Unusual veg 1: Perennial onions
In this series of blogs on unusual vegetables I am looking at some of the quirky veg that I grow on my plot. I had a count up and I think I grow 50+ unusual types, so I’ll cover most
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Category: Edibles
Salad is not just lettuce
I like to eat a home-grown lunch. Winter is a time for hearty soups from the plot but after months of variations on vegetable and squash soups, I look forward to a homegrown salad for lunch. I could grow salad
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What’s wrong with spent mushroom compost?
Spent mushroom compost – it’s light, easy to work with, full of nutrients, free of weeds and disease, rich in organic matter so improves soil structure and water retention. This soil improver is also reasonably priced with a one tonne
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#PeatFreeApril
It’s April and the #peatfree campaign is off the starting blocks. It’s hard to believe how much progress has been made since September, when an exchange on Twitter resulted in a group of gardeners and garden writers coming together to
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Crops to sow and harvest in 60 days
We are living through uncertain times with worrying scenes of panic buying and empty shelves. And we may be faced with the uncertain and restriction on what we can do and buy for the next four months or much longer.
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Voting with my fork – plant foods I am going to miss
Sometimes, I wish I didn’t know the backstory to some foods, so I could happily buy them at the local shops and not think twice. But I do and here is my list of foods I won’t be buying again
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The allotments 2019 – successes and failures
It’s the time of year when the allotmenteers at Empire Farm are planning the year ahead, seed catalogues are out and planting plans in preparation. Like much of the country, the weather has been very wetover the last few months,
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Seeds – to save or not to save?
I can hear you all shouting ‘of course save seed’ and as generations of gardeners have done, I diligently save seed each year because locally-adapted seed is best – or is it? I have saved parsnip seed for the last
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Recycling on the allotments
Love walking round the #organic #allotments on the one acre plot and seeing the ingenious #recycling and #repurposing of items on the beds – nothing goes to waste here. The eagle-eyed amongst you will be able to spot pallets, containers,
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Compost – peatfree, aminopyralid and digestate
There’s been a lot of tweeting around compost in recent weeks; the #peatfree campaign which is vital to saving our peat bogs, biodiversity, climate change and flooding; the risk of #aminopyralid contamination in manures and composts and the growing popularity
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