The Shrewd Gardener

Here is a quick quiz for Christmas time. See how well you do.

Christmas Gardening Quiz » Free Online Quizzes

Check out this helpful online article by the New Scientist which cleanly debunks the top 50 of 100 ‘reasons’ why ‘Global Warming is natural’ published in the Daily Express recently.  As a casual reader it can be very difficult to make up your mind what to think about the climate debate. Newspapers always set themselves [...]

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 compost [...]

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 things change [...]

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.

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 also links to [...]

You can be a shrewd gardener in many ways but what underpins it is knowledge and what to to with that knowledge.
You may be an indoor gardener, which I’ll confess now I’m not. You may be a greenhouse gardener or a vegetable gardener or a bonsai gardener.
Even if you specialise you still need to know [...]