Winter is knocking on the door once again and there’s lots to do in the garden in preparation. The trouble is you can never predict what winter will bring and I would like every gardener to be provided with their own personal crystal ball – particularly now that our climate’s so changeable. What will the […]

Whether you want to plant for wildlife or deter burglars, the humble bramble has many attributes I have a long and chequered history with the humble blackberry. As a child I lived on a crescent of houses and in the middle of the crescent was an allotment site, where we had a plot. We didn’t […]

It is annoying when one of your great greenhouse successes of the year is not one you planted… or even particularly wanted, but so it has proved this year. Call me a party pooper but I am not a big fan of a giant pumpkin. I love Hallowe’en and I love the pumpkin’s role in […]

So why on Earth would you want to grow this in your greenhouse? Well, because this is a living ‘pot pourri’. A South American relative of Asters it’s delightful though as the disparaging quote from Paxton’s Botanical Dictionary suggests it’s neither graceful, compact, neat nor colourful. Thus certainly not a centrepiece, nor a background foliage […]

I hope you have invested in at least one Hartley Botanic Water Butt to collect rain from the deluge that has poured down on our glasshouses over the past weeks. Use the tepid rainwater in the greenhouse on acidic loving plants like Citrus and if you have spare, water under the eaves over winter in […]

Quiet, non-polluting, kind to wildlife, people-powered, earth-friendly: scythes win over strimmers on every count – but sometimes you need to see to believe. It’s the sound that pulls them in – the harsh, honing rip of stone against steel isn’t an everyday sound here. As soon as I start sharpening, heads start to turn. ‘Is […]

Most gardeners love to inject their garden with a huge dose of colour, Whether that’s flamboyant bedding schemes, flowers for cutting or the spring spectacular of flowering bulbs. Colour is the lifeblood of most gardens. But it doesn’t have to be dramatic and lairy, it can be soft and calming too. Learning how to use […]

A superbly nutritious greenhouse plant Okahijiki, Salsola komarovii, is one of the oldest Japanese vegetables. Native to saline maritime regions this translates as ‘seaweed on land’ and is distantly related to our Samphire and more closely to our native Prickly Saltwort, Salsola soda, both of which are rich in Elements needed for out nutrition. Salsola […]

I share a trait with the late Queen Elizabeth, only one you understand. Just like our late, and much-missed majesty, I religiously tune into the weather forecast. And just like her, I love it when Tomasz Schafernaker is in charge. It’s rumoured that the late Queen Elizabeth developed quite a crush on this softly spoken, […]

It has been a long, slow and mostly pretty cool summer in the greenhouse. Social media loves to throw old triumphs from past years at us, and so I am fully aware of how smug I have been about summer tomatoes in other years, and how pitifully late my tomatoes are this year. It feels […]

Early in the month, especially if it is warm and sunny, sow trays, pots or old growing bags with ‘cut and come again crops’ to harvest through autumn and into winter; think land cress, oriental salads, like pak choi, mizuna and mibuna greens plus lettuce, lamb’s lettuce, chicory and radish and imagine it is spring […]

I have bought a brand new, long-hankered-after plant this summer that might just make my greenhouse a little less full to bursting this winter: a ‘semponium’. I have long loved Aeoniums – beautiful succulents the most well known of which is ‘Zwartkopf’, which has almost black rosettes of leaves on sinuous stems. I think I […]