others.

Chrysanthemum Lilac Chessington from Woolmans

And Chrysanthemum specialists Woolmans are offering potted garden-ready plants for the first time this year, choosing cultivars that perform particularly well in the garden (as opposed to the showbench).

I think on the whole I like this development. What do you think? With space at a premium, the fact that I could bypass the potting-on stage is very attractive. With the current emphasis on attracting novice gardeners, it seems a helpful development. Yes, the larger plugs cost more but, on the other hand, it must reduce the amount of potting compost bought on the domestic market and so cuts down the consumption of peat.

Will you be buying garden-ready plants this year?

Bird flies through window

I was alerted by the banging. Something was jumping up and down at the kitchen window, trying to get in. "Help," came a cry from my mother by the back door.

Approaching the back of the house from the end of the garden, I caught the desperate stare of a pigeon on the kitchen windowsill. It wasn't trying to get in, it was trying to get out!

"I don't know where it came from," pronounced the Aged P, standing in front of a huge hole in the neighbouring window. (Hmm, speed on the uptake can become inversely proportional to age.)

I think we're probably lucky it hasn't happened before. My father-in-law's patio doors are often covered with pale imprints of wings where birds have flattened themselves against the glass. The difference is they don't go through. We had the same marks, only they were on the inside, where the pigeon was trying to escape.

What a mess! It must have torpedoed through at full tilt. Why I didn't hear the crash, I have no idea. Glass everywhere. In the sink, on the floor, down the side of the cooker, in the hall. Nasty stuff: large chunks mixed with tiny shards and splinters.  Feathers too. Thank goodness the bird-brain didn't break its neck - at least we didn't have to clear that up. Using very slow movements, we managed to open the window it was trying to get out of, and off it went.

It's widely quoted that over 100 million birds die a year by ramming themselves into glass. That's something of a finger in the wind, though. A 2013 article quotes Professor Daniel Klem, who first came up with the figure:

It was based on data gathered over at least 10 years on individual buildings ranging from one bird a year being killed to several hundred in an hour.

But clearly no quantitative survey was done in a stratified fashion to look at different threats at different sized buildings, and window area and so on.

So there was a quantitative basis behind it but it wasn't at the level to consider those figures to be facts.

It's a number that appeals. In 2004, the British Trust for Ornithology estimated that around 30 million birds died in collisions with glass (after analysing recorded discoveries of dead ringed birds), and that 70 million more hit glass but weren't killed. I can say that, if you have glass with the apparent resistance of tissue paper and combine it with a hefty Columba, no corpse results.

Fingers crossed that it won't happen again. There are plenty of online reports of birds repeatedly throwing themselves at a window several times an hour. You're probably familiar with the assumed reasons: that bird is seeing off a "rival" in its own reflection, or seeing the sky and trees reflected, or through a window on the other side of the room and assuming the way is clear.

In 2013 The Wilson Journal of Ornithology published research by Professor Klem and P G Saenger which found that parachute cord hung at intervals between (approximately) 9 and 10.5 cms in front of the pane would stop bird impacts. Not everyone's choice. I found a recommendation to draw lines with a yellow highlighter pen on the outside of the glass - more visible to birds than to us, apparently. If it's a major problem, there is a film called CollidEscape (shipped from the USA) which might be worth considering.  If you've found a solution to the problem, do comment below.

Crossing more fingers, I trust this won't become a problem. This was the first time ever. Still, I can't help wondering what would have happened if someone had been washing up. Would the reflection have looked different enough for the pigeon to avoid the window, or would the window have exploded in someone's face? Doesn't really bear thinking about, does it?

 

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day: a golden bouquet

I love the way that Nature heralds spring with the sunniest of colours - as if she's sending encouragement in the oft grey days of February. This year I've had a surprise.

Yes, I know it's a daffodil. But normally our daffs appear way after the season's started, and tend to be narcissi with shorter, differently coloured trumpets. I have no idea where this lone specimen is from, but it's more that holding its own in a sunny spot by the raspberry beds.

 

A different shade of yellow - rich and silky.

And yellow with a touch of green. Winter aconite catches me out almost every year. Where is it? I wondered a couple of weeks ago. I swear there were no leaves showing, no sign that they would return. Now they're fully fledged. I've been here before. I assumed they were late this year, but no, a look at GBBD from two years ago shows that they're turned up at exactly the same time.

When I joined GBBD I hadn't really even thought of it as a garden journal, but as my records grow it's worth is apparent. I'm a terrible record-taker much of the time, so here's thanks to Carol at May Dreams Gardens for running the meme and many congratulations to her on it's eighth birthday (I'm quite envious of the years of records that early joiners now have).  Why not pop over and see what else is blooming around the world?

No short-cuts for growing...chicory

Some veg are more labour-intensive than others. Take chicory. It turns up in the shops as uniform torpedoes of bitter, blanched crunchiness. As it's not that cheap, last year I thought I'd grow it myself.

Equipment marshalled - large, deep cardboard box; large sheet of plastic. Around November, I...

1. lined the box with the plastic.
2. Filled with soil and compost to about two thirds full.
3. Realised that the box would be staying exactly where it was (in the centre of the outhouse) for the rest of the winter as it was now the weight of a small elephant.

Then I...

1. Extracted several heads of chicory (which I'd sown in the spring) from the raised bed.
2. Cut off the leaves to within an inch of the root, excavated hole in box big enough to bury entire root.
3. Excavated again as hole so deep that sides fell in.
4. Excavated again...
5. And again...
6. Finally rammed in root and started again on two others.

By the end of December, beneath the closed lid of the box, I had something promising. The chicons didn't ever achieve that neat, folded look of the shop-bought variety (the leaves tended to be a touch twisted for some reason - possibly from the nibblings of a couple of small slugs that had found themselves transported with the soil), but, boy, were they crisp and crunchy and, above all, juicy in a way that the shop versions aren't.

Worth another go, I thought this year. Only...why the box? Why not just save myself a lot of work and slice off the top of a couple of heads in the raised bed and stick a bucket over? No effort wasted.

Come the end of December I removed said bucket and found...two stalks.
By the following week I had...nothing at all.

This week, I raised the bucket and found one small sprout with, I suspect, little hope in its heart of ever becoming a big one.

So, all I've achieved is the provision of a delicate salading for various gourmet slugs. No work involved. No chicory, either. Hmmph.

Next year, it's back to the box.

Meanwhile, see how Alex Mitchell's fared with her chicory this year.

 

 

Still time to order from Heritage Seed Library

Ah, that little packet hitting the floor under the letterbox. You can't beat it for a thrill of pleasure, can you?  My seeds from Garden Organic's Heritage Seed Library arrived on Friday. The funny thing is that I know what I ordered, but still tingle with the excitement of looking through them.

Reading the HSL catalogue always takes me ages as the descriptions are full of anecdote and comment. Do I want a long-rooted beetroot, "sweet and flavoursome" described by Vilmorin-Andrieux in 1885, or do I fancy the 1992 Ukrainian - tender, easy to peel.

I went for the former, Long Blood Red, not just for the name but for the promise that it stands well and is slow to go woody. As I tend to just leave beetroot in the ground until needed, I reckon that's a safer bet.

Other choices were:

Tomato Wladek, a beefsteak variety. I love the seeds that have a story to ponder. These were donated by the neighbour of a Polish man who arrived in the UK after WW2. Fleeing the Russian occupation, one presumes.

Lettuce Bunyard's Matchless, described as "a real lettuce-lovers' lettuce". I'm guessing it has a bit more bite and texture to it.

Pea Herbie's Purple Podded - new to HSL this year. Another seed that's been passed through neighbours and family for decades, this time in Northumberland, so I'm expecting them to stand up to the vagaries of the weather.

Onion Cipolla Bianca Agostana - my first attempt at growing onions from seed. All I know is that they should be big, white, thin-skinned and not make my eyes run when slicing. I hope to be more successful with seeds than I was with sets, which gave me something the size of a shallot.

Dwarf French Bean Deuil Fin Precoce - ah, a substitution. My original choice, Bountiful, dating from the 1890s, must have run out by the time my order arrived. You can choose what you'd prefer to receive if your first choice has run out, but as I've rarely received a substitution, I usually just indicate that any would be welcome. This sounds interesting - very old French variety, particularly early. Only caveat seems to be they're best eaten young, which means I must remember to look for them regularly! 

Runner Bean David Chappell - hurrah, a runner bean. I didn't have room to order one (six packets is the limit) and this is the Lucky Dip choice - HSL always send you one unless you say no. If you know anything about David Chappell, let me know. Lucky Dip choices usually feature in the current catalogue, but this one doesn't. I'll see if I can find a past catalogue with it in.

If you're a member of HSL, there's still time to order, as the deadline is 27th February. If you don't belong to HSL, then if you join now (you can reach the catalogue through that link too) I suspect you'd still be in time to receive some seeds for this year. For a bit more information, I wrote more here.

If you've ordered seeds, do post a comment below to say what you're going to grow this year.