Gardening
In this section you will find short essays on various garden-related topics, often reflecting my rather gritty analytical approach. They do not always follow expected stereotypes. These are old now, but I could have written them yesterday.
The Eco-House and -Garden 1999 (doc)
Climate Change in the Garden 2003 (doc)
Growing Your Own: Getting it in Perspective 1997 (doc)
Weeds 1995(doc)
EXPERIMENTS
Here are some examples of simple garden experiments that we hoped would be taken up and tested with greater rigour by better-reourced institutions. Sadly, this rarely happened.
The first is an example of investigating common garden myths. This one concerns covering soil with black plastic, assumed to warm it up. This seems to 'stand to reason', but has anybody ever actually tested it? No. So we did. It doesn't. Well, not much.
Warming the soil with black plastic: a trial (1995 (doc)
The second is an example of a long-term 'public trial' where the public could observe results that were not known in advance.
A Long-Term Fertility Experiment (2012) (doc)
The third recounts some of our experiences trying out horticultural uses for an industrial waste product.
Horticultural Uses of Paper-Mill Waste 2003 (doc)
These were all carried out at CAT, where we were generally concerned to ‘push the envelope’. Although I no longer work at CAT, I have continued to probe the mysteries of the natural world. The following is a combination of observation and thinking aloud, trying to find solutions to the perennial problem of blackfly, by studying the behaviour of the organism and its predators. Work in progress.
In recent years I have become interested in simple management methods for wild areas, and have taken on a wildflower meadow, managed only with a scythe and a rake. See
The Meadow (2019, Word)
Also, I have become involved in the design, construction and maintenance of a ‘Community Garden’. Here is my report after a couple of years:
A Community Garden (2023)
People speak of ‘builders bums’ but gardeners’ bums deserve equal billing.