Dress your greenhouse with lush foliage usable for salad or spinach, for little effort, and get a small tuber crop for free. Sound too good to be true? Yet Oca, Oxalis tuberosa, is very popular all over its native South America and Mexico. True it really does like more sunshine than available in the UK, […]
The smallest earth-friendly actions and choices in our gardens and greenhouses can build to make global waves. Garden dreaming – whether it’s by day or by night – is blissfully unavoidable, but sometimes dreams come to us back to front, the wrong way around. Recently, I night-dreamt that I was inside my greenhouse, early spring […]
You might think of Simon Cowell when I mention the X Factor, but I’m talking about hybrids that arise when two plants hybridise. Usually, it’s the bees that do all the work. They travel between flowers searching for nectar for energy and protein-rich pollen for breeding. As they go, they accidentally transfer pollen from one […]
This year start keeping notes about your garden. A garden journal is such a useful tool, says Jean Vernon. I spend most of my working time writing, so you might be surprised that I’m not that good at journaling. And yet there are so many times every year that I wish I’d kept better notes […]
Winters in the southwest are at best variable to say the least. It may be the cold season, but weeks of warm, spring-like warm weather can’t fool us, we know it suddenly change overnight to unseemly arctic conditions. That’s the moment we gardeners swap the spade for a snow shovel, or possibly a broom since […]
January weather presses close to the greenhouse, with frost on the panes and the quiet threat of colder nights yet to come. Outside, the garden is holding its breath. Frost feathers the edges of leaves, the soil rings hard underfoot, and the light has that pale, slanted quality that belongs only to midwinter. This is […]
After the long spell of warm weather this autumn, the first few days of January, possibly longer, are set to be cold, with snow in some areas. Protect plants in unheated greenhouses with fleece, removing the cover during warmer days. 70g fleece, provides protection to around -5C, 30g fleece protects plants to about -3°C and […]
You can grow a most beautiful plant in your greenhouse or conservatory that’s so valuable just a tiny dried piece was said to be worth more than its weight in Gold. This, The Saffron Crocus, has from Ancient times been revered as flavouring, colouring and medicine. (With astronomic rises in Gold prices this no longer […]
Even though I added an entire truckload of horse manure, several lawn-tractor cart loads of seaweed, and so many wheelbarrow loads of compost that my body ached from moving it, the peppers, tomatoes, and other fruiting plants in my garden had less than ideal yields this year. The lower-than-normal harvest of tomatoes especially suggested that […]
As the year draws to a close, we garden writers begin receiving notices about the fresh trends for the garden in the coming year. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s list of all that is new for the New Year arrived yesterday. For nearly 200 years the PHS, as it is commonly known, shared its top 10 […]
Start Amaryllis bulbs into growth, watering sparingly at first; just trickle a little tepid water around the bulb, gradually increasing the amount as the bud appears. Once it is actively growing, keep the compost constantly moist but not waterlogged and take care not to wet the growth tip. The growing temperature should be around 20C, […]
Escape the stress – festive and otherwise – with a midwinter project that weaves calm, control and creativity back into the season. Tight. Knotted. Coiled like a wound-up, corroding spring. Stuck. All too much. That’s where my mind is right now. It wasn’t a quick journey getting there, via the stress-fuelled frustration superhighway – but […]
