The Garden Jungle Quotes

“much of the peat sold in garden centres is now imported from other countries, notably from Ireland, Estonia, Latvia and Finland. Estonia is a wild and unspoiled country where bears and wolves still roam, and it is sad to reflect that great chunks of it are now being dug up so that we can grow begonias.”
― Dave Goulson, The Garden Jungle

“There is a popular misconception that native flowers are 'weeds', but of course a weed is just a plant growing where the gardener doesn't want it to be.”
― Dave Goulson, The Garden Jungle: or Gardening to Save the Planet

“You might think this messy shambles couldn't possibly make any significant contribution to feeding the world, but you would be wrong. Allotments can be surprisingly productive. In fact studies by the Royal Horticultural Society and Which? magazine, which accord with historical records of food production during the world wars, suggest that a competent allotment holder or gardener can get yields between thirty-one and forty tonnes per hectare. To put this into context, a farmer gets about three and a half tonnes of oilseed rape or eight tonnes of wheat per year from every hectare of land, and will apply about twenty different pesticides plus fertilizers to achieve this. Thus an allotment holder or gardener can grow between four and eleven times the weight of produce that one might get from an intensively farmed arable field...Bear in mind also that only one-third of the UK wheat crop is good enough for human consumption, the remainder going for livestock feed. In contrast, 100 per cent of the allotment food is available for humans to eat.”
― Dave Goulson, The Garden Jungle: or Gardening to Save the Planet

“We are all complicit, and farmer-bashing is not going to help. We need farmers, more than any other profession. If lawyers, politicians, bankers, university academics or salesmen were to somehow disappear tomorrow, I think the world would muddle through pretty well. Some things might even get better. But if farmers were to vanish, most of us would be dead within a year.”
― Dave Goulson, The Garden Jungle