Landscape Juice

Bob Flowerdew puts a dent in the anti-peat campaign

Celebrated gardener and organic campaigner Bob Flowerdew has shaken the organic gardening world by declaring that he uses peat.

Flowerdew, who's a member of the BBC Gardeners' Question Time panel, called for a licensing scheme for peat sourced from managed and sustainable sites but says that the use of peat in horticulture should not be banned.

For the die-hard environmentalists, it's akin to the Pope saying that he has tea with the devil on Sundays.

I've already made the point that Horticultural use amounts to 0.0005% of world peat reserves and also argued that peat will always have a role to play in gardening an doubted it will ever be phased out.

Kicking the habit: why gardeners need to ditch their addiction to oil

Oil spills and their impact on our planet’s ecology might seem faraway and remote, but one way of helping prevent them lies closer than you might think. This article, by earth-friendly gardening writer John Walker, won the Garden Media Guild Environmental Award 2010.

The pale and swirling oil slick from the Deepwater Horizon, which is polluting the Gulf of Mexico, captured by a satellite in late May 2010. The oil smooths the ocean surface, making the sun’s reflection brighter than the surrounding water. The bird’s-foot-like land extending into the sea is the tip of the Mississippi Delta. Image: NASA.

Here’s a question for you: what does the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (still underway as I write this*) have to do with your garden? And while you’re pondering that, try this: how much of the materials, equipment and gadgetry that make your kitchen gardening possible is made from a dark liquid just like that gushing from 1,500m (5,000ft) down on the ocean floor? Here’s a clue to get you started, whether you’re of an organic disposition or not: rather a lot.

The Good Gardeners' Association

Here's a little blast from the past for all you organic gardeners. I've been sent this image of a Good Gardeners' Association newsletter dated 1 December 1972 - it starts off:

My Dear Fellows,

Greetings at this festive season! May you have a blessed Christmas with lots of Compost-grown Vegetables to eat and lots of Compost-grown Flowers in your vases. I shall even have a Compost-grown Goose!

Todmorden, where oats, peas, beans and barley grow

The old market town of Todmorden lies between Burnley and Halifax, on the borders of Lancashire and West Yorkshire in the Pennines.

There, where many strong rivers once powered the machine looms, an industrious cultivation project has begun to flow, a kind of market gardening with free produce and shared ideas.

Incredible Edible Todmorden (IET) is a pioneering project to create a sustainable healthy food chain. Say the word 'healthy' and many are put off. But this scheme is so different and ahead of its time that other towns are taking up the same ideas and it is taking root world-wide.

Reality check: money can’t buy the ‘good life’

As more of us hanker for a taste of the ‘good life’, we need to realise that more satisfying, enjoyable and ecologically sustainable lives don’t arrive in the post, says earth-friendly gardening writer John Walker.

I don’t know about you, but I’m wholeheartedly sick of hearing about ‘the good life’. Ping goes yet another email newsletter: our motto is ‘Making the good life easy!’. In drops another catalogue with its sigh-inducing cover: ‘The good life, made easy!’. Yet another emailed advert from a company called Live The Good Life Ltd (proof positive that ‘living a good life’ is now well and truly commodified; like so much of gardening, it’s now something you buy, rather than something you do). Even the government exhort us to ‘get a slice of the good life’. And just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, a telephone conversation deals me the final blow: “Are you living the good life, then?”

New fungal control for Vine Weevil developed by Swansea University

A Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs funded research programme out of Swansea University, has developed a biological control of pests using a soil borne fungus.

A team of scientists, led by Professor Tariq Butt, discovered that the fugus - Metarhizium anisopliae - proved fatal to vine weevil and western flower thrips when mixed into the root zone growing medium.

Professor Butt, who is based at Swansea University's School of Environment and Society, said: "We concentrated our efforts on identifying a fungus that occurs naturally in soil, and that is a natural pathogen to the pests.

Interview with Nick Mann of Habitat Aid

From 1998 until 2008, Nick Mann ran an investment management firm specialising in Japanese smaller companies.

Disillusion by the lack of ethics in the investment business and a desire to do something to help slow the destruction of native habitats and biomass Nick set up Habitat Aid and began trading in May 2009.

Nick's ambition is to make a real difference by trying to, at least partly, help recreate these lost habitats, or compensating in some way for their loss.

These efforts, and those of others, may be critical in saving many of our native species from extinction.

William Sinclair launches Sincro-BoostPlus peat alternative

William Sinclair has launched a new peat alternative which it hopes will help the horticulture industry achieve the government's 2020 peat-free ambitions.

William Sinclair say the product, Sincro-BoostPlus, has similar qualities to peat namely: good water retention qualities, a low nutrient level, it is nitrogen stable, lightweight, it even looks like peat and is made from entirely renewable sources.

The group says its specialist topsoil subsidiary, Freeland Horticulture, has spent several million pounds developing a new technology that resolves all the problems of using green compost for peat replacement.

Coalition puts 'green industries' at heart of its policy

As I started to read the foreword of the new coalition government's website, what struck me was the comparisons between the ethos of our exciting, new and fresh government and how Landscape juice has developed in the last two years.

Gone are the conventions of top-down control, centralisation and absolute power - the new rhetoric is littered with words like freedom, fairness, responsibility and opportunity.

The coalition says it believes in the need to protect our environment for future generations and make our economy more environmentally sustainable. What I particularly like is support of our farming industry, protection of our biodiversity and encouragement of sustainable food production is to be a priority.

What are the dangers of prolonged pesticide exposure?

I've worked with or been exposed to chemicals and pesticides since before leaving school; first as a car cleaner using silicone spray, detergents and various forms of paints and thinning agents and then as an apprentice greenkeeper when chlordane and lindane were still used for the control of worms and leatherjackets and then through my landscaping and gardening life.

Even now, when the farmers use atomising and misting sprayers to treat fruit trees in advance of humid weather, I am sure there is unnecessary exposure.

Last week, whilst talking with a friend just outside my front door, I could smell and taste the chemical as it was carried three quarters a mile on the wind; I could hear the whine of the atomiser and see the mist as the tractor made its way up and down the rows of plum trees on the opposite hillside to my home.