Info, news & debate

Soil management





Composting: explaining the carbon-nitrogen ratio

| 0

If you read much about composting, you’ll soon come across the terms carbon:nitrogen ratio (often shortened to C:N ratio). Everything you put in your compost has a different C:N ratio. Materials such as grass and manure, known as ‘greens’, have a higher level of nitrogen, and ‘brown’ materials, such as paper, have a higher level

Read more about Composting: explaining the carbon-nitrogen ratio




Human composting diagram

Pushing up the veggies: human composting, coming to an end-of-life facility near you soon

| 2

Natural organic reduction, a technique for turning human remains into “soft, beautiful soil” is being billed by its American developers, Recompose, as the greenest of green funerary practices. A licence was granted in March 2019 by Washington State and the company hopes to open for business in 2021.

Read more about Pushing up the veggies: human composting, coming to an end-of-life facility near you soon







Vital foreign labour in action: Romanian workers harvest the grape crop in an English vineyard in Sussex.

Should we be reliant on cheap foreign labour to work on our farms, or is there a better way to feed ourselves?

| 9

Recently The Guardian ran an article by John Harris called “They say after Brexit there’ll be food rotting in the fields. It’s already started.” To summarise, John is saying Brexit has made the UK look an unfriendly place to our European neighbours and with the increasing financial fortunes of eastern European nations, farm workers are

Read more about Should we be reliant on cheap foreign labour to work on our farms, or is there a better way to feed ourselves?




Strawberries in a Chinese solar greenhouse

A tale of two greenhouses: in praise of the solar greenhouse

| 7

Asked to describe the average greenhouse, many readers might picture a mainly glass structure. There is, however, an alternative which offers even greater growing potential across the seasons with far less energy consumption: the solar greenhouse. Particularly popular in China since the late 1970s, solar greenhouses make use of passive solar energy to retain the

Read more about A tale of two greenhouses: in praise of the solar greenhouse