Innholdsfortegnelse for 27-Apr-2024 i Amateur Gardening

It has long been observed that we in the UK are rather obsessed with the weather. Generally speaking, much small talk and day-to-day chatter is filled with commentary of the season or temperature at hand. Over these past few months, with the sheer volume of rain, such observations have taken on new levels of importance. So tired, frustrated and angry we have become of the seemingly relentless dreary grey and rain. Oh the rain! No one can deny it has been a decidedly dismal, soggy start to the year and tempers have been tested to the extreme. How the weather influences the nation’s mood - you can see and feel the difference when the clouds do break and the sunshine flows through. Just watch those around us soaking it in,…

After months of seemingly incessant rain, it’s hardly surprising that for many of us, our lawns are resembling the end result of the Battle of Bosworth Field. We live at the top of a hill and our soil is free-draining and chalky and even our grass is looking the worse for wear so I feel for gardeners who have to contend with heavy clay soils in low-lying areas. But now the weather is starting to get warmer and drier, so we can start repairing winter’s damage and getting our lawns ready for summer. However, if your ground is still saturated or there are still patches of standing water, stay off until they dry, because walking on them will further compact the soil and damage the grass, creating growing room for…

Sow squashes I adore pumpkins, courgettes and squashes - and I know I’m not alone. So, let’s take a look at this vast group of huge edibles - there’s more to them than you might think. Botanically, all these plants are in the cucurbit family. Specifically, seven main species have been domesticated - Cucurbita maxima, C. moschata, C. ficifolia, C. foetidissima, C. argyrosperma, C. digitata and C. pepo. Collectively, these give us winter squashes, butternuts, figleafs, pumpkins, gourds, hubbards, courgettes, patty pans, marrows, cushaws - the list goes on. But it doesn’t stop there - the cucurbit family is HUGE and there are many other productive edibles that we can call ‘squashes’ within it. Take, for example, achocha (Cyclanthera pedata) which is a vigorous vine with claw-shaped inflated fruits that…

Limited space shouldn’t limit your ability to grow things to eat. On my balcony, I harvest all kinds of organic greens, herbs and sun-kissed vegetables - and there’s nothing better than picking them super fresh. A trough filled with cut-and-come-again salads, spinach, rocket and spring onions is an easy place to start. Fill a 25cm-by-25cm trough with peat-free compost, and sow thickly in drills 20cm (8in) apart. I like to inter-sow with fresh drills every three to four weeks to ensure a constant supply. Potatoes also grow easily in hessian sacks. Fill a quarter of the sack with compost and place four seed potatoes (preferably chitted) into the compost. As the plants grow, add more fresh compost to cover the growing shoots until you reach the top. They’ll be ready…

No matter what your choice of material, one rule when designing a pathway is that it must lead somewhere. Pathways create a framework for movement within a space, connecting different areas and providing a transition from one space to another, be that a shed, bench, seating or a lounge area. Design your pathway so that it complements the look of your garden. Straight or angular paths work well in a formal design, while paths that curve will suit gardens with a more natural feel. What materials can I use for paths? When choosing materials for paths, make sure the style, colour and texture of those you select suit the look you are trying to create. The simplest features are mown paths through longer grass or a meadow, or, if you…

The countryside here on the border between East Devon and West Dorset is full of yellow, from fields of oil seed rape, fluttering brimstone butterflies and if I’m lucky to spot them, yellowhammers. There’s plenty of yellow in the garden too, from dandelions. These begin flowering towards the end of March and are such a treat for bees and other pollinating insects. They’re a good forager’s plant too, mainly for the bright yellow florets. Asked to name my favourite vegetable, it has to be the runner bean and growing them at home means those delicious pods can be picked at the perfect moment. In mid to late summer, I often slice a colander full at lunchtime, to boil briefly but vigorously in lightly salted water until al dente. A meal…

St George’s Day The day this issue of AG is available on newsstands (Tuesday, 23 April) is St George’s Day. As with the feast days of Saints Patrick, David and Andrew, it will be a day of national pride and commemoration. These three saints have the shamrock, the daffodil and the thistle as symbols, but for St George (and therefore for England) there is no direct equivalent. Some men used to wear a red rose in their lapel. Although St George is regarded as England’s saint, we actually share him with many other countries of the world, from Spain and several Eastern European countries, as well as the Middle East. In Catalonia, Spain, St George is the patron saint of the former Crown of Aragon; here, on 23 April, people…

In the pursuit of a picture-perfect garden, happiness can sometimes get forgotten, or left low down the ‘must do’ list. I am secretly planning a nature garden that echoes an important garden, the Japanese Gardens in Rivington, and this is an important garden to me for all the wrong reasons. It is a pleasure garden built by a millionaire who knew nothing about plants and promptly filled all the terraces with invasive Rhododendron ponticum, but for me this was the first garden that I loved to get lost in. The monumental-towering rhododendron canopies dwarfed me, and the vibrant purple flowers sang to me. I was happy to be here, to be transported to another place - but it was also a warning about the pursuit of fashion, because given the…

Evergreen shrubs for our pots Q We have block paving to the north of our property and I’ve bought two pots, 52cm/21in in diameter, 45cm/18 tall to go on it. We would like to plant interesting, low-maintenance evergreen shrubs that will tolerate shade and not make a mess. What would you recommend?  Neil Marfitt, Poole, Dorset A Start by covering your elegant pots’ drainage holes with crocks, stones or pea shingle to ensure that surplus water freely drains away. Plant in a loam-based compost such as John Innes No3 that will provide plenty of nutrients for your new plants. The following contenders should flourish for you. Plant them in peat-free compost: Euonymus fortunei ‘Blondy’: Cheering yellow-and-green-splashed leaves. Sarcococca confusa: Bright green foliage; scented starry white blooms in winter. Camellia x…

When I die and go to rest,I’ll leave behind just one request.No stone so cold lay at my head,Plant a tree for me instead. Scatter my ashes around its base,Let it flourish and grow in grace.Beneath its shady canopy,Sit awhile - remember me. I’ll not be very far from you,Nor will the love we always knew.When, one day, you follow me,Perhaps, you too, will leave a tree. Be sure it’s planted next to mine,So that the branches intertwine.Then as they reach up to the sun,Like us, my love, they’ll be as one.…

Your plant recommendations from expert plantsman, Michael. Hello team, it’s a big moment for nostalgia this week as we talk dahlias! I have such fond memories of my grandparents’ garden, with beautiful tall dahlia plants topped with all the flower types, from purple pompoms to yellow cactus. My nan also taught me how to propagate them, store them over winter, replant and use upturned strawfilled pots to trap earwigs inside. Don’t ask me what we did next with those earwigs, I feel I’d have a much different approach these days! My grandparents also used to show their dahlias at the local flower shows, winning many prizes through the years. Anyway, this fortnight I’m exploring the glorious dahlia, a flower that has gone from being achingly unfashionable, to bloom of the…

Gardening as we know, is far from plonking a few plants in the ground and hoping for the best (although it does sometimes feel that way). It’s about the world around us and the animals and creatures that choose to make our gardens, their homes. The plants we do grow will attract insects and all manner of beneficial critters, which in turn make our green spaces more biodiverse in a myriad of exciting and useful ways. Planting for pollinators is always firmly on our agenda, but how about taking that a step further to encourage in a wider array of wondrous wildlife? A pond in a sink No matter the size of your garden, balcony, patio or allotment, there are ways to feature water within. Even the smallest pond can…

The garden is looking glorious with colour and new growth. May is just around the corner and the buzz for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show is growing. As well as the plants we are growing for the show (we are providing nearly all of the plants for Emma O’Connell and John Warland’s Freedom from Torture Garden), Emily and Miya from our shows team will be lending a hand during the build itself. As not everyone can get to Chelsea, we have decided to put together our own Chelsea display in our nursery area for everyone to see. We’ll be creating it from the middle of May and it will be on display for Chelsea week, which is May 21-25. You can follow our progress on our website, or even better,…

AG readers are being asked to join a three-year pilot project that aims to count hedgehog numbers across the UK. Populations of the ‘nation’s favourite mammal’ have sharply declined since 2000, leading to the launch of the National Hedgehog Monitoring Programme, which will let experts, in time, give a national estimate of Britain’s hedgehog population. Led by The British Hedgehog Preservation Society (BHPS) and People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES), in partnership with Nottingham Trent and Durham universities, London HogWatch and MammalWeb, and largely funded by Natural England, the scheme will use AI, trail cameras and volunteers to give insights into the factors causing hedgehog numbers to plummet. Volunteers from all corners of the UK are needed to make the project a success and can take part from the comfort…

Step by step 1 Multiple-sow as much in pots as you can, so space in your propagator is used to an optimum. Choose square pots, not round, for best space efficiency. Only prick out when essential, and ideally into small modules, rather than bigger pots. 2 Are you growing hardy plants? Acclimatise them to somewhere sheltered outside (e.g. a cold frame) – keep tender plants under cover for now. Zone off an area of your glasshouse with bubblewrap rather than heating the whole thing. 3 It’s tough, but try to only grow onwhat you need. Will you really eat 24 lettuces all at once?! If you can’t bear to throw surplus seedlings away, arrange a plant swap with gardening neighbours and relatives or set up an honesty box on your…

I’ve just given a talk on growing vegetables organically for Northleach Church in Gloucestershire. I always think growing vegetables is a bit like doing A levels in gardening, because it’s quite involved. You’re mostly dealing with annuals that will only get one chance in that year. Once the seeds are sown, you’re in the lap of the gods, so it’s always swings and roundabouts. One year your onions will fail, perhaps due to a dry, over-warm spring, but your brassica and beetroot crops will thrive. I also mentioned the importance of having a compost heap in my talk, so that you can enrich your soil, although you should never put diseased material on your heap. The compost we make is devoted to the vegetable beds and it’s either dug in,…

I was in the garden centre the other day and the shelves of weedkillers and pesticides caught my eye. There are so many products for killing things - and would you look at the prices! We don’t use chemicals in the garden apart from fertilisers and the less we use them, the more growing success we have. Natural methods are more effective and so much cheaper! It sounds counterintuitive, but over the years by welcoming nature, not using pesticides, and digging up weeds instead of spraying them, we have created a balanced, diverse ecosystem in our little patch and harnessed the power of nature. Yes, we lose things - our brassica crops last year looked like moth-eaten doilies but that was because the netting we bought to protect them didn’t…

Your lovely letters, emails and social media posts continue to flow in beautifully. Every message, poem, idea and comment matters. Please keep them coming. We will send out a thank you gift for every item published in the magazine so do please send your address and contact details when you get in touch. The Facebook account for Amateur Gardening magazine is now up and running again and we have also started a new Instagram account @amateurgardeningofficial. We hope to see you there. Plants are clever! I am always fascinated as to how plants grow out of crevices and manage to survive on just on a few drops of rain to sustain them?  Mrs Gloria Wilding (via email) Kim says; thank you for writing in Gloria - it really is a…

Marrows have long been grown, but other than for super-sized specimens at flower shows they’re no longer as popular as the many varieties of squash that have effectively replaced them. True, we still eat a lot of marrows, but solely as wee babies, for that’s what courgettes (zucchini) are. Indeed, if you miss picking for only a week or so then you’ll soon know about it, with giants in place of the smaller, sweeter specimens you might have preferred. Fortunately, with the marrow’s robust constitution you rarely go badly wrong growing either courgettes or zucchini. However, squashes are not marrows and require a bit more warmth and richness to prosper, and the same goes for pumpkins which look very similar and are just another form of squash. Squashes come in…

Funding worth £247,502 has been given to 95 community garden projects across England, Wales and Northern Ireland by the National Garden Scheme. From social welfare and gardening projects that help the isolated, the disabled and the disenfranchised to support for community orchards, food banks and social prescribing projects at GP surgeries, the funding provides a much-needed boost to those working on or initiating community garden projects. Many of the funded community projects in turn open for the National Garden Scheme completing a virtuous circle of giving and giving back. Included among the projects that have benefited are Rhubarb Farm, Nottinghamshire, which provides training and volunteering opportunities to 60 ex-offenders, drug and alcohol misusers, older people, school students, people with mental and physical ill health and learning disabilities. The project received…

Some 30 years ago I was given my first daylily (hemerocallis). It was not something I had been particularly longing for. Yes, I’d known about these plants, and yes, their flowers were OK. But I hadn’t been bowled over by them. I duly planted my gift and, in its third summer, once it was happily growing into a sizeable clump, it threw out an amazing mass of flowering stems. The variety was ‘Pink Damask’, and when I saw the impressive display of deep salmon-pink, trumpet-shaped lily-like flowers, produced in succession, I was hooked. Daylilies – and yes, each individual flower does last just one day – can be grown in any part of the garden, but they perform best in reasonably moist soil, which means that they can make luxuriant…

The other day I was talking to a friend who’s a keen gardener and she let slip the fact that in late spring she digs up and bins her tulips and buys fresh each autumn. I was aghast (she does the same with begonia tubers too) because while bedding tulips may not flower as well after their first year, they will still put on a good show and in the worst case scenario can be moved to a less obvious area of the garden. Discarding perfectly healthy tubers and bulbs is a ridiculous waste of money, but a lot of people do it. My preferred option (when I can be bothered, because our tulips seem to come back reliably year after year) is to wait until they have flowered, then…