Horsetail plant spores walk and jump, footage reveals

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This is a pretty nasty weed. Very hard to eliminate and this will be one of the reasons why.

Dig the City – Manchester’s urban gardening festival. 3rd -11th August

How to start off a comfrey plant.

You can get cuttings of comfrey from anyone with a comfrey plant. Ask nicely and don’t expect them in the winter. It’s best to make take root cuttings in the spring and start them in a pot for a week or two until they’re a nice small plant. Putting them out straight away might work if the weather isn’t too horrid and there’s no slugs about. Whilst slugs won’t damage a big plant to much effect it’ll certainly be no good for a young plant, so give them a fighting chance and start them off in a pot. The seeding comfrey can be grown from seeds or you can find young plants growing next to the fully grown plants. To stop them being a nuisance cut them back. Comfrey is a great plant for corners you don’t mind filling with the plant!

An essential in the gardener’s toolkit! It’s so useful that once you’ve got a roll in your kit you’ll wonder how you managed without it. It has tons of uses in the garden. You can use it for bundling up canes at the end of the season to stop that chaotic giant game of pick up sticks that happens with any pile of garden canes.

Useful hints for using duck tape – cut a piece twice as long as you want and then fold it almost back on itself but leave a sticky tab exposed at one end. Then you’ve made a tie wrap to wrap around things and stick to itself but not to everything you are tieing up!

It’ll be useful for any emergency repairs – if your bean canes come undone then fix them back together with green duck tape. If you have a snapped cane then you can repair it by wrapping duck tape around it a couple of times. You can overlap canes and fix them together to make longer canes too!

If you’ve got a polytunnel that’s taking a hit in the recent winds then you can use the tape to repair it. All the polytunnels on our allotment site are green so the tape will blend in well on any of them!

On a personal note – The tape came in very useful for my wedding. I’d got a bouquet of flowers that I was planning on having ribbon round to hold – but they needed fixing together! I have black and grey tape I could have used, but it made much more sense to use the green duck tape!
It wound round them easily and secured them so the ribbon could be fixed on.

Duck tape is great stuff! It’ll come in hand in the house and in the garden! You’ll wonder how you managed without it!
Green Duck Tape is waterproof and temperature resistant, so it’s great for 100’s of discreet repairs and fixes in the garden or indoors.
Here’s it being used to hold a sapling to a tree stake.

Are you Hungry for Fungi? Would you like to grow your own edible
gourmet or medicinal mushrooms?

EXPRESS YOUR INTEREST BY THURS 30TH MAY****TO QUALIFY FOR A 20% DISCOUNT
ON YOUR FIRST ORDER* later this year (subject to telling us why you love
mushrooms so much. Oh, and a quick questionnaire. Sorry, you don’t get
owt for nowt 🙂 or if you miss that we’ll be giving a smaller discount
for people who respond before end of July.

**Please go here ****http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TC3VZ56****& answer a
couple of questions to **express your support for the Hungry Fungi
project. That’s it. We’ll keep you informed of what’s going down here as
we grow with regular newsletters and we even tweet if you fancy that
(see below).**

*So, who are we?*

*Hungry Fungi* is a newly establishing workers’ co-op based in Leeds who
will be providing mushroom spawn, easy mushroom grow-bags and workshops
on how to grow your own edible gourmet or medicinal mushrooms*. *We’ve
been building our own lab using scrap wood & reused stuff, and we’re
into community, good food and a sustainable future (what other kind is
there?).

By sending your expression of interest you will be helping to support
our project and also help with our market research and funding
applications, which is vital for small community projects,

We promote the benefits of growing your own mushrooms as a sustainable
and nutritional food source and also of benefit to ecosystem health.
Our remit is to provide all the materials and know how necessary to
empower ordinary people to grow their own mushrooms.

We will be supplying the following products and services:

* *Workshops on easy ways to grow your own gourmet edible and
medicinal mushrooms*. For this you need a substrate (or food for
the mushrooms) this can be logs, woodchip, used coffee grounds,
cardboard or straw. Includes all materials and equipment provided
for the workshop and follow up support.
* *Mushroom spawn* *and all equipment you need for growing your own
edible and medicinal mushrooms: *Mushroom spawn is the raw material
you need in order to grow mushrooms (a bit like seedlings, but for
mushrooms). This spawn will be produced by ourselves in our own
dedicated small-scale hand-built laboratory located just outside Leeds.
* *Easy grow, mushroom growing kits*: for busy people, one of our
grow-bags will simply need watering regularly & will start to fruit
within a couple of weeks and will carry on fruiting for repeated
harvests (subject to the amount of TLC you give it).

*Pricing: *We haven’t finalized our prices yet, but our prices will be
as reasonable as possible and our workshops will include a sliding scale
to accommodate people on low incomes. Our aim is to make growing your
own mushrooms accessible to all.

*What inspires us?*
Mushrooms (or fungi) have been shown to be vital to soil and ecosystem
health. By cultivating mushrooms we can support the health of our soil
and the ecosystems we live in whilst also growing our own high value,
highly nutritional (protein rich – same as dairy!) and delicious food
source. We are inspired by the work of Paul Stamets, author of
‘Mycelium Running – how mushrooms can help save the world’ and ‘Growing
Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms’. We exist to promote Stamets’ idea of
permaculture with a ‘mycological (fungi related) twist’ as well as
supporting local livelihoods & trading.

Initially we will be supplying a small range of mushroom spawn for sale
by mail order or collection from our base in Leeds. The varieties we
will be selling will include:

Oyster – a delicious and easy to grow gourmet mushroom
Shiitake – a classic gourmet mushroom suitable for growing on logs
Reishi – a wonderful medicinal mushroom, can be taken as a tea as a
powerful health tonic with a whole host of medicinal properties
King Stropharia – Garden Giant mushroom, suitable for cultivation on
woodchip mulch beds amongst herbaceous plants.

Our first spawn runs will be limited quantities so email us asap for
first refusal on orders later this year.

*Our website (soon to be updated): *www.fungi.coop

*Facebook:*Follow us and ‘Like’ us on Facebook to keep in touch and find
out more: www.facebook.com/hungryfungi

*
Twitter:*Follow us on Twitter to see pictures of the lab currently being
built, and for all things fungi! www.twitter.com/hungryfungi


*More ways to support us:*

*Offer to pre-order now and pay in advance:* we’ll send you our
pricelist as soon as we have it. It will greatly help us if you
pre-order and especially if you can pay in advance. This will enable us
to plan our production and help with cashflow. It will also mean you
get your order first.

*Donate to the project:* Any donations welcome, please email us if you
are able to donate to Hungry Fungi to help us get up and running. We’ve
got a bit more equipment to buy and we are working on a shoestring; any
donation whatever size will help.

Many thanks and may you have lots of future fun with fungi!

Ali, Behla, Fred & Joanna
The Hungry Fungi clan

p.s. feel free to forward this email to anyone you might think would
like what we’re doing. Thanks.

My gran’s garden was just so busy. Tons of fruit trees: apples, damson, victoria plum, yellow and purple gauges. Massive strawberry bed, huge load of daffodils for cutting for church, massive rows of veggies in the back, and the prettiest garden in the front packed with flowers and shrubs. A huge row of rhubarb, a mint bed under the washing line and raspberries.
It did mean being sent over for picking beans and other veg rather than being sent to the shop.
I wish I had photos of it in mid-summer. Of the branches of the fruit trees being laden down with plums, the soft sweet juicy flesh of a ripe victoria plum eaten out in the sunshine next to lavender bushes buzzing with bees, watching the foxgloves full of bees and butterflies dancing by on the breeze.

Polyculture is when you mix plants up rather than sowing them in huge patches. It can help avoid pest problems by breaking up the smells of plants and making them harder for insects and pests to find.

It is the opposite of monoculture which is the planting of one crop in a space.

Polyculture includes multi-cropping, intercropping, companion planting, and beneficial weeds.

Multi-cropping means having two crops from the space in one season – often radishes can be uses as part of a multicrop system as they grow quickly, but any quick growing crop can be used. They can be used to mark the line of a row of slower to germinate seeds. This harvesting in relay can be useful for getting more food from a small space. The three sisters planting – corn, beans and squash is an example of this.

Inter-cropping is when one crop is grow between the space between another. Some people use garlic – a tall growing plant – to fill in gaps. The garlic never takes much space and so is happy dotted about in gaps. Intercropping can be used with smaller spacing as some of the crop will be removed before taking too much room, allowing the remaining crop more space to grow.

Companion planting – example is when a combination of tomatoes and marigold can be multi-cropped to help deter some tomato pests.

Use of beneficial weeds – can be seen as a green manure waiting to be hoed into the soil. If you remember to hoe before they seed then this is fine. Some weeds can protect plants by keeping away pests either by smell or physically making it hard to get to. Nettles allow early aphids which in turn benefits ladybirds making it a good plan to allow a corner of your space to have some in.

Issues which might occur include not identifying the crops as seedlings if they’re not in rows. More experienced gardeners shouldn’t have this problem.
Some plants may be too vigorous for sharing space with other plants and cause issues over light, air, watering and feed requirements.

I’ve got some sprout cuttings growing in a ramekin and a cabbage stem. The cabbage is doing much better than the sprouts in terms of size.

You can try this on other veg. Leek roots are supposed to grow – have got some in a pot in the greenhouse – will check on them soon.

Potatoes are well known for growing even from little peelings – my compost bin is often full of them!

Anything with a root base is probably worth a grow! Lettuces, lemongrass, spring onions, bulb Fennel, – just have a look at the veg you’re preparing and give it a try!

EDIT- October clearout of greenhouse revealed this ..

Whilst I should be sowing my sprout seeds right now I read about someone who tried to get sprouts to root. Some went mouldy but some put out little roots. So I thought that sounded like a good idea and next time I had sprouts I gave it a go. As not to waste sprouts though I used the bases that get cut off when you’re preparing them.
I also tried it with a savoy cabbage base too.
All of them were put into glass ramikins and stuck on the kitchen windowsill by the sink. The sprouts started first! Little tiny bobbles of sprout. They’re bigger now in this photo and the cabbage is putting out leaf too. The person doing the original experiment has potted hers up. I’ll be doing the same soon!
I’ve also stuck the bases of four leeks in pots of soil. I’d dug them up off the allotment to eat and when I cut the roots off though I’d do something with them too!

Here are the photos of the sprouts and cabbage.

Whether we get any usable growth off the sprouts remains to be seen, but it’s certainly interesting to see things growing. I’m sure we’ve all done the carrot tops in a saucer of water – they grow lots of top growth!

Breeding hellebores – lovely article with pictures: Either choose two quite different varieties or, if you want to concentrate on a particular characteristic or colour, choose those that display unique features.

how to prune your hellebore in the Winter

Hellebores are shade loving plants that flower in the early spring. This makes them a great choice for gardens!

You can grow them from seed – these varieties are at Thompson and Morgan

Hellebore ‘Washfield Doubles’ – 1 packet (10 seeds) £4.99
Breathtaking, double-flowered Hellebores from the Washfield collection, bred to perfection, adding sheer delight to your borders early each year. ‘ T&M are proud to continue the breeding work started over 20 years ago by Hellebore specialist Elizabeth Strangman, and want to share her passion for these intriguing plants with you. ‘ These delightful doubles are in a wide colour range including yellows, greens, blacks, reds, apricots and much more. ‘ Height: 45-60cm (18-24in). ‘ Please note that stock of this item will be available from June 2012. ‘

Hellebore (Purple-flowered Christmas Rose) – 1 packet (30 seeds) £0.99
Rarely offered for sale as seed! This exquisite Helleborus produces clumps of robust, leathery foliage along with many large blooms, flushed in shades of purple, pink and even slate grey!

Hellebore (Christmas Rose) – 1 packet (40 seeds) £0.69
Surprise your friends and neighbours with an arrangement of Christmas roses for the festive season! Beautiful blooms at a time when little else is available. ‘ From seed you can have a group quite close together in a way which would cost you a great deal if you bought the plants. ‘ They flower in about three years from seed and invariably produce stronger, healthier plants. ‘