In my 34 years on this planet I’ve lived in 17 different houses, but not one of them has ever affected me like this one. I’m sitting in an empty, echoing kitchen on a camping chair as I type this and in a few hours men in a big truck will come and pick up […]
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We’ve always been big fans of county shows and try to attend a couple every year. To be completely honest, our local on in Lambeth isn’t usually on the list, but I’ve always wanted to try my hand at a vegetable competition so I thought we’d try it. Pulling Yellowstone, Purple haze and resistafly carrots […]
Read MoreI sometimes wonder if people with an allotment or vegetable beds in their garden face the same complications that I do when it comes to deciding what to plant where. Even if I’d been growing my own plants from seed rather than cheating and didn’t have to wait for the plug plants to be shipped […]
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 MoreFirst 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 […]
Read MoreApologies for the radio silence folks but a lot has happened since you last heard from me. It suddenly occurred to us that as Garlic Towers is soon to be graced by the pitter-patter of tiny feet (that is, by the arrival of a baby rather than another cat), that we should probably finish some […]
Read MoreSpace in London is at a premium and we guard it jealously. When we first bought Garlic Towers, we were shocked to find that our rotting and decrepit (and for some reason, bright blue) fence wasn’t actually standing on our boundary but that we’d lost almost a foot (or about 30cm) from the back of […]
Read MoreA while back I asked our neighbour (the King Of Ivy) to please trim the Buddleia in his front garden as it was starting to invade our space and to cut out all of the light to our sitting room. I was slightly aghast to come home yesterday and find that he’d hired someone to […]
Read MoreOr rather, here we go peering at Mulberry sticks. In a fit of optimism last year, I decided that as we only intend to keep this house for two or three years before the whispered lull of the countryside becomes a full-throated roar, that I could get a jump start on several heirloom plants. One […]
Read MoreOne of the first things that needed to be done when we took over our garden was to fight back against the wilderness that occupied the space we so badly wanted as ours. So a mammoth pruning session ensued (tempered slightly by the discovery of a nest in a neighbour’s overhanging bush that we didn’t […]
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London to Land Girl 