Old School Garden

Today I am spending a rainy day planning next years kitchen garden. An important thing to remember when planning your vegetable garden is to ensure you practice good crop rotation. Why is that? If you rotate your crops you will help to prevent the spread of diseases and insect problems.

If you have ever grown potatoes in a new garden that used to be in sod the previous year, you may have had an issue with wireworms.  I did when I planted the first community garden bed with potatoes. I harvested the first potatoes with no issues and thought I would leave the potatoes in the soil to harvest in late July.

Wasn’t I surprised to see this on my freshly harvested potatoes that summer. Ugh, I didn’t want to look at a potato after that. I had to toss all the damaged potatoes away.  The next year I grew…

Malnutrition is pervasive, far-reaching and complex. Because of this both the immediate impacts as well as the underlying causes must be addressed simultaneously if malnutrition rates are to be reduced, warranting the need for both nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive approaches. In part one of this article we discussed the roles agriculture, livestock production and resilience building can have in improving people’s nutrition. More productive and diverse farming and reduced vulnerability to environmental and other risks can boost household nutrition. In part two we look at how gender inequality, marginalisation from society, poverty and climate change pose both threats to nutrition and how, as a result, we can fight malnutrition through building gender equality, providing social protection and mitigating climate change.

1. Gender

The theme for this year’s Africa Day for Food and Nutrition Security was “Empowering Our Women, Securing Our Food, Improving Our Nutrition,” and without question, women are central…

November 2015

The Norfolk Collections Centre covers an area a little over 800m2 and provides us with approximately 3,645m3 of storage space. We store a vast array of different objects meaning the job of collections care is no simple task. To help meet the collections care needs of these objects, we have launched an annual deep clean, the first of which took place over five days in September.

We started where the need was greatest, the roller racking in Store 1. This predominantly houses large social history objects from the Museum of Norwich’s collection. We were fortunate to secure the assistance of Norfolk Museum Service’s Teaching Museum trainees who made up the bulk of our workforce. In turn the deep clean was set up as a training exercise which enabled participants to learn new skills and gain additional knowledge.

Roller-racking in store 1

As each pallet load was brought down…

I’m very pleased to feature another fine guest post (and would welcome others), this one from Dr Ruth Cherrington.  Ruth runs the Club Historians website and is the author of Not Just Beer and Bingo: a Social History of Working Men’s Clubs. You can follow Ruth on Twitter at @CHistorians.

I wasn’t sent to Coventry: I was born there. Though I left a long time ago I regularly visit family still living there and the familiar sites of the estate where we grew up: Canley. We can take ourselves out of our childhood homes, but do they ever really fade away from our own sense of attachment and place? For me, the answer is a resounding no. I’m still very much a ‘Canley kid’ at heart after all these years.

I’ve seen many changes, of course. But the constants are clearly visible such as the strong element of working…

Malnutrition, in its various forms, is thought to affect over 2 billion people in the world and, as such, has far reaching consequences for societies, economies and livelihoods. Tackling poor nutrition is both complex and opportunistic in that there are links between nutrition and a whole other range of factors. In other words by tackling nutrition directly we may positively contribute to other developmental problems but there are also multiple ways to address undernutrition indirectly. While there is broad consensus on the need to take direct nutrition interventions such as promoting exclusive breastfeeding or biofortification of crops with micronutrients such as vitamin A or zinc, there is also an urgent need to tackle the underlying and inter-related determinants of malnutrition. The Lancet, for example, suggests that direct nutrition interventions, even if implemented at 90% coverage in high-burden countries would only reduce global stunting by 20%.

So-called nutrition-sensitive approaches are…