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The Alternative Kitchen Garden podcast, produced and presented by Emma Cooper, is all about growing edible and useful plants in an environmentally-friendly way. It is completely free to download and listen to.

Grow Dome
My Grow Dome isn’t quite in the same league as Biosphere 2!

This week I’m doing a bit of armchair gardening, reading through ‘Life Under Glass: The Inside Story of Biosphere 2’ (ISBN 978-1882428076), the story of the first Biosphere 2 mission in Arizona in the 1990s.

If you find the Biosphere 2 story interesting, there are two more books available on the subject. ‘The Human Experiment’ (ISBN 978-1560257752) tells you more about the day-to-day lives of the 8 people locked up together for two years; ‘Eating in: From the Field to the Kitchen in Biosphere 2’ (ISBN 978-1882428045) is the cookbook written by the team captain.

DIY sprouting jar
DIY sprouting jar

There’s the first episode of a new feature – AKG Sprouts – for younger gardeners, all about making your own sprouting jar so you can grow your own beansprouts indoors while the weather is still cold outside. For more information on sprouting seeds, go back and listen to one of the really early episodes – episode 4 was about growing indoor salads.

And there’s the usual run down of what I’ve been doing in my garden, the emails you’ve sent in and what’s been going on in the gardening world. You can read my piece on the problems of chitting potatoes on the Guardian Gardening blog.

There’s a programme on permaculture on BBC 2 this Friday – A Farm For The Future – and you should be able to watch that on the iPlayer later if you miss it.

And keep your eyes open for a new series coming to BBC 2 soon, called Grow Your Own Drugs. Air dates are still to be confirmed.

AKG listener Peter has been making his own grow lights, using an online calculator to work out how many LEDs he needs; he’s also made a rocket stove to use on his allotment. And Lisa has been contemplating making her own solar heater.

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The Alternative Kitchen Garden podcast is released in good faith with Creative Commons BY-NC-ND terms. You are free (and encouraged) to share, copy, distribute and transmit the podcast episodes providing you attribute them to Emma Cooper, don't use the episodes for commercial purposes and don't modify the episodes.For a full explanation of the licence, please see the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND licence details.