Monthly Archives: March 2011

Wednesday Wigglers ~~~ Aphids

Posted on by
2
The aphid group includes all aphids, blackfly and greenfly and are definitely FOE.
They vary in colour from green, pink, and yellow, black, greyish-white to brown and are about 2mm long.  Most of us would be familiar with greenfly on our roses or blackfly on our broadbeans.
Aphids are sap sucking insects and produce honeydew that sooty mould can form on.  They attack exposed parts of plants and roots.
They can spread virus and ants farm them.
Shocking fact about aphids: 
A newborn becomes a reproducing adult at 1 week old, can then produce five offspring per day for up to 30 days.  Aphids can reproduce asexually.  As it’s babies all have babies after just one week, by the time the first newborn reaches the end of it’s reproductive life there could be 1,590,155 of the little devils!
They can also lay eggs and live young.
Control
Companion planting can encourage beneficial insects and predators such as hoverfly and lacewing larvae into gardens. 
Insecticidal soap is very effective but kills beneficial insects too.
Protective cloches can be places over crops to prevent aphids infesting them but as they’re so tiny they would be very difficult to stop.  Squashing them between your fingers or spraying them off of plants with a blast of water from the hose works well too but you have to check the plants daily.

"What do the Irish Green Awards mean?"

Posted on by
Reply

I was delighted to find that we’ve been shortlisted for the SME (small/medium enterprises) category in the 20011 Irish Green Awards but as I’ve been sharing my news, I was surprised by the amount of people who’ve asked me “what does that mean?”. So I’ll do my best to answer what it means to me and Greenside Up…

Back in the eighties I was firing off letters to MPs about the rainforest, ozone layer and saving whales… I wasn’t swinging off parliament buildings or buzzing around whalers in inflatable dingies, but for many years I’ve been doing my best to be mindful of our environment and this amazing planet we live on.
Whether that was by not buying aerosol deodorants or by recycling glass, anything that was within my budget, I tried my best to do.  That ethos has continued throughout my personal life and now into my business life too.
As the years have rolled by, the problems haven’t got any better (Prince Charles was so ahead of everyone else) … they’ve got bigger in fact with ice caps melting, global warming and a rapidly growing energy and food crisis.
I mentioned ‘within budget’ and there’s no getting away from the fact that you need a certain amount of cash to be as ‘green’ as you can be. We would love to live in a passive house with solar energy, composting toilets and be fully self-sufficient. However, when we were looking for a home to raise our family, straw bales and solar were still pipe dreams and the only real alternative to oil here would have cost us more than our house (geothermal).
But there are still many steps we can all take that won’t cost a fortune that can help to lessen our impact (and I was relieved to read in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth that it’s not too late either – we can change things – look at the ozone layer for instance).


Here’s the Greenside Up top ten (this list could go on… it was difficult just choosing ten!) of easy ways to make a difference.
Use energy efficient light bulbs and turn lights off when rooms are empty.

  • Always choose paper (and that includes loo roll) that’s been sourced from FSCs – which means that the forests have been managed sustainably.
  • Reuse, recycle or give away.  In the last couple of years Mr G has collected four bicycles and a cross trainer from the dump that people were about to throw into the container (my ‘new’ bike has 18 gears and still had the plastic tags on the tyres). What a waste – have we really become such a throw away society!
In our garden old, unused building materials have been used again – pipe to make cloches, rafters to edge beds, copper stripped out of wire to annoy the slugs and burst paddling pools to cover manure heaps.
Cans, bottles and plastic are all recycled and food waste composted. For a family of five (with dogs) we generate about one black bin bag of rubbish every fortnight. If shops sold produce with less packaging we would be sending even less to the landfill. It’s not difficult for workplaces to add recycling bins to their kitchens and their landfill costs will be cheaper too.
  • Conserve water.  We have a well but have noticed in the summer months, and as more houses have appeared around us, that the supply isn’t as good as it used to be.  Only running the dishwasher when it’s full, collecting rainwater from gutters (or grey water) to water plants or lawns can be very simply done. Installing taps that automatically turn off and changing to more efficient toilet cisterns can help to conserve water too.
  • Turn the heating down! The hotter the house (or workplace) the colder a person seems to become! We lived in a mobile home for 18 months whilst we were renovating and have definitely become more accustomed to the cold. Wearing a fleece over a tea shirt indoors in the winter months shouldn’t be unusual.
  • Talk about the steps you make to help the environment a better place and how easy those steps are, to your friends and neighbours… the more people who take them, the more commonplace they will become.
  • Think about whether a journey is necessary before automatically jumping into a car…. Can the task be achieved by phone, computer, working from home or sharing lifts? Make lists so that you can do all your trips in one go.
  •  Maintain appliances and choose energy efficient ones when you’re replacing them. Have an energy audit done (which you will have to pay for but could save you money in the long run). Work out your own Carbon Footprint to see what you can do to reduce or offset it.
  • Shop locally. Support your neighbours and their business. Think about the air miles your out of season asparagus has travelled that you can buy so cheaply.
  • And it goes without saying for Greenside Up; grow your own food organically! Whether its a few herbs on a windowsill or a garden full of veg, growing your own makes you more aware of how food is produced, how far it’s travelled, what crops must have been sprayed with to be sold in such pristine condition and why organic food is tastier.

So to go back to the title  “what do the Irish Green Awards mean?”… To us it means they keep us on our toes. They make us stop and think about ways we can improve our business, making it and our home life more sustainable and to help others to become more sustainable too. Whether that’s by cutting travelling costs or by looking at ways of helping people grow their own more efficiently, we are aware of our impact on the environment and try to lessen it. We’re not perfect but we do our best.
And if I can help to show people that becoming more sustainable doesn’t have to be expensive or interfere with our lives too much (even though it should), and if being shortlisted by the Irish Green Awards can help me to do that, I’m happy.


Heated Propagating Tray – Review

Posted on by
Reply
I promised a review over on Facebook of a German store ‘Florabest’ propagator but have been pretty busy, with one thing and another. However, one of my close friends helped to plant the very first seeds into it and is now quizzing me on how they’ve performed!
A heated propagating bench has been on my wish list for years now and although relatively inexpensive to make, as is often the case in our house, whenever the funds are tantalizingly close enough to tease me, they’re suddenly redirected elsewhere.
So when Mr G came home with the latest brochure advertising a heated propagator for just €17.99 the offer was too good to turn down and we snapped one up. 
There’s no thermostatic control but the box claims the temperature of the soil is raised by up to 8oC. There are six mini nursery pots with lids, drainage and air vents and first impression was that it was a sturdy piece of kit.
So on the 19th February the first seeds were sown and we waited. It didn’t take long before the tomatoes, melons and chilli pepper seedlings were up and again, very quickly their true leaves appeared (the second set), indicating they were ready to be moved on into pots of their own.
The only fault I’ve found with it is the temptation to sow too much. However, you quickly discover that if you can stop yourself overfilling it, you can almost have the seeds transplanted and the containers refilled before seeds without hot bottoms have begun to germinate.
There’s a lot of condensation in the pots so it’s a good idea to open the ventilation as soon as the seedling appears, removing the lid altogether once they’re fully up. Also a daily wipe around the clear plastic lid doesn’t go amiss as this will help to prevent fungal disease.

So would I recommend it? Most definitely for a hobby gardener. Most families would only need to sow one or two courgettes plants, a few tomato plants, and a couple of cucumbers. They wouldn’t NEED a larger propagator. Do I still NEED a heated propagator bench? Why of course.
(NB: wondering why my seedlings are so leggy? I need lights too…)

Wednesday Wigglers ~~~ Hoverfly

Posted on by
Reply

Hoverfly

Often mistaken for wasps (they don’t have a pinched waste though), hoverflies are most definitely a FRIEND and should be wholeheartedly encouraged by anybody hoping to garden organically.
Their larvae are voracious devourers of aphids (greenfly, blackfly) but they can easily be mistaken for little caterpillars if you’ve never seen them before.
Known as beneficial insects, hoverfly can be encouraged into gardens by planting flowers that they are attracted to. These would include dill, borage, coriander, lavender, nasturtiums, poached egg plant, phacelia and calendula (pot marigolds) to name but a few.
So next time an insect buzzes around you, don’t automatically swat it out of the way. Take a few seconds to have a look and see if you can identify it.

Note: Insecticidal soaps don’t discriminate…. they will kill beneficial larvea too.

St Patrick’s Day – Gardening, Parades & Potato Cake Recipe

Posted on by
Reply



Scout group charging down the main street!

 Determined to take a day off, the holiday started well with a long lay in, mug of tea and a copy of Gardeners World. Unusually, and totally out of character, the children were all up and dressed in their scout uniforms (waiting for the local parade to start at 3.00pm) by the time I got up. It was 10.30am and a gloriously sunny St Patrick’s morning.

After a couple of free overseas mobile phone calls (thank you Vodaphone), I left the bacon to soak and headed out to the garden. The front flower beds are always the last to receive attention, with all work usually centred around the veggy beds.

However, feeling inspired by my earlier reading, I attacked the docks, dandelions and little tingly nettles with enthusiasm, imagining the scents and colours that will hopefully fill the garden in a few months time.

As Mr G can attest, gardening often gets in the way of mealtimes, but I tore myself away from the weeding, and with our middle daughter as a willing helper started to prepare the St Patrick Day’s lunch.

Freshly picked today


Even though Mr G was away for the day we’d planned a traditional lunch. Bacon accompanied by home grown parsnips, kale, a few of the remaining swedes, and some french beans that were frozen last summer would all be on the menu, leaving carrots and potatoes to prepare from the shop bought veg.

I won’t harp on about boiling bacon and peeling veg, but I will share an old favourite potato cake recipe that I cook whenever friends of family visit from the UK, or on a special day like today. It’s a handy recipe to have up your sleeve too for those annoying times when you only have a few spuds left but have to feed a big crowd.


Potato Cakes

Potato Cake Recipe (feeds 4-5)

Ingredients

70g butter
225 gm self raising flour
225g mashed potato, cooled
salt, pepper
a little milk

Method

Preheat the oven to 225oC. Sieve the flour into a bowl, then add the butter, rubbing it in. Add the mashed potato and seasoning and mix together. Add enough milk to bring the mixture together and make a dough.

Roll out the dough on a floured board, place on a greased baking tray, marking it in triangles and place in the oven for about 25 minutes.

I also made a mustard seed sauce to accompany the bacon but didn’t measure the ingredients, so I’m guessing to a certain degree. There’s just about enough here for two portions as the flavour’s are a bit too strong for the children!

Potato Dough

Mustard Seed Sauce

Pour 3 ladles of the bacon cooking liquer into a saucepan and boil until it is reduced by about half. Add half a carton of creme fresh and cook for about 10 minutes. Add a teaspoon of mustard seeds and a small knob of butter to taste.

Sadly, as also happens regularly in this house, the yummy dinner was placed on the table 10 minutes before we were due to leave for the parade. It’s always such a rush here! The good news was that we had a pudding to look forward to when we returned - strawberry and rhubarb crumble that Granny and middle daughter made and froze last summer. Numumumum!

Happy St Patrick’s Day