A Voice From The Garden

The newsletter

It’s raining. Again. In fact despite knowing we have had some warm sunshiney days, it had rained here. A lot!!

And yet always someone, often me, jokes about a soon to be hosepipe ban, or drought, or we see news articles stating that England will be buying water from the devolved nations this year, and none of it makes sense. As it rains, again….

So rather than focusing on the rain let’s focus on the soil, because how you treat your soil, look after and nurture it, can help you continue to have a beautiful and abundant garden, growing space, allotment, with minimal watering needs!!

And the answer dear reader is mulch. And by mulch I don’t necessarily mean compost, but any organic matter used to cover the soil and keep that precious water in the soil rather than allowing it to evaporate. Compost, well rotted manure, woodchip, sheeps wool, cardboard. The list is endless.

At EdibleBristol we are working at our learning space with Janet Manning, a soil scientist with the RHS. We are looking at how much water we use a month in the growing season, stepping up our water collection, (we now have 8000 litres capacity on site) and utilise sustainable growing methods to keep the water where it falls, and growing healthy soil.

Anyway, the point of telling you this is that we worked out last week that over the total site, (3 standard allotments) the soil is holding at least 52,000 litres of water!!

That’s a lot of water!!

I’ll share more about this project over the summer!!

This week Bristol Tree Forum tweeted this excellent tool that helps to work out the worth of a tree….

https://bristoltrees.space/trees/Reckoner/Reckoner.html

Now whether or not you believe trees should hold a monetary worth is another thing, but for anyone fighting to save trees in this crazy world we live in, it’s an incredibly useful tool to have at our fingertips.

And finally have you signed the #StopKillingOurRivers petition from the Soil Association yet? If not, please do-it’s linked below!!

https://act.soilassociation.org/stop-killing-our-rivers

This week I’ve watched Poisoned on Netflix. It’s a hard watch about food standards in the States but it’s also a must watch because it really shows the industrial food system at its most manipulative!

Until next week…..