The Shrewd Gardener

For Clever Gardeners Everywhere

Do you really know what’s going on in your garden?

Today is beautifully sunny and bright. Ideal for pottering around the garden. I noticed yesterday that there are quite a few ladybirds (ladybugs, US) on the willow tunnel we built last year. They seem to be quite happy and I think they are going around eating the marauding insects that attack willows at this time [...]

Deed for the day: Helping a BumbleBee

Spring has finally arrived and so we were busy in the garden over the weekend. As the weather becomes finer we are starting to see more insect life, notably the BumbleBees as they come out of hibernation. It’s a fact that some do better than others and I was impressed to see a couple of [...]

NASA – Fire at Fuel Storage Facility in Puerto Rico

I’m browsing the Earth Observatory pages at NASA, sparked off by another Twitter user. I thought this image of a fuel fire in Puerto Rico which happened in October 2009 was interesting. It shows the area affected by the incident which in the picture is about 140km long by 15km wide. Fire at Fuel Storage [...]

Copenhagen – was it all worth it?

Was the trip to Copenhagen worthwhile for all the nations that took part? Well, yes it was. Kyoto was a beginning, a start on the path towards working out some solutions to the problems caused by man made pollution. In Copenhagen the aim was to go further and include everybody in the collective responsibility for [...]

Avoiding slimy compost

The ideal is to be able to make one’s own lovely compost to feed the garden. This isn’t always so straightforward as you need to get the proportions right and get the correct micro-organisms to help you. Composting is a complex process where different families of microbes get their nutrients from the contents of the [...]

Seen on the BBC website – Google trick tracks extinctions

This caught my eye a while back. The algorithm used by Google to work out rankings for pages has been applied (theoretically) to food webs.  the implication here is that if scientists can calculate the state of an ecosystem they will be able to work out whether the system is vulnerable to collapse. Of course [...]

BBC Science & Environment – Herbs ‘can be natural pesticides’

Herbal pesticides have been in use for thousands of years. Plants and herbs also have many medicinal uses and form an essential part of our every day lives.

National Trust Tree database

The National Trust in the process of building a database of trees in the UK. This is quote a big project and there are lots of related links on the web as I’ve been finding. The BBC have picked it up BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Plan for national tree database. There are [...]

  • About

    This is where I blog about my interest in gardening and ecology. There is always something to do in the garden all year round and as we have an inner city garden the tasks are a little different to rural spaces.

    I work as a software developer now but a few years ago I had my own gardening design and construction business.

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