An inspiring new book on the wonder of woodchips is packed with must-try ideas that let you play a part in climate cooling – even while heating your greenhouse. Gardening books abound, but every once in a while one appears that’s clearly been conceived in earth-friendly gardening heaven. These are the books you feel were […]

With the world’s focus on ways to cool the global ‘greenhouse’, the onus is on all of us not to add to the problem. Earth-friendly under-cover gardening can make our greenhouses part of the solution. Being on life support is serious stuff. It means we’re so poorly that we need extra, emergency help to actually […]

Embracing the alchemy of decay will enhance the life – plant, soil, wild and human – in your garden. It was a gamble, but it was also a back-saving, pragmatic experiment from which the wilder life in my garden and I are now reaping rich, dark rewards. Wood – as chips, mulch, paths, poles, stakes, twigs, […]

When the climate crisis took hold, the effects on gardening were devastating. Thankfully, technological innovation is allowing us to get growing again. ‘Just imagine what this kind of weather did to greenhouses in the late 2020s,’ shouted Cally over the thunderous din. Unlike the group she was guiding, she didn’t flinch as 3in-wide hellstones – or hailstones, […]

A green energy byproduct that allows compost to be revitalised and reused offers a potential pathway to a future beyond peat. Out of all the new stuff that’s appeared on the gardening block in the last few years, plant-derived digestate – the fibrous, chopped-up remains of forage maize and other grasses that have been fed […]

Tapping into the interconnected mycological web beneath our feet lets us make allies of the myriad fungi in our gardens. Not many books – a mere third of the way through reading them – have me dashing excitedly out into my garden. But that’s exactly the effect that Finding the Mother Tree: Uncovering the Wisdom and […]

If we’re to truly break free from peat-dependent gardening, what’s needed is joined-up oversight with the vision to see the bigger picture. Unlikely as it sounds, there is every chance that gardening will soon turn noticeably greener, as our gardens, allotments and greenhouses – after three decades of delay, doublespeak and deception – are finally […]

It’s time to look beyond plastic – there’s a new pot on the plot that promises pollution-free planting. If gardening wants to get serious – and I mean serious, not just some fluffy padding that fills a few column inches now and then in glossy magazines – about its darker side, the one that blights […]

Why pay the financial and environmental costs of a propagator, when our own well-heated homes offer plenty of ideal places to germinate seeds and nurture seedlings? “Sow your seeds and germinate them in a heated propagator at… blah, blah, blah.” If I had a penny for every time I’ve read or heard this outmoded gardening […]

We can’t buy our way out of the plastic problem – but we can reuse, recycle and share our way toward a more sustainable gardening world. Is gardening’s contribution to our global plastic pollution crisis sorted? Have we – gardeners and the businesses that profit handsomely from us – collectively fixed it? Is concern over […]

Our climate is getting inexorably wetter, but as gardeners we need to learn to think more like our plants. It’s time to start dancing in the rain. When my gardening dreams and I landed here 18 years ago, on what was a bracken-riddled bank, I had no inkling that I was about to embark on […]

… green gardening Christmas – and a more climate crisis-aware gardening world in 2021. Change arrives at a snail’s pace in the wonderful world of gardening – even when our fragile natural world is undergoing its own profound and irreversible change. But if ever an entwined community of folk needed to change, it’s this one […]