By Alice Marks
Using drones for agriculture. Credit: Lima Pix (Flickr)
According to experts at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, we are sitting on the edge of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This revolution builds on the third, which was the digital revolution, and is predicted to blur the lines between the physical and digital world through innovations such as artificial intelligence, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, and the use of Big Data, which will integrate digital technologies into daily lives ever more closely. It is predicted to be exponentially fast and far reaching in its scope and impact, transforming entire production, governance and management systems in an unprecedented way. Whether this will mean “promise or peril” for humanity will likely only be clear with the benefit of hindsight, but optimists hope that it offers the opportunities to improve lives and help to eradicate poverty through improved connectivity and…
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Levelling up the new cross paths was this week’s focus.
Metal posts installed and mulched underneath in readiness for fruit planting
The roof well underway on the new ‘bothy’- pic Blickling Estate
Tulip ‘Harborlight’
It’s great thinking about and perhaps drawing up your garden design ideas, but even better putting them into action. Sometimes (perhaps more often than I care to admit), I find the design process is more satisfying by going out, looking at the garden, grabbing your tools and shaping or constructing things there and then. A bit risky sometimes if you don’t fully appreciate the impact of your ‘on the spot’ decisions on the rest of the garden. However, when using a half moon, perhaps in combination with a nicely curving hose pipe as a guide, it is really satisfying seeing the new, crisply flowing line of a border with its freshly dug soil, emerging from the adjoining grass.‘In a nutshell, people who garden by the phases of the moon believe that its gravitational pull on the earth’s water (i.e. tides), has a bearing on plant growth. They never plant anything when the moon is waning in the last quarter because it’s believed that the earth’s water table is receding. After the new moon, the water table rises again and planting can resume. Farmers on the continent have been using moon phases to guide them for years, as indeed have many gardeners in the UK.
You don’t need to spend money on any special equipment. My friend directed me towards lunarium.co.uk, from which you can print out universal lunar calendars for free….’
See more of her interesting article here.Old School Gardener
I’ve now begun this year’s seed sowing; some early veg and some of the interesting varieties above, courtesy of my visit to Wallington Gardens last year and the RHS seed scheme…Looking at the germination requirements some of these are going to be a challenge!
A magnificent Kitchen Garden ‘out front’ in Drummondsville, Quebec, Canada
Anyone can enter a ‘feel-good garden, celebrating the health benefits of gardening and taking inspiration from where they live.’
By Katrin Glatzel
Credit: Alvise Forcellini, 2006
“How to feed our cities? Agriculture and rural areas in an era of urbanisation” – that was the theme of the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture, or for short, the GFFA, hosted in Berlin in mid-January. With Habitat III taking place in October in Quito, Ecuador, urbanisation features on top of the agenda of many meetings and conferences in 2016 including the Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ annual flagship report and the Committee on World Food Security (CFS). These forums are important as they draw attention to what urbanisation will mean for rural areas, the agriculture sector and those millions of smallholder farmers, upon which urban areas rely for their food supply. This is particularly important in a developing country context.
Urban and rural transformation
According to UN figures, in 1950 only about a third of the world’s population…
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Nigel Boldero aka 'Old School Gardener'
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