Roots and All - Gardening Podcast Sarah Wilson

My guest this episode is the super-talented and creative gardener and designer Brent Purtell and we’re talking about the Capitaspring Rooftop Garden in Singapore, which shares the ‘2nd highest’ building ranking along with 3 other buildings, all the same height. There are 3 gardens on the building, covering an area of 10,000 square feet and containing a mixture of ornamentals and edibles, all growing at dizzying heights. Brent was involved on the build and design side before he became the Head Gardener, overseeing the maintenance of Capitaspring Rooftop Garden. 
Dr Ian Bedford’s Bug of the Week: Stinky pigs
What We Talk About
What is the Capitaspring Rooftop Garden and where is it located? How much growing space is there in total?
The kind of things which grow in the garden
How productive a rooftop edible can forest be
How the produce is used
The challenges of growing edibles on a rooftop
Who visits the garden? 
About the Capitaspring Building & Gardens
The Capitaspring building was completed in early 2022. At 280m high, it shares the ‘2nd highest’ building ranking along with 3 other buildings, all the same height. This is due to Singapore having a cap of 280m on any new building. It's owned by Capitaland, a major property developer in Singapore and the region. Designed by BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, and Carlo Ratti, it is very much a flagship building for the company and Singapore in general, with the relatively unique use of planting throughout the building. Current tenants are the big investment house JPMorgan, for example. 
An article about the building
Within the tower are three restaurants. These are:
‘Sol and Luna’ on level 17 - a casual latin inspired theme
‘Kaarla’ on level 51 - Fine dining coastal Australian
‘Oumi’ on level 51 - Fine dining Japanese
Originally there was no concept of a ‘food forest’ or similar from the architects, and indeed, the chef's garden only takes up 50% of the overall rooftop space, with the other 50% planted in typical ornamental, low maintenance fashion. Rather, the addition of the edible section came from 1 Group, who reached out to a local company, Edible Garden City Pte Ltd to help with the design and installation.
www.ediblegardencity.com
Edible Garden City was started in 2012 with the aim of ‘helping Singaporeans grow their own food’. It has 3 pillars to the business, one being food production at 2 ‘urban farms’, which supplies produce to many restaurants through the city, including many Michelin starred. The second pillar is education, which runs workshops for the public at the aforementioned urban farm, along with onsite workshops for teachers in schools across the city. Thirdly, they design and build edible gardens, with over 260 built to date. The majority of these are gardens built within schools so that the students have access to a working garden, however many gardens have been built for commercial/hospitality venues, including the famous ParkRoyal Hotel, Marina Bay Sands etc. The remaining founder Bjorn Low, is a very recognised figure within Singapore for his environmental efforts.
The garden was opened in Feb/march 2022 and so is still quite new and produces approx 70 - 80 kgs of produce a month. For example, here is a breakdown for October:
Apple mint 200gm
Brazilian Spinach 19.6kg
Fame Flower 1kg
Lemon Balm 800gm
Lemon Myrtle 1.5kg
Moringa leaves 10gm
Kaarla Salad mix 12kg
Purslane 3.1kg
Rosemary 280gm
Thyme 50gm
Wasabina Mustard 1.5kg
Wild Water Cress 15.5kg
Mizuna Mustard 1.5kg
Komatsuna 1kg
Oyster Leaf 500gm
Wild Pepper 500gm
Pumpkin x 3
Edible flowers 2kg
And here are a few of the ways the kitchen use them all:
KAARLA CLOSED LOOP SALAD - ROOF TOP LEAVES AND FLOWERS, TIGER NUT CURD, DAIKON WESTERN PRAWNS, GERALDTON WAX, NATIVE TAMARIND ARDEN GROWN TIGER NUT ICE CREAM, TIGERNUT NOUGATINE, WHITE CHITOSE CORN, CALAMANSI JELLY, POACHED ORANGES AUSTRALIAN MARKET OYSTER, FIG LEAF AND OYSTER PLANT VI

To book-end the winter break, I’m sort of picking up where we left off by talking about a way to mark the passing of the year and the seasons and to ground yourself and your gardening endeavours in the natural patterns that govern them. My guest is Lia Leendertz, author of the annual The Almanac: A Seasonal Guide and she starts by talking about the origins of her almanac.
Dr Ian Bedford’s Bug of the Week: Winter in the veg garden
What We Talk About
The history of Lia’s Almanac
How Lia intends for people to use the Almanac throughout the year
The importance connecting with traditions, celebrations and rituals
The monthly list of gardening jobs
Gardening by the phases of the moon
Underlying themes of the Almanac; the pond and the zodiac
A discussion of Lia’s line about the month of August, “Your ancestors would be proud to see how far you have come, sipping a glass of cold wine and laughing in the sun.”
About Lia Leendertz
Lia is an award-winning garden and food writer based in Bristol. Her reinvention of the traditional rural almanac has become an annual must-have for readers eager to connect with the seasons, appreciate the outdoors and discover ways to mark and celebrate each month.
Links
The Almanac: A Seasonal Guide to 2023 by Lia Leendertz - Octopus Publishing Group, September 2022
Lia’s Website
Lia on Instagram
Lia on Twitter 
Other episodes if you liked this one:
The Wheel of the Year with Dr Rebecca Beattie
Garden Roots with Lulah Ellender
Patreon Membership

My guest this week is Dr Rebecca Beattie. Rebecca has just released a book called ‘The Wheel of the Year’, which is a look at what is happening in nature and in ourselves as the seasons move from one to the other. She suggests tools and rituals to rediscover and appreciate each seasonal festival, giving you a chance to pause, reflect and connect you to the wheel of your own life. As this is the last episode of 2022 and the winter solstice is just 2 days away, I thought this would be a perfect way to wrap up the year and to encourage you to take time to appreciate, well time, as it passes and as things shift from one state of being to another. Christmas can be a frenetic time so I hope you can take half an hour out of your schedule to sit down and listen to Rebecca and to contemplate your place in the wheel of the year.
Dr Ian Bedford’s Bug of the Week: Lycaenidae butterflies
What We Talk About
What is the wheel of the year?
The origins of the events and customs you find at the sabbats
In our secular society, are we beginning to realise the importance of connecting back to a framework that makes sense of time and our place in the world?
Useful hints for people to make sure they remember to mark the passing of seasons at appropriate times
Advantages gardeners have in terms of being connected to the wheel of the year
Our own annual wheel of the year and how this connect to those that occur in nature 
How our unsettled seasons might affect how we celebrate the sabbats
About Rebecca Beattie
Dr Rebecca Beattie is a Wiccan Priestess with a PhD in Creative Writing. Rebecca grew up on Dartmoor, which gave her an early appreciation of the power and joys of nature. She has been practising solitary witchcraft for twenty years and an initiate of the Gardnerian Wiccan tradition for fifteen. She is acclaimed for her highly informed teaching of witchcraft subjects at Treadwell’s Books in Bloomsbury. By day she is a professional in a major charity, with advanced degrees in Literature and Creative writing.
Links
The Wheel of the Year by Rebecca Beattie - Elliott & Thompson Ltd, October 2022
Catherine Heatherington Designs
Other episodes if you liked this one:
Sacred Woodlands with Simon Leadbeater
Sensory Herbalism with Karen Lawton
Patreon Membership

This week’s guest is Martyn Richards who is the Home & Garden Manager for Agriton UK, part of a large European group of companies who manufacture products to help commercial and domestic users deal with the ‘soil, crop, animal waste cycle’. Martyn contacted me to see if I would be interested in speaking to him about their bokashi composting system and I thought, yes, I would, because I didn’t really understand the process. So my first question to Martyn was, just what is bokashi? Listen now and all will be revealed…
What We Talk About
What is bokashi compost? 
How bokashi systems are different to traditional composting methods
What can you compost? Is there anything you can’t?
Do you need to add anything for the process to work?
What are Bokashi organisms? Where do they originate from?
Is it expensive to set up?
Does it work at any scale?
Does what you put in affect what comes out in terms of nutrient value?
What is Bokashi bran?
Links
Agriton’s Bokashi Brochure 
www.agriton.co.uk
Other episodes if you liked this one:
The Composting Process
Feeding Your Soil with Humanure
Patreon Membership

This week, my guest is David O’Carroll. David runs an 11 acre agroforestry learning centre in Totnes, Devon where he teaches natural farming methods, based on the techniques around Indigenous Microorganisms (IMO) and Korean Natural Farming (KNF). He focuses on building healthy soil to produce healthy plants and is both generous with his time and knowledge as he aims to share the details of his techniques to help other growers.
What We Talk About
What is Korean Natural Farming?
What is IMO? How do you make it? Why do you need it?
What is LAB? How does it help plants?
Is KNF as useful for ornamental plants as it is for edibles?
Do you need a lot of space to make the KNF preparations?
Preparations for home gardeners to try 
Links
www.ballaghbotanicals.co.uk
www.zerosoap.info 
Other episodes if you liked this one:
Mycorrhizal Fungi with Jeff Lowenfels
Garden Amendments with Nigel Palmer
Patreon Membership