One thing I’ve always been prone to do is put things off. I wait happily for harvest from my main plants, thinking that I’ll have nothing until then. And to a certain extent, that’s true because I have so little space in my tiny urban allotment garden. But this year I’ve decided to really try […]
Read MoreBeing a foreigner myself (albeit a bit of a fake one), I sympathise with anybody that comes to the UK and struggles to make themselves understood. Take, for example, my lovely yellow climbing French beans. Or haricots, if you will. They came with a pleasingly incomprehensible instruction illustration.You will laugh, oh experienced gardener readers, when […]
Read MoreI know, I know, it’s April now. But today I spent an absolutely lovely day gardening and the plants are all going zoom and growing like the clappers and I wanted to document the garden before the real growing takes place. So here it is, relatively bare but with small signs of growth, seen as […]
Read MoreI have decided that every Friday I will post an image of the garden, without text. Hopefully it’ll become an interesting collection of images that chart the progress of the garden in 52 tiny details every year. This week’s is pretty self explanatory. Nobody is immune to raspberry canes!
Read MoreMy side return is, by definition, narrow. And the raised beds that I have there (filled with garlic and rhubarb) are currently performing very nicely. I have eight varieties of garlic in there, and three of rhubarb. The side return is technically south facing but it’s so narrow that the sun hits it for about […]
Read MoreWarbled (badly) to the tune of Gloria Gaynor’s “I will survive”At first I was afraid, I was petrifiedBrought home from RHS Wisley (that plant shop outside)And then I spent all winter long, feeling sorry for myselfIn the cloche I’d hide, feeling safer there insideI took my time, I will surviveFor a while there I looked […]
Read MoreOnce the first flurry of joyous seed sowing starts, I find that things quickly settle down to a comfortable rhythm of sowing and potting on. So it was with a big smile on my face that I proceeded to move the first of my tiny sprouts into small pots on the weekend. I think that […]
Read MoreLast month I mentioned that I’ve cleverly broken my foot (to be exact, I’ve sustained a Lisfranc fracture which is a horrible thing that takes months to recover from). This has been difficult enough in terms of looking after the GarlicBaby (who is starting to crawl – eek!) but at least there we’ve been able […]
Read MoreMy tiny front garden has always been a problem, not least because it’s been paved over and used as a driveway. Parking in London is a problem, and so having our own driveway does make life much easier. I’ve planted bulbs and wildflowers in large troughs lining the driveway and finally moved the birdfeeder from […]
Read MoreI have a certain fondness for gooseberries, something that I think is shown by the fact that I’ve squeezed five bushes (two green hinnomakis, two red hinnomakis and a trusty old invicta) into my tiny space. They’re marvelous things, gooseberries, useful for everything from a liquor to liven up fizz through to pies. They’re one […]
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London to Land Girl 