FEATURE: GARDENING & ENVIRONMENT
They’re not cheap and far too many simply don’t work I’m talking about vegetable seeds. I spent more than £70 on them this season and have to say that germination rates for some can only be described as rubbish.
QUALITY CONTROL
This month our gardening and environmental expert Graham Paskett muses over the state of our rivers and the poor quality of
some branded vegetable seeds. M
any thousands of column inches of newsprint and hours of TV and radio coverage have been devoted over
recent years about the disgusting state of many of our rivers and the discharge of untreated, raw sewage into them, as a no-cost alternative to proper treatment.
When time permits I’m a keen salmon and trout fisher, so this is a subject very close to my heart. We have a family salmon fishery on the River Wye midway between Hereford and Ross-on-Wye. It has been predicted by Natural Resources Wales (NRW), who manage the river on behalf of the Environment Agency, that without action salmon could be extinct in Welsh rivers, and the Wye in England and Wales, within 20 years. And the action they propose; more research into the problem. Their inactivity beggars belief. Clearly NRW does not know what
the problem is, but many salmon fishers do. The salmon are not coming back to the river because of pollution caused by raw sewage being pumped into it and by chicken farmers dumping vast quantities of chicken manure. There is too much water abstraction by farmers when the river is low, concentrating the levels of pollution and warming the water temperature.
Too many
young salmon are being lost at sea. Although NRW clearly does not
28 DIY WEEK JUNE 2023
know what the answer is, many of us who spend time on the river do. Water company bosses need to take time off from counting how much money they take as salary, bonuses and other perks and ensure the companies they run follow existing laws about running raw sewage into river.
Chicken farmers on the banks of the river also need to follow existing law about dumping manure into the Wye. Water abstraction regulations also need to be tightened up, implemented and policed by NRW and the Environment Agency in England.
The solution to what is happening to salmon at sea is, in part, a numbers game. The higher the number of salmon that are sent out to sea, the more proportionally will return as mature, spawning salmon. There is a perfectly good fish hatchery that served the Wye at Abercynig on a tributary of the Usk near Brecon that is owned by Natural Resources Wales.
Until
they stopped it in 2015, typically 120,000 salmon fry were released each year into river to develop into parr and smolts. Since 2015 salmon numbers have spiralled downwards so that extinction is now a reality. The solution isn’t more research NRW, its action. I was fishing the Wye this month and managed to soak the sleeve of my jumper in the river. It dried up okay and I carried on wearing it. When I returned home that evening, sitting in front of the fire, opposite my wife, she looked up at me, accusingly, and said that I was giving off the most awful smell of sewage. A quick sniff identified the culprit, the formerly wet sleeve. What a filthy pong. That’s the reality of the Wye. Welsh Assembly members, please get your NRW to do something about sewage, abstraction and reopening the salmon hatchery and not waste precious time and money on yet more research.
I do know how to plant seeds and have been doing it successfully for donkey’s years but 2023 has defeated me in a number of areas. Butternut Squash (two plants), Spinach Beet (none), Aubergine (none) and Gardeners Delight tomato seed (three). These packets of seed are not cheap and were all top branded items. The runner and broad beans have been a roaring success and the courgettes are also okay but to have four staples virtually written off is appalling. I appreciate that the 2022 season was strange from a weather perspective and may have resulted in poor seed harvesting but germination rates like this are simply not acceptable. A number of strange things are happening in my garden this year but two of the most peculiar are the number of sycamore seedlings that have germinated and the arrival of a really strange and extremely high weed.
I don’t know if you can have a
Mast Year for sycamore seedlings, but we must have had several hundred thousand germinating, the majority on the lawns and were easily dealt with by the mower. But my wife and I have weeded out literally thousands – and the blighters are still coming. They are in the hanging baskets, borders, drive and even the guttering. We will have missed some and next year will find mini trees growing in various parts of the garden. Hey ho. Now, I’m a member of the ‘beanstalk generation’ born around the end of the Second World War and am 6’2” tall. About six weeks ago I discovered a small clutch of thistle like plants that towered above me. I identified them as Sow Thistles. They do pull up quite easily. Then we found them, again in small clutches, in six other locations in the garden – including the vegetable cage. We have never seen them before and have been here for 36 years. So where on earth have they come from? The garden is reasonably well cultivated and, at getting on for seven feet tall, they are pretty easy to spot. It will be interesting to see if they return in 2024 but I have been very careful not to put them on the compost heap and bagged them up for the tip. This is why gardening is always so challenging and fun.
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