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Growing Food You Can’t Buy in the Supermarket

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  Growing Food You Can’t Buy in the Supermarket “I Can’t Buy Gooseberries in the Shops, But I Can Grow Them in My Back Garden” We often talk about growing food as if it is mainly about saving money. People ask whether a packet of seeds is cheaper than a bag of carrots, or whether growing potatoes in a tub really makes financial sense once you have bought the compost, the container, the fertiliser and the inevitable “essential” gardening tool that you absolutely did not go outside intending to buy. But growing food is not only about money. It is about freshness. It is about flavour. It is about resilience. It is about learning how nature works by getting your hands dirty rather than merely reading about it. And, perhaps most importantly, it is about growing things that supermarkets either do not sell, cannot sell well, or have quietly decided are too awkward, too seasonal, too delicate or too old-fashioned to bother with. For me, gooseberries are the perfect example. I can walk arou...
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Why Dark Skies Matter More Than You Think

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  Why Dark Skies Matter More Than You Think We Have Forgotten What Darkness Looks Like “We have become so used to bright nights that many people have forgotten what darkness looks like. Many of my students have never really seen the stars — and none of them have seen the Milky Way.” That is a sad sentence to write. For most of human history, the night sky was not something special you had to travel to see. It was simply there. People navigated by it, told stories about it, measured time by it and wondered about their place in the universe because of it. Today, for many people, especially those living in towns and cities, the night sky has been replaced by an orange-grey glow, a few brave stars and perhaps the Moon if the clouds and streetlights allow. We often talk about pollution as something we can smell, breathe, drink or see floating down a river. Light pollution is more subtle. It does not stain your hands. It does not pile up in a bin bag. It does not smell like diesel or blo...
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The Forgotten Environmental Cost of Fast Fashion

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  The Forgotten Environmental Cost of Fast Fashion Why the Cheapest T-Shirt May Be the Most Expensive One We Own “The cheapest T-shirt often turns out to be the most expensive for the environment.” We talk a lot about cars, heating, electricity, flights and plastic bottles when we discuss the environment. Quite right too. They all matter. But there is another environmental issue hiding in plain sight, often hanging quietly in the wardrobe, folded in a drawer, or sitting in a carrier bag waiting to be returned because it did not look quite as good at home as it did online. Clothing. Fashion is personal. It is emotional. It is about identity, confidence, comfort and sometimes pretending that the shirt still fits because “it must have shrunk in the wash”. But behind every garment is a chain of resources: land, water, oil, dyes, energy, transport, labour, packaging and eventually waste. Fast fashion has made clothes cheaper, quicker and easier to buy than ever before. That sounds wonde...
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Can Your Garden Help Prevent Flooding? A Thousand Litres of Rain: Problem or Resource?

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  Can Your Garden Help Prevent Flooding? A Thousand Litres of Rain: Problem or Resource? A thousand litres of rain falling on your property is either a problem or a resource. The choice is often ours. That may sound dramatic, but anyone who has watched water rush down a driveway, bounce off paving slabs, fill a drain, and then disappear towards an already overloaded road gully will know exactly what I mean. Most people think flood prevention is something councils do with big drains, concrete channels, warning signs, pumps, flood barriers and occasionally a man in a high-vis jacket looking worried beside a swollen river. But there is another side to flood prevention, and it is much closer to home. It is the garden. Not the grand National Trust sort of garden with sweeping lawns, elegant ponds and someone called Nigel pruning roses with terrifying confidence. I mean ordinary gardens: front gardens, back gardens, school gardens, patios, driveways, borders, lawns, vegetable patches, an...
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The Repair Revolution: Why Learning to Fix Things Is a Green Superpower

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  The Repair Revolution: Why Learning to Fix Things Is a Green Superpower “The greenest washing machine is often the one you already own.” We are very good at talking about recycling. We have recycling bins, recycling labels, recycling collections, recycling symbols and, occasionally, recycling confusion when nobody can decide whether a yoghurt pot lid belongs in the blue bin, the green bin, the food caddy or a small museum of modern plastic anxiety. But before recycling comes something much more powerful. Repair. Many environmental problems do not begin when something reaches the bin. They begin much earlier, at the moment we decide that a perfectly useful object is no longer worth the effort. A shirt loses a button. A toaster stops working. A garden tool becomes blunt. A chair leg wobbles. A boat fitting comes loose. A piece of science equipment starts behaving like a sulky teenager. And too often, the modern answer is: “Throw it away and buy another one.” That may be convenient,...
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