Healthy sustainable food production on small spaces plus books and gardens
Sally is an experienced organic gardener, smallholder and writer. Here you can read about the organic one-acre plot and walled garden that Sally has set up at Empire Farm in Somerset. Sally blogs regularly about what's being grown and raised, her greenhouse, the organic allotments and her walled garden, as well as matters that concern her - climate change, healthy soils, organic growing, peatfree compost, biodiversity, sustainability etc. She writes about her visits to farms, gardens, allotments and growers during the year. You can also find out about her workshops that she runs from Empire Farm and the books she has written, including The Resilient Garden and Allotment Handbook, The Climate Change Garden and Living on One Acre or Less. She is a contributor to Amateur Gardening, Bloom and other gardening magazines. She publishes a weekly newsletter on Substack, the Climate Change Garden, which covers a wide range of gardening topics.
My veg plot has Nasturtiums everywhere – it’s not just that they look good, attract insects and are tasty in salads ( it’s a really punchy, peppery taste) but they are brilliant trap plants. You can see from the photo
Continue reading
These Ailsa Craig onions were grown from seeds, not sets. Sown in modules in Feb / March and transplanted in April and May. They are later than set grown, but looking good. Not only is it much cheaper to raise
Continue reading
There is so much to see at Hampton Court from beautiful prairie-style gardens to the more extreme plane wrecks, but I’m focusing on one area that I found truly inspiring and I hope the many visitors that I saw admiring
Continue reading
As we get into summer and I start harvesting the first vegetables, I can’t be the only one to think – have I sown enough? Perhaps something has failed, the pesky birds have destroyed some seedlings or the slugs have
Continue reading
Blog updated 30 May 2022 Lockdown sent people into their gardens. They have spent hours nurturing their green spaces and while garden centres remained closed, the online suppliers of seeds, compost and other gardenalia were deluged with orders. We saw
Continue reading
A keyhole garden is a raised circular vegetable garden with a cut out or keyhole on one side for ease of access with a compost bin in the middle. They originated in Southern Africa where they were made popular by
Continue reading
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
Continue reading
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
Continue reading
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
Continue reading
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
Continue reading
