Food glorious food! Hot sausage and mustard! All together now… Please join us in a gastronomical feast of food and farming delights as we celebrate the start of the Year of Food and Farming. Not to mention British Food Fortnight which starts on 22^nd September.  Time to fire up your ovens and head off to your local farm shop for some fine fodder. All this talk of food is making us hungry – anyone fancy a bacon sandwich?

The line-up this week:

1. A Spot of Agri-Culture
2. Smoothie Operator – the new game from Planet Science
3. Activity of the Week: Grow your own Avocado Tree
4. Mouses at the Ready:  Pair of Whippersnappers
5. Noticeboard: FYI
6. Recommended websites of the week
7. The Winners’ Enclosure
8. Joke of the Week

The Year of Food and Farming starts this month and, as ever, Planet Science is on the ball (or should we say - farm).  Each month we will be bringing you a snapshot of what’s happening on the land. No, not literally! How many photos of sheep grazing and tractors ploughing do you think we can muster? But we do have our Essex farmer Guy Smith, author of the fabulous FREE booklet ‘Farm, Food and Countryside’ to give us a monthly update. Guy farms 400 hectares of combinable crops (wheat for bread, barley for beer and oilseeds for vegetable oil for human consumption/bio-fuels). There’s also a dairy herd and a few pigs, sheep, ducks and chickens. The farm has won awards for its conservation work. The margins around the fields are left uncropped which make them good habitats for hares to graze, sky-larks and corn buntings to nest and for barn owls to hunt. This also protects the water quality in the ditches and streams. Over two thousand trees have been planted in the last five years. Thirty different bird nesting boxes and bat boxes have been put round the farm. Looks like we’ll be finding out plenty over the next twelve months then. We look forward to hearing from Guy in a couple of weeks.

A handful of this, a dollop of that, easy on the you-know-what and one, two, three BLEND. Ye-hay a nutritious smoothie and we didn’t even have to get up from the computer. We present the new Planet Science game – Smoothie Operator. This fantastic game is stuffed with nutritious facts (or should that be ‘facts on nutrition’?) Plus there’s no end of ingredients to play around with and you get to check how healthy your recipe is. Maybe Choc Chip (chocolate, greasy chips and whole milk) is not such a good combo.  Also there’s the small matter of the fulfilling the 5-a-day promise, in this case the chips don’t seem to be counting towards it! Plus compete against other people everywhere with your creations in various different categories (see Hall of Fame).  Have fun!

Grow your own avocado tree

Don’t throw away those avocado stones, get your green fingers out and grow a tree instead. Did you know that Latin Americans wrap avocados up and give them as wedding gifts? So this will be ideal for Raoul and Conchita’s nuptials then!

You will need:

• At least one avocado stone
• Toothpicks
• A glass jar for each avocado stone
• Water
• A warm spot for your plants to grow, away from any interference
• Later you will need rich potting compost and a 25 cm diameter pot for each plant.

What to do:

1. Wash the avocado stone or stones.
2. Hold one of the stones so the pointy end is pointing upwards, and then push three toothpicks into it as you can see in the picture.
3. Fill the jar with water and put the avocado stone and toothpicks on top so that about 2 cm of the stone is in the water.
4. Do the same with your other stones, and then place the jars in your warm spot, out of direct sunlight.
5. Now keep an eye on the stones, but be very patient! You might see a root appearing in about two to six weeks, but we have known some take a year! (This is why it's best to use more than one stone.)
6. When the stem has grown about 15 cm tall, cut it back to about 7 cm.
7. When the roots are thick and there are leaves on the stem again, you can plant it in the pot. Leave the stone half exposed.
8. Water the plant well, but let it dry out between waterings.

What’s going on?

An avocado ‘stone’ is in fact a very large seed. Giving it water and warmth is a trigger for germination. If you could cut open the stone you would see that it also contains a miniature shoot (called the plumule) and a miniature root (the radicle). The rest of the space is taken up by a massive food store. When the conditions are right, the radicle breaks open the seed cover and pushes downwards to get water, and the radicle pushes upwards and grows into the stem and the leaves of the new plant. Until this plant has grown its own leaves, it gets all its nutrition from the food store inside the seed.

Make sure you look after your avocado tree. If it gets very droopy, you might not be watering it enough. Non-woody plants only stay upright if they have enough water in their cells. However, if the plant looks like it has wilted but the soil is saturated, you are watering it too much. You shouldn’t swamp the roots in water as they need oxygen as well.

If the leaves become brown and seem to fry at the tips, there is too much salt in the soil. You can remove the salt by leaching – run water into the pot for several minutes while letting it drain out of the bottom.

This experiment came from Planet Science’s Little Book of Experiments.

If you’d like more info about the humble avocado then check out the California Avocado Commission website which has information about avocados plus games, recipes, face masks and much more.

Brangelina, Madonna… don’t you know what you’re doing is soooooooo last year? Never mind adopting outside of your own culture, how about adopting out of your own species?  We can see the headlines now ‘…finalised plans to welcome their new broad bean to the family...’. Brings a tear to your eye, doesn’t it? Oh no, that must have been the onion.

Seriously though, for over thirty years Garden Organic Ryton have been campaigning to save Britain's traditional vegetable varieties, which are threatened by a combination of commercial pressures and red tape. So would you like to Adopt a Veg?  This week we have the chance for TWO lucky readers to adopt the breed of tomato known as Whippersnapper. The lucky winners will receive:

• A certificate of adoption for one year
• Background information on the adopted variety
• A gift card designed by Artist-in-Residence, Lesley Davis, with message

Plus the personal satisfaction of knowing that they are helping to keep alive part of the country's precious vegetable heritage. Sigh! British Food Fortnight on the horizon and all.

For more information about the Adopt a Vegetable scheme.

Would you like to adopt a cheeky young whippersnapper? If so then email us with your name and address, and the words ADOPTAVEG in the subject line, to planet-science.news@nesta.org.uk.

The draw will take place at 5pm on Wednesday 12th September.

With the emphasis of food and farming this week, how could we resist these websites?

For starters we’ll have... Some ideas for activities involving seeds and fruit. Followed by downloadable features from Guy Smiths booklet on Food, Farming and the Countryside and a side order of chipped potatoes. Partial to a spud? Then get with the Potato Challenge. 

And for desert a nice free resource pack from FACE. Then we’ll finish off with the Buzz Game from Country Life

Very satisfying! Must come again.