Growing Vegetables
Water Butt
A container for storing rain water. This water has no chemicals, so can be used to top up a pond. The easiest way to fill a water ...
rain | Compost
Can be made in your compost bin, or bought. It is a mix of organic matter than feeds nutrients back into the soil. If you made it ...
| Intercropping
This is when you sow two, or more, different crops in the same bed. It may be as one benefits the other, or simply to make best us...
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Food mile
this is the distance the food you are going to eat has travelled to get to your home. The further it has travelled, the more carbon dioxide has gone into the atmosphere, and so the bigger the carbon footprint.
Is it better to eat local non-
organic food, or far-flung
organic? For some food that may be considered essential like bananas, grapes, oranges and avocado, it’s a price that has to be paid; but for cabbage, apple, strawberries?
By growing your own you are reducing your carbon footprint, and very little helps.
Friable
(tilth)A term for
soil that breaks or crumbles easily when handled.
Friendly Fire
These are the natural predators of
pests and exist in a garden where no insecticides are used, and there are plenty of plants for them to feed on, and habitats for them to colonise . For instance, Ladybirds, which eat aphids, as do hoverflies. Bees and wasps that pollinate flowers. Frogs that eat slugs. Thrushes that eat snails.
Nematodes that destroy slugs and snails, and vine weevils. Parasitic wasps that destroy whitefly. Predatory mites that eat spider mites.
However, a
friendly fire predator needs the pest to be present, so you need to manually remove the pest until the
friendly fire arrives.