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• TV gardener says we should be broadening rather than reducing range of plants 

By Colin Fernandez

Published: 19:57 EDT, 15 May 2024 | Updated: 20:17 EDT, 15 May 2024

Alan Titchmarsh has hit out at ‘fads and fancies’ at the Chelsea Flower Show.

Branding the likes of rewilding as a ‘step backwards’, the 75-year-old celebrity gardener said the assumption that we should reduce the number of ‘exotic’ species we plant was ‘erroneous’.

And he added that climate change meant gardeners need to increase the variety of plants and flowers not reduce it.

‘Rewilded’ gardens have attracted controversy at the Royal Horticultural Society’s flagship event in recent years – with one garden by designers Lulu Urquhart and Adam Hunt including a beaver dam winning the coveted ‘best in show’ award in 2022.

Writing about the annual show in Country Life magazine, he said: ‘The variety of today’s show gardens is hugely welcome, as is the appearance of young garden designers with original ideas.

‘Less welcome are the fads and fancies that purport to signal the way forward in domestic gardens, but which are in real terms a step backwards.’

He continued: ‘The erroneous assumption a couple of years ago that ‘rewilding’ meant reducing the number of exotic plants in the garden and sticking to British natives was a case in point.

‘Why anyone could think fewer species and varieties could increase biodiversity is beyond me.

‘What’s more, if our gardens are to survive global warming, we need to be broadening the range of plants we grow, not reducing it, in the interests of populating our gardens with plants that thrive in a changing climate.

‘But we need controversy to make us think and keep us fresh.’ He added that the costs of some of the Chelsea show gardens are ‘eye-watering’ and described the event as the ‘Paris catwalk of the British gardening scene’.

And he singled out the specialist growers for particular praise.

‘Amid all the hoopla that surrounds the horticultural event of the year that we call the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, at its heart is a group of folk who continue a tradition that is as old as Adam,’ he said.

‘It would be a travesty if they were regarded as merely an add-on, for what they do is keep alive the plants and the growing skills that have made British gardens the envy of the world.

‘It may be the show gardens that steal the newspaper headlines, this year, we are promised a Bridgerton Garden sponsored by Netflix.

‘One only hopes that the ghastly artificial wisteria that flowers all year round on the townhouse owned by that family in the television series is not a feature.

‘Yes, the show gardens themselves offer inspiration – although their six-figure construction costs are eye-watering -, but it is the expertise of specialist growers in the Great Pavilion that deserves every bit as much attention and praise.’

The five-day Chelsea Flower Show is held by the Royal Horticultural Society in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea in London. This year’s show opens on Monday.

If our gardens are to survive global warming, we need to be broadening the range of plants we grow, not reducing it, in the interests of populating our gardens with plants that thrive in a changing climate.’

Writing in Country Life, he said the costs of some Chelsea show gardens are ‘eye-watering’ and described the event as the ‘Paris catwalk’ of British gardening.

Source: dailymail.co.uk

Source: express.co.uk

While one point of gardening is to be enjoying the great outdoors, using tech doesn’t take anything away from that. In fact, I’d argue it enables being outside, because you don’t have to be tethered to paperwork or books—all you need is on your phone or tablet. Although I had long embraced using spreadsheets for charting what I was planting in seed trays or Adobe Illustrator for mapping my garden beds, I was slower to embracing gardening apps. I had, somewhat naively, waited for “the one,” the app that would do everything, for while I’d happily pay for. What’s happened instead is that I use a variety of apps in small ways for almost every aspect of gardening, depending on what I need.

The best, free way to identify plants

It never fails to amuse me how many friends send me pictures of plants asking me to ID them, because usually, I have no idea what I’m looking at. In my own garden, I figure out what I’m looking at by using a plant ID app, and I benefit from Plantnet weekly. It has rarely disappointed me in being able to identify plants, even from a less-than-stellar picture, and immediately links to information about the plant. You can use it offline, too, so you don’t need service. 

ADHD-proof succession planting

Succession planting (or planting crops every few weeks so you have crops ready to harvest at various times instead of all at once) is a test of best intentions. Keeping track of when you should seed, when you should harvest, and then actually following through is a test for anyone, but I really struggle with it and need reminders to stay on track.  While Seedtime is advertised as a planting app to help manage your whole garden, and is incredibly popular, I really just use the succession planning aspect. While you could much of the same result using spreadsheets, Google Calendar and your own research, Seedtime does a lot of the legwork for you, plotting out a customized calendar based on the crops you want to grow. There are paid tiers, but you can remain on a free plan and get a lot of the functionality, including one planting calendar. Paid tiers will net you more functions to use Seedtime as a gardening journal (which is a great idea) and the ability to save more data from your gardens, like yields and germination rates. 

Eliminate crowdscaping

Almost every gardener I know grows or buys too many starts and then packs their beds too full. It’s easy to do when the plants are so small—the beds can look sparse at this point. Apps like Planter help you understand how much space each plant really needs, as they all grow to different sizes, and some grow vertically while others grow horizontally. To really get a sense of what you can pack into a particular bed, this is the app I use to help me come back down to earth and get real about spacing. Like Seedtime, Planter tries to be an app that does everything for your garden, so you can also use the growing calendar, but I think Seedtime does that aspect better, while Planter is better for planning your beds. Planter has plans that start about $1/month, which is great, but you’ll get most of what you need on the free plan. 

Companion planting on the fly

Over time, you can learn what crops benefit from being planted together, and more importantly, which crops can’t be interplanted. While there are great charts to detail this, they’re hard to refer to while out in your garden. Instead, I use the Seed to Spoon app. I can quickly, from the garden, look up a specific vegetable or flower and get data on what to interplant and what to avoid, as well as a bunch of other growing info about a particular plant. There are some other features I like about this app, like the general reminders about what to plant now, or what to plant soon, on the home page, but mostly, I use this app as a reference library for interplanting. Seed to Spoon can be used for free, but you can upgrade for $47 a year to get access to more features, like an AI garden chatbot. 

Take advantage of free online tools

While not an app, Johnny Seeds has a ton of free tools that you should use. I use the seed quantity calculator to figure out how many seeds or starts of a particular plant I should get based on the space I have. There’s also a seed planting scheduler that does many of the calculations for you based on frost dates. Take time to peruse the tool list for planning, growing and harvesting. Gardenate is a free online tool that will tell you what to grow in your zip code right now, and whether to direct sow or plant starts. 

Source: lifehacker.com

by Joann Pipkin

Educating consumers wasn’t on Norris Sloan’s radar when he started dairying more than four decades ago. But today, serving as an industry advocate is one of the Douglas County, Mo., dairyman’s most important tasks.

Tucked away deep in the hills of south-central Missouri, 15 miles from the nearest town, Sloan often pauses his daily routine for a lesson in milk nutrition and pasteurization to a passerby.

The scene is a stark contrast from early days in the dairy business when talk among producers focused solely on milk prices.

“Being involved in dairy organizations is more about educating consumers than it is [networking] with dairy farmers,” Sloan says.

Sharing the dairy story

In what was once a dairy hot spot with five milk trucks passing by his house daily, Sloan says now one lone hauler travels 100 miles to fill a load.

Still, the veteran dairyman thrives amid the industry he sought.

In a day and time when a disconnect between producer and consumer looms on every street corner and down every country road, Sloan finds great value in his chosen profession.

CARE FOR COWS: Dairy cows rotationally graze pastures at the Sloan farm. It is a way make the most of the farm’s best asset: grass.

Through his involvement in organizations such as the Midwest Dairy Association, Missouri Dairy and Dairy Farmers of America, as well as the local school system, Sloan has come to embrace the disconnect.

Producer to consumer, one conversation at a time, he works to connect the dots. It all starts with telling his own story.

Charting his own course

Now in his 46th year, Sloan, a first-generation dairyman, overcame obstacles to become a full-time farmer.

He entered the business in the 1970s with only a Holstein heifer, which was gifted to him after he was named Star FFA Greenhand. Once the heifer was bred and calved, a neighbor stepped in to help with milking.

After high school, Sloan worked for an uncle in a dairy equipment service and sales business while devising a plan on how to become a dairy farmer.

In 1978, Sloan married Annette, and soon after, he purchased cows and began milking on a leased dairy. All the while, the young couple worked off-farm jobs.

The early years were challenging for the Sloans. Still, they eventually secured financing and purchased additional cows. Sloan quit his off-farm job and purchased the leased dairy operation.

Overcoming the odds

Dairying through the decades that followed was no easy feat.

From drought to high interest rates, the Sloans navigated the challenges by keeping expenses in check while using their biggest resource to their best advantage.

“Grass is our asset,” Sloan says simply.

Cows rotate from one pasture to the next every few days to keep them grazing fresh grass. The protocol works well until the species grow dormant.

RIGHT MIX: Native fescue mixes with legumes and orchardgrass flourish in southwest Missouri pastures. They are key for low-input dairy production.

While the rugged Ozarks hills are prime land for grazing cattle, the terrain is less than ideal for growing crops such as corn for silage. Transportation challenges make hauling in premium forages cost-prohibitive.

“We’re challenged here because byproducts are not close,” Sloan says. “Everything must be hauled in here in a truck. So, unless you can figure out how to do something [for feed] on your own, you must be satisfied with a little less production.”

Everything fed to the dairy cows is home-raised.

Native fescue mixes with legumes and orchardgrass in Sloan’s pastures. They also put up hay, focusing on timely, early harvest to ensure quality forage.

Navigating through change

Today, the Sloans milk about 100 Holsteins, bred to mostly beef bulls. The farm plan is to transition to beef cattle when the couple is no longer able to dairy.

The couple’s children do not plan to take over the operation, but a larger concern is labor to sustain the business.

“Times have really changed,” Sloan says. “[Used to be] we would always have somebody stopping by asking for work.”

Blessed with a dependable community-based workforce over the years, Sloan says the future remains uncertain because of the rise in the minimum wage and fewer people seeking employment.

Pipkin writes from Republic, Mo.

Source: farmprogress.com

Rishi Sunak’s plan to improve the UK’s food security will not help build farmer’s confidence in the short-term, the head of the country’s biggest farming body has said.

Food production was likely to drop next year, said Tom Bradshaw, the president of the National Farmers’ Union, who warned that the prime minister’s plan, published during the UK’s second annual Farm to Fork summit, failed to give farmers the solutions they needed.

On Tuesday, 70 food and farming businesses met at No 10 to discuss how to improve food security, as the government unveiled a plan to boost food production and security. The plan focused particularly on fruit and vegetables, the two food types most reliant on imports from abroad.

The new policies include changing planning laws to make it easier to build greenhouses and a replacement for the EU horticulture resilience scheme that would double the funding available to £80m a year.

In a briefing after the summit, Bradshaw said overall the changes would do little to fix the short-term challenges farmers currently faced.

He said: “I think that what’s missing from today, really. Today was more about the strategic long-term plan, it’s not about putting the building blocks in place that rebuild that confidence immediately.”

Last month, an annual survey by the NFU found farmers’ confidence was at its lowest since the first survey of its kind in 2010, which followed a winter of extreme weather when many farms flooded and farmers were unable to plant crops. There are also widespread concerns about the impact phasing out the EU’s basic payment scheme subsidies will have on farmers.

Bradshaw was keen to stress the importance of the Farm to Fork summit and said it marked a change from previous governments when it came to the importance of farming. However, he said: “I believe as we go into next year, we will have less food, [a] lower food security index than now.”

“I think that the government needs to take critical steps to get the industry on to a firmer footing, and willing to start that investment cycle. If they’re not doing that, then an industry that is not investing is not preparing for the future.”

The government has published its first ever food security index, which uses official data to paint a picture of Britain’s overall ability to produce enough food for its population.

The table revealed that the UK only produced 17% of its own fruit, and 55% of its own vegetables. Lamb and milk were the most secure foods, with producers respectively generating 7% and 5% more than the country needs.

Bradshaw welcomed the index but called on the government to begin setting food security targets for different food types. Other sector figures, however, cautioned that the index was based on old data.

Tom Lancaster, a land analyst at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, said: “In only running to 2022, the new food security index is lagging behind the impacts of extreme weather and climate change that we’ve seen in the last 18 months.

“To address this, they could have done some interim analysis or even provided some interim commentary, but clearly chose not to.”

The index also outlined the main risks to future food security but the government was widely criticised for listing climate change as a “longer-term risk”.

Dustin Benton, the policy director at the Green Alliance, said: “The past 12 months have been 0.7C higher than the 1990-2020 average. Higher temperatures are associated with the sorts of extreme weather that cuts food production. Climate risks are no longer just a long-term problem.”

Rob Percival, the head of food policy at the Soil Association, said: “Absurdly, climate change is described as a ‘longer-term’ risk, despite the steady ratcheting of climate extremes and the profound effects already being felt on the ground.”

Steve Barclay, the environment secretary, said: “Today’s announcements will turbocharge the growth of our horticultural sector, supporting the building of cutting-edge glasshouses and innovative farming techniques to put British fruit and vegetables on our plates all-year round.

“We will continue to invest in and support farmers to produce the best of British food to strengthen our food security, championing innovation in the sector.”

Source: theguardian.com