Blogspot - Interia Dezain

A few days ago we sowed the tomato seeds for this season's market and home garden. It never ceases to amaze me what little indoor space you need to rear thousands of seedlings. We use two 50 cm x 30 cm x 15 cm trays to germinate approx 150 seedlings from 10 cultivars. When they get bigger we move them into two 1.3 x 8 m beds covered with polythene to rear them before they take their permanent positions in the gardens in early - mid April. Many of the plants we grow I prefer to sow directly outside and one of the most important things to consider when sowing is that the temperature of the soil is high enough for the seed to germinate. Other important considerations include: whether the seed requires any pre-treatment before it will germinate, i.e stratification and scarification (mainly relevant for perennial plants particularly trees and shrubs). how deep you sow the seed - too shallow is better than too deep.  that the correct moisture levels are kept constant during the germinati...

Trees are the bee's knees, and I'm pretty fond of bees too :) Trees are an important, stable source of food for bees and other pollinators providing thousands of flower heads all in one place. I could go on and list their other virtues but the fact you're on my blog leads me to assume that  you already have a pretty good appreciation of both trees and bees so let's get straight to the point of this post and find out which trees attract bees. Bees from our Garden The good news is there are trees that provide nectar and pollen for bees pretty much all year round. Better news is that most of them are very easy to grow and suitable for growing in a wide range of conditions including small and large gardens and in the wild. I've put together five lists of trees that you'll find below; Trees for Bees that also provide fruit or nuts  Nitrogen Fixing Trees for Bees  Ornamental Trees for Bees    Master list including all of the above in alphabetical order (including USD...

Encouraged by high yields and high levels of biodiversity that we have been recording in our  home gardens  we have extended our research to look at how we can provide nutritious affordable food whilst enhancing biodiversity in polyculture market gardens. We are delighted to be offering a unique opportunity to take part in this study. Would you like to join us? What are we doing ? We are undertaking a multi year study of market gardening growing herbs, vegetables and perennial fruit and nut polycultures. The study aims to compare our polyculture plots with conventional organic plots, record levels of biodiversity in the gardens and look at set up and running costs (in terms of finances and time) and outputs in terms of produce and income. Diversity of high quality biologically produced food from our polyculture gardens  The approach we take to market gardening goes way beyond "organic". We design biological systems that rely on the native ecology to function as opposed to...