Your Questions About Gardening

GardenersCardiff answers:

Growing your own vegetables.

* You can grow them organically without pesticides and chemical weed killers.
* you can make compost to make your soil richer (which uses up leftover vegs and fruits, plus weeds and even pet manure, and the stalks / plant material from dead vegetable plants, instead of sending all that stuff to a landfill)
* you can use “second hand water” from your washing machine / rain barrels / doing dishes
* you can grow them without using heavy machinery that uses up fossil fuels
* they’re local, so you don’t have to use energy or resources to ship them, package them, clean them or resell them in a grocery store with artificial light and cooling systems

The next best option would be to go to an organic food cooperative, but those vegetables still have to be shipped, packaged, cleaned and re-sold.

Think globally, act locally – right?

GardenersCardiff answers:

The trouble with saving seeds from store bought fruit and veggies is that most of them these days are hybrids, or from grafts. And of course, all vegetables don’t have seeds. The seeds will grow a plant/tree, but the plant probably won’t produce, or if it does the fruit will be inferior. If you want to give it a try, make sure the product is thoroughly ripe. If not, the seeds won’t be mature enough to be viable. Different methods of recovering the seeds from different fruits have been devised, but in most cases you can simply hand pick seeds, dry them in a cool, low humidity location and store them in paper bags, again in a cool dry place, until you are ready to plant them. There are dozens of online articles and sites specific to seed saving for about any fruit and veggie you can think of.

GardenersCardiff answers:

Grow bags and an automatic watering system. You can get all the stuff you need at any decent garden centre.