As seen at Chelsea: Giant lettuces
How the heck do you think they get them to look like that? And by May, for heaven’s sake? Just look at the lettuces on the South West in Bloom exhibit in the Great Pavilion at the RHS Chelsea Flower...
View ArticleAs seen at Chelsea: Good ideas
As the bulldozers rumble in and we leave Chelsea for another year (pause for a muffled sob into my hanky): a gallop around some of the many, many little flashes of inspiration I spotted this year....
View ArticlePower to the people
(c) Jeffrey Tischart, Jr. You won’t be gardening long before you feel the need for a little electricity. I don’t mean excitement: goodness, there’s quite enough of that what with mouse invasions and...
View ArticleA pocket full of posies
Raw materials for tussie-mussie making outside the American Museum's herb shop On the whole, I’m a pretty rugged sort of person. A disproportionate amount of my gardening time seems to be spent...
View ArticleA nice cup of tea
Looks boring - but it's among the most useful things in my veg patch Right at the back of my veg garden I have a little triangular corner in the shade, where not a lot else would grow. All through the...
View ArticlePick of the month: June
Pea ‘Oregon Sugar Pod’ To quote a well-known advert for a certain shop which I’m sure used to sell clothing but now seems to be a supermarket for posh people: [cue 1970s lounge lizard soundtrack and...
View ArticleHampton Court: A rubbish show garden
'A Space to Connect and Grow', by Jeni Cairns and Sophie Antonelli (Gold, Best Summer Garden) Recycling in the garden can be tricky to get right. It’s all very well making planters out of teacups and...
View ArticleHampton Court: Do try this at home
Veg gardening the traditional way Well I thought I was doing pretty well on the exotics front this year, what with the tomatilloes hogging one end of the greenhouse and my huge tree chilli – now, in...
View ArticleRogue’s Gallery: Garlic rust
My garlic has turned ginger. And not in a good way. It happened just about overnight, a few weeks ago. One day I had perfectly healthy, sturdy garlic shoots: the next day the foliage was a bilious...
View ArticleThe bitterest pill
This is what a cucumber flower ought to look like. See that little baby cucumber behind the petals? Crop failures are pretty bad. You put all that effort in, coaxing the seed into life, nurturing and...
View ArticleThe truth about self-sufficiency
Like most people of a certain age, the whole self-sufficiency thing drifted into my consciousness via two main routes: Tom and Barbara Goode, and John Seymour. What they didn’t tell you back then is...
View ArticleLife in the greenhouse: August
My greenhouses are the engine rooms of my garden. I have two: both six-by-eights, or in modern parlance 1.8m x 2.4m. Aluminium, pretty bog standard, and I love them both. Neither cost me much: I just...
View ArticlePick of the month: September
Turnip ‘Purple Top Milan’ Turnips get a bad press. In the minds of many they’re only one step up from cow food. They’re fall-backs, winter staples, the kind of thing you only eat if you really have to...
View ArticleRainy day gardening
Purple French beans cooling off after a bit of a blanch You know it’s been a good summer when you breathe a huge sigh of relief on waking to a rainy day. When a gardener needs an excuse to stay indoors...
View ArticleA whole mess of strawberries
Well here’s a pretty mess. This is my strawberry patch. As you can see, it’s become a little enthusiastic of late. In fact it may not be too much of an exaggeration to say it’s run amok, thrown off...
View ArticleBig is beautiful
A monster lurks in the shrubbery.... Look what I found in the pumpkin patch. Isn’t it the fattest, plumpest, most pumpkiny pumpkin you ever did see? You can probably guess I’m inordinately proud of it:...
View ArticleLife in the greenhouse: September
Cucumbers still dripping fruit: the tomatilloes are at the end, with 'Red Snackbite' peppers and 'Black Beauty' aubergines on the left I had a bit of a tidy-up in the greenhouse this month. Goodness...
View ArticlePick of the month: September
Raspberry ‘Autumn Bliss’ Just from time to time, while footling about in the garden, you pop something in your mouth in passing and everything stops while you’re transported into another plane of total...
View ArticleLife in the sloe lane
Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but if you really can’t be bothered with all that seed-sowing and weeding and tying in and composting you don’t have to do much gardening to get a free supply of...
View ArticleCare in the community
Jon Wheatley's Hampton Court show garden celebrated Britain in Bloom's 50th anniversary Britain in Bloom finalists across the country are currently biting their nails to the quick waiting to hear the...
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