The vegan-organic garden ideally has a diversity of plants, birds, small animals, insects, fungi, bacteria and other micro-organisms…

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Dave of Darlington

You are never too old to learn, they say. Thank goodness for that! Fortunately we are continually getting new insights and challenges, which sometimes make us realise that what we always believed in is wrong. For example, for many years I was committed to the idea that only annual plants could yield enough to be suitable for use as agricultural crops. Even as recently as 1998 I was writing that, from the point of view of feeding the world’s human population, annual crops were better than perennials.1 Now I must eat my words and own up to having been mistaken. I am now convinced that annual crop production is unsustainable, even when done organically, and that we must look to perennial plants for our nourishment in the years to come.

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By Ita West.

I read once that there are “Angels of Nature” and I think that they try to play small tricks on me when the mood takes them. There we were, just coping with growing vegetables and fruit without animal manure and letting the flowerbeds survive the best they could, when a friend dropped me in seven floribunda roses, which she’d had to move for an extension to her house. Roses to me are synonymous with horse manure. When I was growing up in the Dublin suburbs neighbours would almost come to fisticuffs as to who would be able to collect the horse manure on the road. When a rider went by, they all rushed out with their shovels/spades, whatever was handy. In those days a fair amount of the “travelling community” used horse drawn vehicles so if you looked you could usually find some… but we’d committed ourselves to not using animal manure so what were we going to grow these roses in?

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