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Small container garden: Grow herbs in the kitchen

Greta Jonyniate | 22.08.11

By author: Amanda Kidd  Gardening Clan is a blogger who is a nature lover. She has her own rock garden and she is right now busy in growing herbs in it. She always keeps herself updated with new gardening tips to make sure that her garden is properly maintained. Here she shares her tips on growing herbs in your kitchen.

A visit to my friend’s house gave me an encouraging idea. She had smartly used and recycled many of the materials which normally reaches the trash without any second opinion. I was delighted to see a small area inside her kitchen brimming with life. There were small cute pots, which were actually designed out of used cans/containers, containing small herbs and plants. It seemed that she has put in all her biology lessons keenly into her kitchen garden. They were so appealing. And I was surprised to know that she had designed her ‘small container kitchen’ all alone with some inputs from the internet.

You can start working at your small container kitchen with some basic knowledge about plants and the ways to maintain them. Plants can be placed inside or outside your house. Outdoor garden enjoys the advantage of abundant sunlight and natural atmospheric climate, but certain climatic conditions can be harmful and you need to keep a check on them. Indoor garden enjoys the protection from unfavorable climatic conditions. You need to devote sometime exclusively for your garden to gain maximum benefit out of it.

Generally, an opening is made inside the pot to allow the excess water drain out. But if you choose to place the pots inside, you can either not make that outlet or select an area which allows draining while keeping the house tidy. Rainwater may play foul and damage your garden. After showers, plants need careful examination. Excessive water needs drainage and the lost soil, which gets flushed with rainwater, in the pot has to be restored. Plants gain nutrients mainly from the soil. Sometimes, a heavy downpour can potentially damage the plant, particularly the roots. Check it sometimes to determine whether it needs replacement.

You can select plants/vegetation which is easy to manage and grow. This can save troubling yourself and being comfortable with your garden. Many are happy to grow multiple plants/vegetation in single pot. This needs extra skills or else you may end up with not even one grown properly. Be careful while you select your plant.

The container garden allows you to experiment with many plants. The choice is varied. You can opt for some herbs which can add refreshing ingredient into your kitchen. Many people choose to grow vegetables which need less space and are easily manageable. Or you can prefer to nurture some of the beautiful flowering plants which are a delight to the viewers. At any point of time, you can choose to change the plant as per your need and desire. Being portable, you can keep them anywhere as per your requirement. The containers can be shaped beautifully that add interiors’ outlay to your house.

An environment oriented ingredient for your garden is the compost. It is made out of wastage and is really healthy for the plants. It is apt to provide micro and macro nutrients needed for the health and growth of the plants. The polluting content of artificial fertilizers is not found here. Besides, it is cheaper compared to the artificial fertilizer and easy vegetation. You may also need some pest-control tools to save your garden from pest infection.

By growing your own vegetation, you benefit your health as well. The extended use of synthetic fertilizers and other components have diluted the natural nutrition content of vegetation. This can be one of the prudent opportunities to gain healthy outcome with limited efforts. If you are new to the subject, restrict yourself to limited number of containers in your garden. Once you gain the tact, you can extend it according to desire. Regular trimming sessions can keep the plants in shape and avoid being clumsy. It is not only an option to spend your leisure time constructively, but also helps in saving money.
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For Christmas, we sent a cow

Anna Guyer | 23.12.10

We are lucky at Greenhouse to work with a team of creative and interesting people committed to making a difference. So this year we have chosen to honor their commitment by sending some rather unusual gifts on their behalf to families in Africa. From beehives to medicinal herbs, from goats to a donkey, the gifts we've sent reflect different interests or personality aspects of each member of our team. 

We did this via one of my favorite organisations, called Send a Cow, a group that helps thousands of African families grow enough food to eat, sell their produce and develop small businesses that last. 

I love them partly because I love cows, but even more because when you invest in Send a Cow's gifts, you are funding something that continues to give over and over. People who receive these livestock and farming support go on to share their success with others, too, so that every person who is helped by Send a Cow passes on knowledge and skills to around another 9 family members, friends or neighbours.

You can actually pick out what you want to send. Have a look at what we picked out for each of the people at Greenhouse:

Send a Cow would love to have your support. Have a look at their work, and then check them out at www.sendacow.org.uk.

Give a gift that will change a life!

To all of our clients, colleagues and friends, we wish you the very best for the festive season and for a wonderful 2011. It has been a pleasure to work with you in 2010, and we look forward to continuing our conversations in the New Year.

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Barbra Streisand, the One Pot Pledge and Me

Kenneth Hill | 26.05.10

I don't talk to my plants. No, sir. I'm not a crazy person.

I don't sing to them either, not when I have Barbra Streisand to do it for me - with proven results.

In the 1970 Vincente Minnelli film On A Clear Day You Can See Forever, Ms. Streisand gives a marvelous performance as Daisy Gamble, a nice woman living in New York, engaged to a guy so boring he could make weeds wilt.

Among her gifts, aside from channeling her past lives during psychotherapy, are two sorta cool "superpowers:" She hears phones ring before they ring, and she sings to make plants grow --and I mean grow REALLY FAST - with lyrics like:

"Hey buds below
Up is where to grow
Up with which below can't compare with.
Hurry, it's lovely up here…"

The supersonic plant growing is done to marvelous effect in the film thanks to the talents of John Nash Ott Jr., a time-lapse specialist who pioneered the medium working for Disney and others as early as the 1950s. Ott was also a horticulturist.

The scene below is a fantastic ride through Daisy Gamble's ability to get things to grow, something I'm thinking a lot about at the moment as I watch my little pot of basil inching, well, quarter-inching, it's way to become something I can harvest.

Oh Ms. Streisand, how my One Pot Pledge could use you now! 



 

PS: Do you talk or sing to your plants? C'mon, you can tell :-)

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Teach your children well

Anna Guyer | 20.05.10

The greatest resource we have for creating a sustainable future isn't a law or a revolutionary new product. I believe it lies in our ability to, as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young so beautifully put it, teach our children well.

As parents of three, Matthew and I are keen for our children to develop an understanding of the importance of being good stewards for the planet. They are really into it -- and so are their friends, which I find both fascinating and heartening.



When Rosie’s school, St John’s in Wimborne, celebrated Environment Week, we spent a day there to help more than 160 children plant edible veg. This was part of our effort to support Garden Organic's One Pot Pledge, which I've talked about on the blog. It's all about getting first-time gardeners to plant a few seeds and grow something edible.

Our day at school was really great. It was also exhausting - a good exhaustion - which left me in complete awe and admiration for the stamina and commitment that teachers expend everyday.

For many of Rosie's schoolmates, planting something was a first. We gave the children a choice of seeds for French beans, courgettes, carrots and salad. Everyone had fun and they loved growing the veg.

The day before, I went to our local supermarket and bought the equivalent of what we were going to plant. We looked at food miles:

• French beans from Kenya, 4685 miles
• green beans from Morocco, 1500 miles
• lettuce from Perthshire, over 400 miles
• carrots and courgettes from Spain, 585 miles

What was inspiring was that the children were knowledgeable about food miles and the issues where are food comes from, and they have an awareness about the impact of food transportation on the environment and the benefits of growing your own. There's something to this exercise of reaching kids when they are seven and eight. These are such formative years. 

We weren't taught lessons of sustainability when I was a kid. What I saw at Rosie's school gives me hope. It makes me reach for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.



PS: I am going to keep asking you to take the One Pot Pledge. I have promised myself to recruit 1000 new growers! 

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Give it a grow: Join us in the One Pot Pledge

Anna Guyer | 18.05.10

Everyone at Greenhouse is working to recruit 1,000 people to join us in the One Pot Pledge, a campaign to get 30,000 first-time gardeners to grow a pot of fruit or veg.

I love this project. It's good for the environment, and it's stuff you can eat :-)

Please join us in pledging to grow a pot of veg. Like you, we are just starting out.

The official web site is chock full of tips for first-timers, and they have expert advice from well-known gardeners like Alys Fowler. You can even submit your gardening questions and they will be answered.

It's all on the One Pot Pledge site, sponsored by Garden Organic, the leading organic growing charity.

We'll be posting our progress here and on our new Facebook page. Check it out and "like" us. We're mailing free veg seeds to new Facebook friends.

If you're already a gardener, there's a role for you in the One Pot Pledge to help get a friend or two growing too.

Let's grow a tastier world together!

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Eco Hero: Alys Fowler

Anna Shepard | 12.04.10

The 'grow your own' movement is getting a lot of attention lately, and there isn't a better advocate for it than Alys Fowler. Alys is a gardening superstar, but without a star's ego. Naturally warm, modest, eclectic and funny, she's the gardener next door -- who just happened to train at the Royal Horticultural Society, the New York Botanical Gardens and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.

Alys is a presenter on BBC Gardener's World, and a widely published journalist whose work appears in The Guardian, The Garden, Gardeners' World Magazine, Gardens Illustrated and Horticulture Week.

Her latest book 'The Edible Garden: How to Have Your Garden and Eat It' is currently the number three book in the Gardening category on Amazon UK.

We've chosen her as our Eco Hero for this edition because not only do we love her utter willingness to share her knowledge of all things horticultural -- and tie that into your health and wellbeing -- she also understands the positive impact gardening has on communities and the environment. She gets it. So one minute she's teaching people how to pot vegetables on a fire escape, and the next she's planting guerrilla allotments at Heathrow to protest runway expansion. She's a rebel in a pair of Wellies.

As guest blogger Anna Shepard found out in the interview that follows, what's not to love? -- ed.

How would you describe yourself?

Gardener and cyclist.

What is your mission?

We’re going to need more skills in the future and one of those is growing food. I want to pass on knowledge about how to do this. I’m very aware that my role is simply to pass on the things that were taught to me. Having trained at Kew and New York Botanical Garden, I’m one in a long line of gardeners. Many have come before me and many will come after. I’m just handing on the knowledge.

What do you care passionately about?

I care most about finding a way for all of us to become part of our environment. I don’t like this idea that man is pitted against nature and that we have to change ourselves to make it better. A lot of environmentalism is about ‘not doing’ things. Stop this; reduce that; cut back on the other - it can be quite negative. What I love about gardening is that it’s not negative. All that matters is that you do more of it.

Why is organic so important?

You can call it organic, natural, or whatever you like, but what matters is that we have the most gentle approach to our environment and that we try to have the least impact possible. Organic is a word that has become complex because it’s used in so many different ways.

In gardening terms, it means no chemicals, no pesticides, no herbicides, no man-made fertilizers and as little water as possible. I try to think about the fact that yes, it’s my garden, but all the little insects and animals don’t know that. To them it’s just a bit of ground.

What is the next big challenge?

To build up soil fertility, particularly in urban areas where there’s no endless supply of farmyard manure. It is so necessary if we’re going to grow food in our cities. On a lighter note, I am setting myself the challenge of learning to love slugs. When you’ve had plants eaten by slugs, it’s hard not to want to annihilate every single one of them. Of course, if a slug comes too near me, it’s probably going to get squished, but I am trying to learn to live with them. It’s an important lesson; it’s about realizing that you are part of a wider eco system. The more you can accept that, the easier it is to garden because you learn to accept it’s not all about you.

What would you like to achieve in your lifetime?

If I knew the answer to that, wouldn’t that be perfect happiness? No, seriously, one thing I would like - although maybe it’s a little idealistic - would be for society to move away from being so consumerist. Instead I’d like more people to be engaged with bigger issues. If everyone did things they were truly passionate about, wouldn’t it all be a lot easier? Apathy is a big problem. People do things without even realizing why they’re doing them. They go shopping because it seems like a nice thing to do, but if people could really focus on what they were truly excited about, we might all be happier.

What top green principles do you live by?

I cycle as much as possible and eat as many homegrown things as I can. The other thing is that I believe in walking to happiness. This is something my cousin said to me the other day, that we should keep the things that make us happy - whether it’s people, hobbies or work - as close to home as possible.

What one thing do you wish everyone would do?

Make more things. It could be some jam, a knitted jumper or a thank you card; the things you make and do yourself have meaning for a really long time.

And in the garden?

Plant an apple tree, preferably an English variety. Within five years, you’ll be cropping your own apples, you’ll also have lovely blossom in late spring, and you’re doing it for the next generations as well.

How long have we got to save the planet?

No time at all. We need to do it immediately. This is partly why I don’t want to have children; we need to be more sensible about our population. But I’m not naturally pessimistic about the future. If everyone did one small thing, such as One Pot Pledge [link] this would have a huge effect.

Who is your Eco Hero and why?

I’m totally in love with the work of Wendell Berry. He’s an American farmer and philosopher who writes about agrarian issues. He looks at how many of our problems began when we moved away from being close to the soil. Every time I pick up anything written by him, I think he’s absolutely on the money.

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