Death From Above

People who have kept up with the saga of us, our landlord and all manner of dubious prospective tenants for the flats above us via Twitter will be aware of this. Cutting a very long story short, we have some dodgy builders in the upstairs flat who will think nothing of working from 7:45am to 9:00pm, hammering loudly and incessantly the whole time. They may well be putting in internal walls (illegally, as it's a listed building and no planning permission has been sought), and they're sticking a new back door on at the top of the fire escape.

On Thursday they dropped their drill. Into Jurassic Park. Hubster saw one of them come down the steps, reach in and pick it up, and go back upstairs. Then he went outside to check on my plants.


That used to be Euphorbia characias "Black Pearl". I doubt it is anymore. There are a few things about which I am incredibly protective. My family, my gecko, my students, and my plants. Not only did the builder smash the plant, but he did not own up to it. If he had tapped on the back door (which is almost always open when we're in) and said "I'm really sorry, I dropped the drill and it smashed the plant" then we could have had a civil conversation about it.

But ask any one of my students, and they'll say that not owning up to things is one way to really piss me off. So by the time I had got together the pieces, I was seething with rage. I absolutely screamed at the builders, all of whom denied it, until one of them said he'd dropped the drill "so I think maybe it was me". YOU THINK??? Hubster, by this point, was more concerned for the safety of the builders than he was for my distress.

Eventually they asked me how much it was, and I plucked £15 out of the air. Perhaps a little more than it would normally cost from a garden centre, but I'm happy enough to factor in a replacement pot, compost and the several stiff margaritas I needed to calm down. However, I'd bought it from Burncoose Nurseries on holiday in Cornwall this year, so if that proved to be the only place selling it then delivery charges alone would be £13. I don't think "Black Pearl" is too unusual a variety, but it's not really the right time of year to buy euphorbias as they're all finishing up their flowering (I deadheaded "Robbiae" today). The plant itself may not be lost - I shall repot it and put it in the ICU to see if I can breathe some life back into it.

One thing I did manage to impress on them is that they were jolly lucky the drill did not fall a couple of feet in either direction. Whilst the guy who appeared to be in charge seemed to have more money on him than we have in our bank account, I don't think they'd appreciate replacing what is now a 1.5m tall Wollemia nobilis, or Encephalartos princeps (could I even get another one of them?). And I doubt replacing my £300 fountain is in their budget either.

Jamie Oliver And Peat-Based Compost

I enjoy a good Jamie Oliver-bashing, I do. I restrained myself when his Dream School took over the airwaves for all too long, but many others didn't. Not content with trying to tell me how to teach "kidz wot da system's let dahn innit", he now wants to tell me how to grow my own vegetables, and he wants me to use his compost to do so.


Firstly it's a bit over-priced, compared to what I pay for New Horizon at the garden centre. With any luck it'll simply attract the idiots at the bottom of the economic food chain in that case. But worse is the composition of the compost:


That's well over 50% (maybe getting on for 60%) peat in the fruit and vegetable growbag.


Same with the potato compost. At a time when the pressure should be (and is?) on compost manufacturers to reduce the amount of peat in their products, Jamie Oliver goes right in with more than 50% peat.

Why do I have a problem with this? Well, firstly, I'm a leftie pinko tree-hugger. I like our unique habitats. I like the endemic species of the highland and lowland peat bogs. I'd quite like them to hang around for a few million years more, until they naturally die out. I like how peat bogs are excellent carbon sinks, and how we'd be even more screwed in terms of anthropogenic global warming than we already are. Read Mark Diacono's piece for the Telegraph. See what Mr Corduroy himself, Monty Don was saying back in 2002:

Every time you use a peat-based compost in the garden, you are deliberately participating in the destruction of a non-renewable environment that sustains some of our most beautiful plant and animal life. No garden on this earth is worth that.

Whatever you think about his presenting of Gardeners' World, there is no doubt that Monty has no trouble with the yield of crops from his kitchen garden. Perhaps it's all the different compost recipes Monty uses for the plants with specific requirements.

Which brings me to my second point: peat-free composts are outperforming peat-based composts. They first did so in 2010, when Which? published their annual compost survey. They did so again this year, according to Hort Week, including my favourite, New Horizon. When I don't use my own compost, I buy a couple of bags of New Horizon. Does my garden look like it's suffering for the lack of peat?


Homebase have really disappointed in this regard. A few years ago they published a paper outlining their commitment to reducing peat in their compost sales. Their target was:

To ensure that by the end of 2009, 90% (by volume) of the growing media and soil conditioners sold by Homebase are peat free.

How can they possibly still aim for that target given that they're selling Jamie Oliver's peat-based compost? I note that there was no peat-related target on the 2009 corporate responsibility report, but it returned in the 2009/2010 targets:

Achieve at least 60% peat-free growing media by end 2009/10 and at least 65% by end 2010/11

Well, that's a bit of back-peddling and a half. It's also not clear whether this is by volume sold, by number of products available, or indeed by popularity contest. I'd love to know how Homebase are squaring their targets with their introduction of a new high peat content product, but this certainly discourages me from shopping there full stop (we were only there to buy a new toilet seat - I cannot remember when I last bought gardening products from there).

And in the meantime, perhaps Jamie Oliver could stop trying to tell me how to teach and how to garden? I promise, that if he goes back to just cooking stuff, I won't tell him how to do it properly.

Bastard Lives

I truly thought that Bastard the Cycad had carked it over the winter. All his fronds were yellow and crispy, and he looked very sorry for himself. But you should never write off a cycad, so he was moved to the ICU and put in a bucket of water. A few weeks ago, there were signs of life:


Two weeks later, we are well and truly in a flush!


That's probably a good 3cm in 15 days. He's in a pretty sunny spot now, and he's still sitting in a bucket of water. I'm not moving him until the fronds have fully formed, as movement would result in some twisting of the fronds. I really must investigate the physiology of this more. Angiosperms grow to the light, but conifers don't seem to have much of a phototropic response - I didn't need to turn my Sequoia seedlings on the windowsill. I don't know whether conifers aetiolate either (I've seen it in cycads, ferns and of course angiosperms).

It looks like I might get as many as half a dozen fronds off Bastard, so I will try to post regular updates on his progress.

Wordless Wednesday: Hail Damage