DEFRA on the future of food.

Has made it into the Financial Times Westminster blog.  They are not impressed. “The new food review by Defra promises much but offers little*. As far as I can make out, there is a lot of widescreen chin-stroking (sorry, moral leadership) about future food shortages and the need to get green but nothing remotely concrete [...]

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Go read…

The tragic demise of an organic allotment over at Scattered Gardener.

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Aldi seeds…

I did an experiment with some very cheap Gardenline seeds from Aldi more from curiosity than anything else.  Both the Boltardy Beetroot and Spinach Beet did very well, although why you would eat Spinach Beet this side of starvation escapes me.  Cattle food. The Gardenline tomato seeds did terribly, but maybe that is because I [...]

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Compost trenching and manure….

was one of my strategies to help the quality of the soil on No 16, especially since I had a limitless supply of peelings.  It seems to have worked, as the soil is much better than a year ago, but I am getting several crops of rogue potatoes that have sprouted from peelings that chitted [...]

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Chichi bee home…

from the people who brought you the Eglu, the Beehaus, a modern plastic beehive.  Yours for £465. It looks and sounds splendid but I suspect that your average allotment holder or urban gardener is going to balk at such a fat slice of the monthy pay cheque going on a hive.

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Hope for humble-bees

Allotmentality has long a Thing about bees and wants hives.  The surrounding allotment holders are Not Sure and there has ben Sucking Of Teeth at the idea that no 16 might be home to a hive.  Bees, after all, cannot be boiled and eaten.  Well I suppose they could, but it would a strange thing [...]

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Out they come…

you may remember the horrible onion crop from last year.  Being a noob alotmonaut we bunged in a load of onion seedlings and waited for the football-sized alliums that must inevably follow.  We got five weazened specimens that, when they’d been peeled, were into the new vegetable territory of negativeonion.  This year, after some almost [...]

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