Writing this on the first day of autumn, whistling a sigh of relief that we got all the tomatoes and peaches in before frost turned them to mush or the squirrels got them. I the garden is taking on the shades of fall, burnished gold, steely blue, burgundy purple, while the rugosa roses are setting […]
Lots of people in horticulture will have very fond memories of out late Queen Elizabeth, including the staff and management of Hartley Botanic. Her late Majesty adored going to the Chelsea Flower Show and Hartley are regular attendees. I particularly remember her visit in 2012, the year of the Diamond Jubilee, because an entire military […]
A few weeks ago, I took a day trip to the tiny town of Elkton, Oregon to visit butterflies. The Elkton Community Education Center includes Elktonās library, community meeting area, and other historic buildings, but the Butterfly Pavilion, a netted hoop house that shares the open parkland on the Umpqua River was my goal. But […]
Itās been an amazing summer in the greenhouse for peppers, aubergines and anything Mediterranean. What these crops need in order to produce at their best is warmth and lots over it over a long period of time, and they certainly got that. So much so that the challenge this year was cooling down the greenhouse: […]
If you grow tomatoes, you are probably now awash with lots of fruit. Itās a great challenge finding ways to use up a glut of tomatoes and there are many wonderful ways to make use of this fabulous, flavour filled surplus. Gardeners that grow tomatoes should now have a bit of a glut and be […]
In my last piece I described a greenhouse gem; the chocolate scented Cosmos, which I also noted was not exactly one of the neatest looking shrubs. Oddly, another powerfully chocolate scented flower, Berlandiera lyrata, also comes as an unruly small shrub. Thereās little obvious similarity in these even though theyāre both in the family Asteraceae, […]
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Ventilate the Greenhouse on warm days but reduce this when temperatures drop later in the month and the amount of shading, so crops ripen and to avoid problems with grey mould caused by damp air and cooler nights. Before bringing plants in for overwintering check them for pests and diseases, and treat accordingly. Red spider […]
Imagine if you went to a restaurant and were served plastic vegetables? And when you complained the chef said that they were less maintenance, didnāt need washing and would never go off. Would you eat them? Would you think, oh wow, thatās a great idea, another way to circumvent nature? I donāt think so. But […]
With the climate crisis escalating and evidence of ecological breakdown all around us, itās time to get serious about gardeningās restorative potential. What if gardening stopped being fun ā and becameĀ seriousĀ fun? Emergencies are skidding at us from around every corner: social, political, economic, ecologicalā¦ the list grows as we face crises near and far, in […]
Gardeners are used to battling the elements, but 2022 has been a catastrophic event. It began with an āIām-not-going-to-grow-for-you-at-the-momentā dry winter and cool spring. That was followed by extreme heat and strong Saharan winds, so most peopleās gardens (including mine) turned into a sea of brown. One evening I sat and watched as hummingbird-hawk moths […]
Once I had a kitchen garden. It was a large space, surrounded by a trellis fence so that it didnāt appear part of the āproperā garden, because it was a hard-working space, with a small glasshouse in one corner, compost heaps in another, and two long parallel rows of four-foot-wide raised beds. These were not […]
