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Courgette flowers

A female courgette flower…

…and its attached fruit

A male flower from the same plant

Courgette flowers are either male or female. The female flowers are easy to spot because they have tiny fruits forming behind them, which swell when the flower has been fertilized. What I hadn’t really looked at, until this morning, was the different structure inside the flower.

And my first courgette is growing :) This one is an Albarello, but there’s a tiny Sunburst F1 squash nearby, too.

Music to Forest Garden to

If you were lucky enough to have a forest garden, and were pottering around with your iPod on, what would you listen to? I’m putting together a playlist of suitable songs, with the help of some friends on Twitter. Feel free to add your suggestions in the comments.

(I’m also thinking a Fantasy Forest Garden game would be fun, but have no idea what it would take to put one together!)

1. A Forest, by The Cure


2. Wild Wood, by Paul Weller, suggested by James and Ketan


3. I Talk to the Trees by Clint Eastwood, suggested by Wildely Creative

Hot carrots

It’s hot this week. I watered the garden early this morning and that may be all it sees of me all day. In other news, we have been eating the Chantenay carrots that I sowed in a cold frame at the end of January. They’re very yummy. Having cleared the cold frame, I have sown some more.

BBC Countryfile Blog of the Month

I’m very chuffed to be BBC Countryfile magazine’s Blog of the Month for July 2009 :) I’m a pin-up!

I haven’t had more than a flick through the issue yet, but it looks pretty exciting – with articles on growing your own strawberries, the best places to go rockpooling this summer and a school that has its own working farm. There’s even an article by Griff Rhys Jones.

If you have found your way here because you’re a Countryfile reader, then welcome :) The post about the beauty of broad beans can be found here. Why don’t you stick around long enough to listen to an episode of my gardening podcast?

Big Green Gathering Seed Swap

It looks increasingly likely that I will be attending this year’s Big Green Gathering at the end of July/ beginning of August to run an Alternative Kitchen Garden seed swap in the Permaculture area.

The details have yet to be finalised (watch this space), but if you’re intending to go to the BGG then start keeping an eye out for ripening seeds in the garden that you could save and bring with you to swap. (If you’re in to tomatoes then have a look at Patrick’s guest blog on the Guardian website about saving tomato seeds. And I did an AKG episode on seed saving.)

If you have any hints and tips on running a successful seed swap, will be there and want to say hi, or are a seed company interested in having a presence at the event (maybe donating seeds, or seed-saving information) then send me an email or leave me a comment.

Broad bean harvest

Broad beans aren’t the most efficient of vegetables. Each bean is so cocooned in the pod that once you’ve shelled them you only have about a quarter of the weight in shelled beans that you had in unshelled pods. My first harvest (and quite possibly the last as well) was 200g of pods, resulting in around 50g of beans. I don’t expect large harvests, because my beans are growing in containers. I also pinched the tips out of the beans before we went on holiday, to prevent blackfly taking up residence while we were gone.

The plants looked strong, though (they’re a bit wilty now the weather has warmed up), and the pods were good. Does this mean the bean booster had an effect? We won’t know for sure until I pull the plants up and look for nitrogen nodules on the roots.

Review: A Forest Garden Year

Spiny Pepper

If you were lucky enough to catch A Farm for the Future then you will have seen a snippet of Martin Crawford in his forest garden at the Agroforestry Research Trust in Devon.

Martin has now brought out his own DVD, called ‘A Forest Garden Year’, which is 49 minutes shot in his forest garden – looking at forest gardening in general together specific techniques that are useful in agroforestry and some of the plants he is growing.

Fifteen years ago, Martin moved from a conventional market garden to a bare field, where he hoped to create a productive forest garden following the work of Robert Hart. A forest garden aims to mimic a natural forest system, but to ‘tweek’ it to make it a productive human environment full of edible and otherwise useful plants. If planned and planted correctly, a forest garden is highly efficient – producing a yield year on year with very few inputs.

That’s the theory, and something you can pick up easily from a book on permaculture or forest gardening, but what Martin’s DVD gives you is a feeling for what it’s like to be in a forest garden. You can see that they’re truly beautiful spaces, and you can hear that they’re teaming with life. The whole film is shot on location in the garden, and I don’t think there’s a minute that goes past without birdsong in the background.

Martin is a knowledgeable and passionate presenter, but I think it’s still fair to say that the plants are the stars of the show. You’ll be introduced to plants you’ve never heard of, and discover new sides to some that are more familiar. Depending on the size of your plot you may not have space for a lime tree (its leaves make a good salad vegetable) or a snowbell (with pea-flavoured fruits), but you could find room for the perennial Turkish rocket and it’s broccoli-like flowers.

And you’ll discover the correct way to harvest bamboo shoots, pollard a tree and graft several varieties of apple onto one rootstock or make a shiitake mushroom log.

If you’re a fan of unusual edibles, permaculture or even just beautiful natural environments then this film is well worth watching. Whatever the weather outside you can escape to a beautiful patch of Devon for a little while, and dream of having your own field to fill with trees.

‘A Forest Garden Year’ is available direct from the Agroforesty Research Trust and costs £14.95.

Rain shadows

It has been raining a bit overnight, and I was fascinated by the patterns of dry spots in the garden.

The loquat pots have hefty rain-shedding rims

This mint pot is much smaller

The garden chairs add a touch of geometry to the display

Mobile rice paddy

I’ve spent a long time in the garden today, pottering around and doing all kinds of jobs. Before I came in I managed to do what I went outside to do – creating four little rice paddies in my Ikea pots that have no drainage holes. The rice seeds are Nembo, a brown risotto rice, from Seeds of Italy. I wanted some last year, but couldn’t find the seeds for sale. I ordered these last year to make sure!

Ideally they should have been sown mid-May, but I didn’t want to put them in before we went away and have them dry out – they need to be kept under at least 1 cm of water until harvest time.

Vales Emerald

I forgot to mention that we ate the first new potatoes from the garden a couple of days ago. These are Vales Emerald, and they’re not spuds I planted this year – they’re the ones I was trying to grow for last Christmas. They didn’t sprout until early spring, in the Grow Dome, but better late than never!

The Tweehive

Have you seen the Tweehive yet? It’s a project to raise awareness of bees by getting a bunch of humans on Twitter act out the roles of bees in a massive online role-playing game. There are 3 game dates scheduled, the first of which is in July, and the last of which is going to be part of the Pestival, a celebration of insect life taking place in London in September.

They’re still filling in the details, but if you would like to take part then you’ll need a Twitter account, and to sign up at the Tweehive community site or to keep an eye on the main Tweehive website for instructions on how to play.

Hotting Up

Before I went on holiday I did something I have been meaning to do for a long time, and bought myself a piece of ginger root to grow.

I had a lot of things (gardening and otherwise) to do before I went, so when I read in Asian Vegetables that ginger can be safely left at room temperature for a couple of weeks, to sprout, I left my root on my desk.

Sure enough, when I came home it was starting to sprout. Yesterday I potted it up (bud facing upwards, about 5 cm deep, as instructed) and now ‘Ginger Rogers’ is sitting on my bedroom windowsill where it’s hot and sunny.

Blotanical.com

Over in the sidebar there’s been a link to Blotanical for a while now, but I’ve never explained what it is.

Blotanical is a directory for garden blogs – so it’s a great place to find new stuff to read if your favourite garden blogger is currently outside enjoying the sunshine too much to make any new posts. There’s links to blogs from all over the world, in lots of different languages, and on every possible gardening topic.

Blotanical is also a social networking site for bloggers. You can Favourite blogs, and bloggers, and you have a profile page where you can fill in stuff about you. You can send and receive messages, and Pick your favourite blog posts of the day to encourage other people to read them.

There’s even a system of Profile Points, and you can points for leaving and receiving messages, picking posts, and having people visit your My Plot profile page. As you gain points you progress through the Botanical ranks. I’m still stuck on newbie status – I’m a Blotanist – because I don’t have a lot of time to spend on the site and I’m still trying to figure out how some of the features work.

So if you’re a garedening junkie in search of some new blogs to read, check it out! Oh, and Blotanical has a custom Google search, too, to help you find even more gardening goodness.

Tallinn

The next port of call on our Baltic tour was St. Petersburg – a place that has more than 250 rainy days a year and only 30 days with sun. Winter ends at the beginning of May, and it was interesting to see how far behind the plants were – at the beginning of June the tulips were out, and the lilacs were in full bloom. However, it was a rainy day and the light wasn’t good for photos, and we were on a coach trip to see the city sites.

We had more fun in Tallinn (Estonia) when we avoided following the crowds to the old town and headed for something a bit more modern. I think this unusual tree was part of an arts festival.

Our last stop was Oslo (Norway), and I didn’t take any photos there either. Once again we were on a tour, but at least this time the sun came out. And we saw the King of Norway’s farm, complete with cows that supply the city’s milk!

Once again, you can find all of my holiday snaps on Flickr.

Finland

I took hardly any photos in Helsinki. We took a boat trip across the harbor to the Suomelinna Island fortress, which was fun, and a nice change from city tours. Suomelinna is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but it’s also home to around 850 people.

Back on dry land I spotted some strawberries growing in a tub outside a shop. Outside the indoor market there was even a strawberry growing as weed in a crack in the pavement!

July 3rd 2009
2:42 AM GMT

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