Snow joke when the weather confuses your plants

February 3, 2015.Reading time 2 minutes.

First it was my poor Brown Turkey fig tree, getting completely confused because I brought it into my warm dining room. Now it’s my poor garlic. Stupid weather. There’s a lot of pity in me for my poor garden. My garlic, dutifully planted on the shortest day of last year so that it could have […]

Tempus Fig-it, or, my poor confused Brown Turkey fig tree

January 30, 2015.Reading time 2 minutes.

I brought my very normal Brown Turkey fig tree (because of the usual space problems, I have to grow my fig tree in a pot) in from the garden about three weeks ago thinking that it probably wouldn’t survive a frost. So it’s been happily sitting in the sunlight coming through the French windows for […]

Planting garlic on the shortest day of the year

January 6, 2015.Reading time 3 minutes.

Dahlia checking the garlic bulbs pre-planting Garlic takes a good long time to mature and so traditionally it would be planted on the shortest day to give it enough time to grow big and strong in time for harvest on the longest day of the year. And so it was that on the 21st of […]

The poor neglected garden

August 4, 2014.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Dear readers. I write to apologise for my absence. Normal service will resume within a couple of weeks but I’ve been otherwise distracted for the last couple of week. Well, the last four anyway. Four weeks ago today our first child, a little boy, was born and it turns out that looking after a baby […]

Keeping on top of the raspberries (or alongside them at least…)

July 5, 2014.Reading time 1 minute.

The number of things that I have really not been that efficient at in the garden continues to increase. It didn’t occur to me, when planting my rows of raspberries in my raised sleeper beds, to string up a proper wire frame. This has resulted in having to tie new lines, made of string, across […]

It’s all a bit of a squash in here

July 4, 2014.Reading time 3 minutes.

Oh, puns. They prompted Caligula to roast a comedian alive and Bierce to sneer at them as a “form of wit to which wise men stoop and fools aspire.” But my love of them, established early at the knee of my maternal grandfather, lives on. Puns and cracker jokes. I just can’t get enough, and […]

What a difference some weeds make

July 3, 2014.Reading time 2 minutes.

Before weeding I wish that I had a massive garden. Well, a smallholding really. That’s the eventual dream, to be able to potter out of our house and see our cows and sheep grazing our fields in the distance, to wander about lovely large veggie patches next to the house whilst the chickens burble away […]

How to freeze berries: making the most of a home-grown blackcurrant harvest

July 2, 2014.Reading time 4 minutes.

One of the biggest problems with having such a tiny city garden is that you can’t fit in lots of plants. This isn’t a problem in itself as most plants, especially berry bushes, will crop quite heavily over the growing season. However, if you find yourself (as I do) in the first year of your […]

Garden ornaments: Tacky or fun?

July 1, 2014.Reading time 2 minutes.

The Royal Chelsea Flower show always makes headlines. But one last year really caught my eye. Gnomes, those maligned imps of the garden world, were making a comeback. They’ve never really been my sort of thing but I have to admit to thinking that no garden is complete without a spot of whimsy. I have […]

Harvest Monday: 30/6/14

June 30, 2014.Reading time 3 minutes.

Look! Mangetout! The “beanbags” One of the blogs that I read is the lovely Daphne’s Dandelions. And so now that I’ve finally got some of my plants to start producing things I can eat (more than just herbs that is), I have decided to pluck up the courage to join her link party on Harvest […]