Author: Sick Veg

Food for the Brain

Post author By Sick Veg
Post date March 7, 2023

I’ve been working on an advert for the excellent Food for the Brain organisation. My most substantial contribution in the film, beyond flying stuff around in an attractive way, came in conceiving and devising the end sequence with its Pauling badge; pulling back to see multiples of it pinned on many different people.

^{Music: “Lara’s Heart” courtesy of Pandit Pam Pam.}

Food for the Brain, which has thus far concerned itself primarily with dementia, is now under the umbrella of a larger group of teams that are united behind Linus Pauling’s conjecture that “Optimum Nutrition is the future of medicine.” In due course the badges will refect the diversity of the other teams in the group. The group’s idea is that “Citizen Scientists” will be able to provide health data to the parent organisations and thereby help the scientific cause.

Pauling, twice winner of the Nobel prize, is a hero of mine and of Food for the Brain supremo Patrick Holford’s. Linus gave Patrick his blessing for the latter’s Optimim Nutrition Institute. Pauling had a starring role in my Vitamin C film which, although it felt like yesterday that I made it, is now six years old.

Community Growing Practice Urban

Guerrilla Camellia

Post author By Sick Veg
Post date March 6, 2023

^{How it looked freshly planted in 2002.}

I planted this Japanese Camellia in the leisure centre flowerbeds in 2002. It was a gift from my father-in-law which I didn’t have a pot large enough for. For many years it was dwarfed by the trees and bushes around it. I was sure I was going to be rumbled and the council were going to cut it down. That never happened thankfully. In the intervening years I’ve composted around its base occasionally.

These days, twenty one years later, it’s absolutely massive. It has really thrived. And this time of year, at the end of February, it flowers. It’s very pretty though sadly the petals go brown and it starts to look a right mess. Requires me to dead-head it.

The Monkey Puzzle Tree I planted at the same time didn’t fare so well. Where I put it it had almost no light and it got choked by other hardier bushes. It looked pretty terrible by the time it was cut down.

Ecology Growing Urban

Winnowing Limanthes

Post author By Sick Veg
Post date March 5, 2023

Growing veg on my roof garden is only meaningful up to a certain point. You couldn’t pretend it was a substantial amount of food or that it was making a dent in your shopping bill. It’s for laughs really. To that end I like to plant to a lot of flowers with the focus on ones which the bugs like. And they love Limanthes which is sometimes called poached egg plant because it has a yellow bit in the middle and a white rim. Geddit?

^{Limanthes in bloom early last summer.}

Last autumn I collected the seed of the flower and stowed them away in the dark in a jar. The Limanthes jar is here in the centre with my saved Poppy seeds and saved Borage which I also planted yesterday. Yesterday was an auspicious day to plant because it was three days before the full moon.

^{Home-grown Poppy, Limanthes, and Borage in jars.}

Because I was a bit lazy when I gathered the seed it was mixed up with a load of other shite. Twigs and stuff. So I had the opportunity to winnow it. I scrunched it all up and blew the chaff away.

Then I stuffed them in pots and marked them “LIM”. The temptation is to overplant because you’ve got so much seed. Which I probably succumbed to. Though it’s supposed to keep it’s not going to be so lively next year and you don’t want to waste it. Home-saved seed is supposed to be particularly vigorous, these little guys know the scene and they’re back for more action. We’ll see.

Food Growing Urban

Beetroot seedlings

Post author By Sick Veg
Post date March 1, 2023

^{Is this a jungle? It just came alive and took him.}

^{It’s like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how I keep from going under.}

The last frost here in London is towards the end of March. If you were to plant seeds outdoors after that point you’d have to wait a while to get a vegetable you could eat. Therefore you plant seedlings earlier indoors in the warmth, and get a head start. And then you transplant them outdoors as soon as it’s a bit warmer because a frost will kill many types of seedlings. I use some cheap LED grow lights because there’s not enough light on my window ledge. In theory it would be good to have a greenhouse but I don’t have enough space for one. Furthermore this early in the year you’d need to heat a green house somehow. I heat my study already because I work here. Therefore, on balance, I think it’s justifiable.

If you don’t have enough light the seedlings get “leggy”. The poor things are stretching themselves up higher to reach a light they perhaps assume is just out of reach; like they think they are under a pile of leaves or summat. And then they fall over. This, below, is my leggy seedlings last year – terrible. But you know they planted just fine outdoors and grew into big healthy beetroot. You just bury them and their stems a little deeper in the soil. I’m not going to have that problem this year. In fact I’m pretty happy with how they are looking.

I’m planting all my seeds in soil blocks which are like home-made chocolate brownies. You could make them just as easily squeezing the soil into a little ball and popping the seed in the top. That’s apparently how lots of native peoples do it. Maybe I’ll try that in the next batch. I plant a lot of beetroot because it’s maybe my favourite vegetable. I like to roast it. Delicious.

Ecology

Earthship

Post author By Sick Veg
Post date February 27, 2023

I’d never heard the term Earthship till this weekend when I got to visit this beauty at Stanmer Organics outside Brighton. It was warm and cocooned inside and when the rain started I was glad to be there.

Earthship architecture began development in the 1970s, when the architect Michael Reynolds set out to create a home that would fulfill three criteria. First, it would utilize sustainable architecture, and materials indigenous to the local area or recycled materials wherever possible. Second, it would rely on natural energy sources and be independent from the electrical grid. Third, it would be feasible for a person with no specialized construction skills to build. Eventually, Reynolds’s vision was transformed into the common U-shaped earth-filled tire homes seen today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship

Earthships in Europe from the Low Carbon Trust.