There is nothing quite like a home-grown, sun-warmed tomato picked fresh from the greenhouse and a fair few of mine never reach the table when the grandchildren are sent out to hunter gather! We grow lots of different types from cherry, to plum, to beefsteak, to medium-sized and round and, although we major on reds, […]
As a young thing I used to wear incredibly short miniskirts, known as pelmets by friends and family. I trained as a teacher and when it came to getting a job I went for a fair few interviews. I emerged without one job offer, despite having done well on the course, mainly due to the […]
The great advantage in having a Hartley greenhouse is stealing a march on time. It may be a chilly outside, with a biting easterly wind, but it’s always toasty under glass so you can start to sow earlier in the year. If you can keep the temperatures at an ambient 10 -17C, with ventilators or […]
As a busy journalist you get to meet a lot of gardeners and garden lovers and sometimes they make an enormous impact on me, despite the fact that I may only spend a short time in their company. The late Felix Dennis, who passed away in 2014, was one such person. He had built up […]
In the last 30 years I’ve had two gardens and, although there were only 20 miles apart, they were as different as chalk and cheese, a bit like my children! My old garden in Hook Norton in Oxfordshire, famous for its beer, was a stone’s throw away from the church. The one-acre garden was on […]
I think I’m enormously lucky to be in the world of plants, because the people who grow them are always nurturing and kind. I made this discovery in my twenties when I joined the Hardy Plant Society – some forty odd years ago. They had a seed exchange ( and still do) and I wanted […]
Towards the middle of the month, you won’t be able to escape from the pumpkin! They’ll be festooned outside shops everywhere and, by the end of October, they’ll be blackened by candle soot and perched limply on walls, following the Halloween revels. We think of this festival as an American custom. However the tradition of making […]
One of the great things about owning a Hartley greenhouse is the sense of escape in a modern world fraught with difficulty. It’s like your own miniature TARDIS and when you walk down the garden path and through the door you’re lost in another world. It doesn’t matter about the vagaries of the British climate […]
The best thing about having a Hartley greenhouse, especially in the sort of summer we seem to be having, is that you can get away from the weather. This year my peonies were washed away in mid-June and then my roses took a real battering at the end of the month. In fact I’ve never […]
A good garden should shine throughout the year and it should also provide plenty of nectar from early spring until late autumn. This is the time of year to think about late-flowering plants, because many of them come from the southern hemisphere, particularly South America. Flowers tend to be pigment packed, with plenty of reds, […]
I always get wisteria envy at this time of year, because it’s one climber I don’t seem to be able to find the right place for. I’ve planted two in my lifetime and the first one was in a Northamptonshire garden in the late 1980s. I recently went back for a peek and it’s now […]
I do love plants with silvery foliage, the trouble is they’re difficult in Cold Aston because we get a lot of rainfall dumped upon us and silvery plants hate wet. They would much rather grow on thin soil in places like East Anglia – where rainfall is far lighter. However I’ve developed an area, underneath […]
