Garden ER’s Guest Blog Dr Alan Rae
I hope you enjoyed watching the final episode of Garden ER, and the series as a whole. It will be sadly missed until the next series come back to our screens. For the Garden ER blog, we are requesting for guest bloggers to be featured on here to help give the public an insight into gardening. It could be anything gardening related from hints and tips to the best show garden that they have visited.
So without further a do, I would like to introduce to you our last Guest Blogger: Dr Alan Rae. He is the Chairman of Fletching Glasshouses in Newick, Sussex which grows organic vegetables for the local market and sells plants and gardening items online. Once upon a time he was a plant scientist. His blogs can be found at The Intelligent Garden and NFUonline.
Hope you enjoy 
Edible Gardens Everywhere:
As organic growers ourselves, we often wonder where the public’s head is when it comes to food production. I’ve generally found that the best way of finding out is to interact with them – either at a farmer’s market or at a show.
One thing I’ve noticed is that there is a continuing move towards re adoption of organic techniques like biological control of pests and the use of more organic manures to maintain soil structure amongst some of the mainstream field vegetable producers.
Having spent a week on our stand at RHS Hampton Court I also spotted a parallel steady drift towards a more integrated approach to gardening amongst individual gardeners. One of the show gardens and at least 3 or 4 of the small gardens were focused on the “potager” approach to growing vegetables as ornamentals and integrating food production with the flower beds.
You see quite a lot of this on our local garden food trails like this one here.
At Hampton Court as well as a complete Grow Your Own tent with some smashing displays, the main RHS exhibit was “The Edible Garden” which was a massive display covering seven or eight different areas of gardening.
In some ways it was a pastiche of how the public imagined the 50s to be – with a man in a weskit and stilts pretending to pick hops, an old fergie in an apple orchard and exhibits about bee-keeping, a duck pond and a lavender still.
More practically it also showed a model veg garden with a polytunnel for growing peppers and tomatoes and a selection of mega cabbages in raised beds to rival Findhorn in its pomp. Plus some great examples of integrated borders like this one.
It’s definitely striking some kind of a chord with the public. On the farmer’s markets sales are down at this time of year because the people who want fresh produce have got their own gardens kicking in.
There’s a real hunger for knowledge about how people can produce their own stuff – these displays answer the call.
To see the RHS promoting the self-sufficiency vision is strange but it shows the distance that the public has travelled since the Good Life vision of the 1970s. We are probably now in the situation where the public are ahead of the political classes – the RHS being more closely in touch with its constituents than the average MP.
Given the effects that water and mineral fertiliser costs may have on the ability of currently cheap producer areas people are probably wise to start thinking about growing some food themselves – while integrating it into the garden visually.
I think the exhibits at the Hampton Court Show plus what we see in gardens locally show that the public are steadily moving in that direction.
We would just like to say a big thankyou to Dr Rae for helping us by writing a guest blog and we hope you enjoyed reading it as much as we did Please feel free to let us know what you thought of it and if you would like to be featured on our blog!
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(PLEASE BE ADVISED THAT THIS PROGRAMME HAS NOW FINISHED!)
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