I’ve often considered carrots an uninspiring vegetable, always served with chops, beans and potatoes, often served in salads, sometimes added to hearty winter vegetable soups. Carrots are in season for the most part of the year in a Mediterranean climate and can easily be taken for granted or overlooked, considered boring, or not worth growing because they never seem to be very expensive. We always seem to have carrots in the fridge and when we don’t we automatically buy more. According to the World Carrot Museum (yes you read correctly, there is a group of people dedicated to preserving the history and…

If you are anything like me, you are already planning which fruit trees you will buy when the bare rooted trees are in stock at your local nursery, or you are scouring the catalogues or online stores to find just the right variety for your spot. Knowing how to calculate your chill hours will make selecting the right tree even easier. Chill Hours is a calculation of how much time your fruit trees spend below 7 deg C per year. Knowing how many chill hours you get in your location each year will help you to choose the right sorts…

Anybody who has ever cared for a garden knows about weeds. They’ve seen them, cursed them, pulled them out and squashed them. Some gardeners have even sprayed them. But weeds can be your friend in many ways. They are great indicators of what your soil is like. Bare soil left to its own devices will attract the pioneer weeds – the ones that establish first and can survive on whatever the soil provides and what ever rainfall you receive. Some weeds have strong tap roots to go down deep and plant themselves firmly in the terra rossa. Although these can…

There are so many reasons to grow your own food. Firstly, it is superior to produce found in a supermarket and can give you so many other benefits you just can’t get by going to the supermarket.  Let’s look at some of the reasons I started to grow my own food and perhaps you will be able to identify with some of these. 1. Flavour Firstly I wasn’t satisfied with the flavour of things I bought in the shop. A lot of fruit and vegetable varieties have been bred to be easily transported, to be stored for long periods of…