Hartley Magazine

All the latest news, hints, tips and advice from our experts

Written in United States

What Plants Belong in your Winter Greenhouse?

Autumn is arriving, night time temps are dropping. But your garden, especially your containers, have finally come into their own at the end of the season. You’d love to carry some of this beauty on inside a greenhouse. But how do you decide which ones should be sheltered? That’s a question C.L. Fornari examined in […]

Written in United States

Plant and Prune Now?—Dan Robinson tells why

Fall is a brilliant time for planting. The ground is still warm enough to encourage root growth, and the fierce battering of summer heat has lifted, which means less work for you. But there’s another reason autumn is the best time for both new plantings and the shaping of certain woody plants, either in the […]

Written in United States

Growing avocados and other exotic edibles

Hasn’t this been the challenging summer? Here in the Rockies, we’ve experienced cool days and regular drenching rainfall seemingly every afternoon from June to July — the garden loved it! But. Unseasonable cool days and nightime temps below 50° were not a joy for the edibles: Were I growing tomatoes in a greenhouse, the harvest […]

Written in United States

Solving Your Summertime Water Woes

In summertime, it’s hot and dry in much of America for extended periods of time, but plants still need water – typically lots of it. What’s more, keeping greenhouse plants watered in these extreme conditions is made even harder when local communities impose lawn and garden watering bans to conserve their rapidly depleting water resources […]

Written in United Kingdom

Basella, or tropical spinach

  Without a greenhouse this tropical climbing vegetable, Basella, is hardly worth attempting thus it’s little known in the UK though with a plethora of common names indicating worldwide popularity. Vine Spinach, Indian Spinach, Malabar Spinach, Ceylon Spinach, Gambian Spinach, Malabar Nightshade to name but a few. Originally growing wild in much of the East […]

Written in United Kingdom

Planting potatoes and sowing biennials

If you’d like to eat new potatoes at Christmas (or earlier), it is time to plant them now, when late season, second early potatoes, stored in temperature-controlled conditions are sent out from late July to early August. They can easily be grown in pots. Stand two or three tubers on a 12.5cm layer of multipurpose […]