Having succumbed to the standard festival phone battery difficulties, I had no camera to take photos at the talk. I did however manage to grab some photos of the permaculture display which was in the vicinity of the green room. I’ve included some photos I took below.

First is the Green Room which had a pretty cool grass-clod-on-a-stick display outside:

In the permaculture area, there was a tyre-based potato barrel. Note how you can pile up the tyres as you go similar to a technique I described before:

There was also what they called a “herb spiral” consisting of old tins arranged in a vertical spiral to maximize space usage. It was pretty impressive and in practice they used a lot more than just herbs:

They also had a star-shaped bed of vegetables. There were brassicas (kale etc.):

…potatoes:

…alliums (onion-type things to you and me!):

…and here is the whole star:

There was also a compost heap on display. It was actually quite effective in showing passers-by the variety of things that can go into compost. I immediately regretted throwing my banana peel in a standard rubbish bin earlier that morning:

There were also chard and beetroot:

…and some tomato and basil plants. I don’t know how realistic is is to have these growing outside in Ireland but the point was to demonstrate companion planting. If memory serves I think they also suggested that the tomatoes would taste better grown in the vicinity of basil. I remain sceptical!

And lastly, here is a bed of mixed herbs:

All in all, a great demonstration accompanied by clear and useful information on placards. Hopefully it has people thinking about how easy it is to grow food themselves and the variety of options available to them. Did anyone else stumble upon this display?

As part of a series of talks on sustainability in the Green Room in the Body and Soul area I’ll be talking about my experiences growing my own food over the past year at 12 o’clock on Saturday and Sunday.  For those of you who haven’t been there before, the Body and Soul area is really cool, with lots of interesting cultural activities, great food, diverse music and art installations.

I’m really looking forward to it, if a tad nervous.  I can’t wait to see the reaction we get.  If anyone is heading to the Picnic do drop by the Green Room at 12 o’clock on Saturday and say hi.  Everyone at the talk will get some free seeds and if they’re lucky get a carrot grown on my balcony too!

If for whatever reason you can’t catch me at the Green Room, I can be found rocking out at Flock of Seagulls.  See you there!

The YouTube solution is basically to place a dish of one part water, one part light coloured vinegar and a dash of detergent out to catch flies. I’m unclear on the science behind it, though I read somewhere that it is something to do with breaking the surface tension of the liquid. Another site suggested that the flies are attracted by the scent of the vinegar. In my case, I used tap water, some white wine vinegar (posh I know, but all we had) and some generic washing up liquid.

For fly paper I have some “fly stickers”, about the same surface area as the dishes, which are cleverly designed to look like a flower.

I put one sticker beside a vinegar dish outside and did the same at the same spot inside. Catching flies outside is a bit futile but I thought it would make for a good comparison. After two weeks here are the results (for insects greater in length than about 1 mm):

As you can see, inside (where the real problem is ) there is no difference between the two methods, with the sticker performing marginally better.

What was surprising to me was that in the dish outside with only 12 flies, there were also hundreds (literally) of insects about 1mm or smaller. These were largely absent from the inside dish. There was also a much more diverse selection of insects in the outside dish: (outside top, inside bottom)

I guess this is a tribute to the insect biodiversity out on the balcony! I was once under the impression that container gardening leaves you less likely to experience insects but this summer we have noticed bees, wasps, flea beetles, earwigs, centipedes, caterpillars, mites and many types of fly on the balcony to name a few.

As regards the experiment, I don’t think that there is any real difference between the two methods, but they both seem to do a reasonable job. I would say whichever is most convenient or cheapest is probably the best. I would also like to add that our fly problem is not as bad as it was last year so it might be worth investigating again when we have a really bad infestation. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

There are three other common methods I didn’t consider that are worth a mention:

Honey: A lot of people on the Internet use honey to catch flies. I guess this would have a similar effect to the sticker, although perhaps the flies would be attracted by the sugary substance.

Venus Fly Trap: While entertaining, fly traps don’t have a very high insect turnover. I had one for a number of years, which is now sadly in carnivorous plant heaven, and even in its heyday it would struggle to consume more than about one insect a month.

A Dish of Water: This probably won’t catch any insects, but I just wanted to preempt anyone who came on and commented that I should have used a proper control!