22 August 2008 (4 comments)
I love this time of year when the harvest is rolling in, when you can wander round the garden and pick enough to make up a meal from the ingredients you have in your hand. But it also gets me reflecting on the choices I made when planning this year’s garden. Could I have squeezed in more peas? What made the peppers do so well? Did I make the right choices about what to grow in the space I have? Read more...
Categories: gardening vegetables harvest planning |
15 August 2008 (3 comments)
This week has been designated ‘National Allotments Week’ here in the UK and it’s also the 100th year since the 1908 ‘Small Holdings and Allotment Act’ was passed in parliament, requiring local government to provide allotments for people where there was demand. (For those readers who live elsewhere in the world, allotments are areas of land owned by the local government or parish in the UK and rented out cheaply as small plots for growing fruit and vegetables.) In recent years there has been a huge resurgence of interest in allotments and we’ve seen lots of people planning them using GrowVeg.com. The motivation for people taking up an allotment may be different from the beginning of the last century but I believe that the upsurge in interest is here to stay as more and more people want to grow their own food again. Read more...
Categories: gardening allotments |
08 August 2008 (0 comments)
I am a great fan of Italian cooking. I love the varied tastes, healthy ingredients and simplicity of many traditional recipes from the country. Italians are passionate about food demanding high-quality fresh produce together with a strong tradition of home-growing supplemented by a daily trip to the local market. Browsing through a good Italian cook book is a mouth-watering experience but before sampling them there is one prerequisite: fresh ingredients. Trying to cook these simple recipes with second rate vegetables or canned produce just doesn’t work. So I really love the summer when I can harvest sufficient fresh ingredients to indulge in cooking the Italian way. Read more...
Categories: cooking vegetables harvest summer |
01 August 2008 (4 comments)
If there’s one fruit that I always think I could do better at, it’s strawberries. The rewards of beautiful freshly picked strawberries are hard to beat, yet those rewards come at the price of some quite specialist care – different from almost any other fruit or vegetable. Last week I couldn’t resist purchasing a beautiful punnet of organic strawberries from our local supermarket. But what looked so mouth-watering turned out to be disappointing, bland-flavoured fruit over half of which were mushy, when they should be at their very best in mid-summer. So I have decided it’s time to give strawberries the attention they really deserve and plan ahead for next year... Read more...
Categories: gardening strawberries propagation |
25 July 2008 (0 comments)
Tomatoes have to be one of the most popular vegetables to grow – and rightly so. Not only do they produce a wonderfully bountiful harvest of ‘fruit’ from each plant but they also come in so many great varieties – all with their own distinctive taste, shape and even colour. Compared with freshly-picked tomatoes from your own garden, supermarket ones are either picked green and ripened with ethylene gas or sold for a high premium as ‘vine-ripened’ when they were still picked days ago. Either way, fresh tomatoes taste far superior and growing your own is very rewarding. But how do you ensure that you get the best crop from your tomato plants? A bit of judicious pruning can make all the difference... Read more...
Categories: vegetable gardening tomato |
18 July 2008 (0 comments)
It’s around this time of year that gardeners start to look forward to a bumper crop of potatoes but for those who have grown them before there is always the worry that the harvest will be spoiled by blight. Probably the most common plant disease, blight can wreck whole crops in a matter of a few weeks, as it did so devastatingly during the Irish potato famine in the 1840s where 1 million people died and a further 1 million emigrated. Although it is commonly associated with potatoes, blight also affects some other members of the solanaceae family of plants, the most common of which is tomatoes. So what causes it and what are the best ways to tackle it? Read more...
Categories: gardening disease potato tomato |
11 July 2008 (30 comments)
Manure has long been the standard way for vegetable gardeners to improve the fertility of their soil. On my local allotment gardens, manure is delivered by the truckload each year and for just a small cost large quantities can be dug into your vegetable plot ready for the next season. This cheap high-nutrient boost is the way many gardeners have been producing vegetables for years but that’s going to have to change. Over the last few months a large number of plots treated with manure have been producing warped and damaged plants and the culprit seems to be a certain weed-killer... Read more...
Categories: gardening organic problems |
04 July 2008 (6 comments)
Earlier this year we asked gardeners using our website to tell us what their favourite and worst garden jobs were. Most found it easy to name planting or weeding but a few people simply wrote that they loved it all. I envy people who find such pleasure in an activity! Of course what motivates people to garden is usually a very personal thing and varies from a love of the outdoors to a desire for gourmet-style fresh kitchen ingredients. But I have always thought that there must be some common thread with those who ‘get it right’ and just love the whole experience... Read more...
Categories: gardening |
27 June 2008 (4 comments)
Seed companies would have you believe that all you have to do is buy the right seed, water regularly and use good soil to be guaranteed success. But real gardeners know differently: every garden is different and there are thousands of important factors that make up success. No matter how carefully you follow books and seed packet instructions, you soon realise that conditions you have and the way you garden are unique - and both have a great influence of the results you get. So how about some experimentation to find out the best methods for your own garden...? Read more...
Categories: gardening |
20 June 2008 (2 comments)
A few years ago my parents gave me three dwarf apple trees for my birthday. You might think that’s a strange present but I love apples and they’re great to grow. I carefully set up supports and planted them as thin ‘cordons’ where they grow up at an angle to maximise the crop in a small space. Soon they were blossoming and then laden with lots of tiny fruit. Imagine my disappointment then when after a few weeks the apples started dropping off. What was the cause? Read more...
Categories: gardening fruit apples |