You see you can get everything right - you can choose the right space, have the best quality potting mix, and what's more, a plant in the peak of its season - but time and time again it is water that derails the entire operation; more specifically, people not able to find the time to water their plants.

Wicking beds use the age old idea of capillary action to draw moisture through the soil from a reservoir below. That way plants then decide when to use water and how much to use. After initial surface watering to get them set up, the gardeners' ongoing challenge (and a much more manageable one) is to keep the reservoir topped up. This becomes a fortnightly job, rather than a daily job where the process normally falls over. 

A few years ago we teamed up with Glowpear and our friends at Taxi Dining Room to embark on a 3-month self-watering challenge where we tested just what can be grown in a single unit, over the peak of summer. Most people assume that come summer, starting a veggie patch is gardening insanity. This challenge was designed to prove otherwise.

Self-Watering Systems in our shop.

Learn more about self-watering beds in another post Wicking Beds 101

Related videos:

Self-Watering Challenge: Finale

Self-Watering Challenge: Month 3

Self-Watering Challenge: Month 2

Music:
"La Fata Morgana (con Lucrecia Dalt)
Los Amparito
losamparito.bandcamp.com

Foodies and gardeners alike often find coriander to be among the most polarising plants in the patch, eliciting equally passionate responses of both love and hatred. While there is nothing that we can offer to change your taste, gardening haters may need to accept some responsibility. Rather than pointing the finger, it may be time to address our own shortcomings.

Coriander can sometimes feel like a tumultuous relationship that you keep going back to. But have you ever considered that maybe coriander is not the difficult partner we make it out to be, rather it always seems to be dating absolute duds? That’s right, we need to stop trying to change coriander, and rather try to understand it better.

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Root to Bloom 

To think of coriander as a leaf is to think of a pig as bacon; it’s only one of its many parts. This Homer Simpson form of tunnel vision (mmm, bacon) means we miss out on all the other delicious parts of plants that have only recently come to be regarded as waste. We are growing lots of perfectly edible food, then wasting most of it. Most disturbingly, the practice is so ingrained in us, that we are doing it in our gardens too.

Our perspective of what is food and what is waste is perhaps a by-product of a farming industry that for too long has been striving for efficiency in business rather than the efficient use of our resources. Plants that are grown exclusively for their fruit, foliage or seeds typically have many more edible parts. There are some exceptions, such as the nightshade family, which has poisonous flowers and foliage, but most plants, be it coriander, dill, peas or nasturtiums, are full of food, from the root all the way to the bloom.

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While more than three thousand varieties of the tomato exist, most of us would only be accustomed to a bare few. And dishearteningly, that few mostly don

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It’s not often that a change in colour changes a leaf vegetable, but such is the case when green mizuna turns red. In its regular green, Mizuna is alright; with a nice texture and subtle bitterness, it is a solid leafy green. But it’s when it changes into red that this vegetable really lights up.

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