Winter in the polytunnel

December 10, 2018.Reading time 4 minutes.

Winter in the poly tunnel should be a time of leaves and carefully staggered late crops of things but mine looks a bit like the half price sale at a garden centre that’s going out of business. We’ve been so very busy lately that we haven’t been able to find the time to get some […]

Getting our fruit trees FIG-ured out

March 10, 2018.Reading time 3 minutes.

You may remember that a couple of years ago I was utterly baffled by a little Brown Turkey fig that I grew in a small pot on my London patio. After a year of doing nothing interesting, this small but determined fig tree suddenly started to fruit over the winter and then promptly died for […]

Planning (more) fruit futures

January 11, 2018.Reading time 4 minutes.

The weather is dank and dark, the heating still isn’t working and the dog refuses to recall but I find I drift easily away from all of these petty everyday issues when I think of summer and the bumper soft fruit crops I hope we’re going to get. I’ve become increasingly irritated by supermarket soft […]

DIY irrigation using soda bottles

April 7, 2017.Reading time 1 minute.

Years ago I decided to install a homemade drip-feed system of soda bottles to water my pots and raised beds. But having filled the one nearest to my beloved plum tree yesterday, I noticed this morning that the water level hadn’t dropped. The culprit was the lid of the old water bottle I was using. […]

Ask not fig whom the bell tolls…

April 11, 2015.Reading time 1 minute.

It finally happened. I was so thrilled by my Brown Turkey fig tree as it produced so many overwintering figs, you know, over winter. And as we’re having such a warm snap at the moment, I thought I’d pop it outside so that it could enjoy some of this lovely bright sunshine. So I popped […]

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 […]

DIY watering system (drip – feed from soda bottles)

June 22, 2014.Reading time 4 minutes.

When planning the garden, one of the things that worried me most about planting in pots was how easily they dry out, especially on hot days. It’s not good for root structures to get completely parched as the plant stems start to collapse inwards. So my initial thought was to purchase a rainwater butt and […]

Planting out supermarket herbs

June 13, 2014.Reading time 2 minutes.

When we put a new kitchen into our last flat, one of the things I wanted to do was to make up for the lack of a garden. So I went to IKEA, bought about ten FINTORP racks and pots and had the workmen affix them to our tile splashbacks so that I could have […]

Potting on: Lessons learnt from seedling transfers

June 7, 2014.Reading time 3 minutes.

I think that I made a couple of mistakes this year in my naivete and general gung-ho enthusiasm to get the garden up and running as fast as possible. 1. I planted far too many seeds. I ordered goodness knows how many packets of seeds and therefore ended up with so many seedlings that there’s […]

When you can’t grow out, grow up! Or, vertical gardening.

June 5, 2014.Reading time 3 minutes.

When you’re as limited in space as I am, sometimes up is the only way to grow. Vertical gardening, vertical planters or “green walls” have all become very popular over the last five or six years, as urban dwellers seek to grow food regardless of the size of their plot. From planters made of old […]