Innholdsfortegnelse for 11-Jan-2025 i Amateur Gardening

Have you already planted some onion sets in autumn, or did yours all bolt last year? Perhaps you’re not sure what a set is, or bolting. If so, let me help! Onion growing can be really simple: buy some onion ‘sets’ from the garden centre in autumn or spring, plant them, and then lift the resulting bulbs come autumn. And if that appeals to you, please, just keep doing that (‘sets’ are little tiny bulbs that save you having to sow any seeds). Many of us are now re-discovering onion seed sowing, though – after all, one packet of 200 onion seeds is far cheaper than 200 sets, and many interesting varieties are available as seeds, but not sets. If you’d like to sow seeds, now is a great time…

Sweet cicely (Myrrhis odorata) With a sweet and slightly aniseed flavour, this is my go-to plant for adding zip to a leafy salad and it is a perfect companion for sharp, acidic fruits including rhubarb. You could say that sweet cicely’s aromatic fern-like foliage makes it the slimmer’s plant of choice. I cook handfuls of its leaves with rhubarb and it goes a long way to sweeten or at least lessen the tart flavour. When the rhubarb crowns in the garden start to send up strong stems ready for picking, I check the several clumps of sweet cicely to see how much new leaf there is. Sweet cicely is a hardy perennial and in severe winters it may die back. In spring its soft feathery new foliage is ideal for…

YOUR PERFECT GARDENING COMPANION FOR 2025 SUBSCRIBE TO AMATEUR GARDENING AND NEVER MISS AN ISSUE 2 PACKS OF SEED WORTH OVER £4 WITH EVERY ISSUE! WHY SUBSCRIBE? ■ Pay just £2.50 an issue for the first three months of your subscription ■ Save over 60% on the shop price** ■ Get two packs of seeds FREE with every issue ■ Delivered direct to your door Terms & Conditions:⋆ Savings based on cover price + post and packing. Offer is for continuous payment or direct debit. You will receive the first 6 issues for £15, after which your subscription will continue at a rate of £39.99 every 6 months (13 issues). GET 6 ISSUES FOR JUST £15!* Our award-winning editor, Kim Stoddart, explains why a subscription to Amateur Gardening makes sense:…

ACROSS 1 A Floral one is a feature at many national and county flower shows (7) 6 In May every year, the RHS _______ Flower ____ is held in London (7,4) 7 ____ majus – the bullwort, an annual with white flowers in summer (4) 8 This head of state in some Islamic countries is also a variety of cold-tolerant cantaloupe melon (4) 9 This girl, this month! (3) 10 The mystery over the allotment site thickens, it is said (4) 11 The beetroot genus (4) 13 Lilac tent is something that will sparkle! (11) (anag) 14 Types of fungi having umbrella-like caps, with numerous gills beneath (7) DOWN 1 Coffee and chocolate mixed flavour, as in Heuchera ‘_____’ and Iris ‘Honey _____ Lotta’ (5) 2 Botanical name for the…

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. More wildflower seeds please Dear Kim For many years I have grown scarce wildflowers from seed, to be planted out in local farm fields. I now no longer receive the seeds. Imagine my surprise then to find the pheasant’s eye seeds on a recent copy of Amateur Gardening. Thank you so much, and could we have more wildflower seeds in future please? Loving the “new” magazine. With regards, Belinda Robson, Scarborough Kim says; thank you for writing…

The climate’s never been predictable, but these days it seems to be becoming more haphazard. Not always detrimentally, and some crops have done surprisingly well, but to be fair, many have done poorly, and the outcome has been worse if we’ve put all our ‘eggs in one basket’ with crop varieties grown. You see, when we sow carrots, parsnips or whatever, we can wait until the soil’s warm and wet enough. We can water if it’s dry, but what we can’t ensure is steady, even progression of the growing season from cool to hot to cool again. And if, as now more often happens, our sowing fails, then by the time we realise there may not be much time left to sow again. Why several batches of sowing is better…

Bringing you some of the gardening news highlights The latest peat-free compost trials held by the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) show that growing media made without using peat can perform just as well, or even better, than peat-based products. The findings were revealed at the gardening charity’s annual peat-free conference held in conjunction with four leading UK plant growers and six major growing media manufacturers. The plants used in the trials were alpines, ericaceous plants, shrubs and herbaceous perennials and the growing factors tested included irrigation, plant nutrition and the saleability of plants at the end of the tests. The participating growers each tested up to six peat-free mixes against a nursery peat-added control. Dr Alistair Griffiths, RHS Director of Science, said: “These trials provide robust evidence that peat-free growing…

No matter how hard we try to be paperless and packaging-free and live a life without excessive amounts of plastic, it all seems to come undone at Christmas when the cardboard packaging and protective wrappings start to build up. Luckily, a lot of Christmas packaging and paraphernalia can be used around the home and garden to save it from the recycling centre or landfill. Along one wall of our garage (which is so full of ‘stuff’ we can’t actually fit a car inside it) stand five Christmas tree trunks, seasoning nicely and ready to be chopped up for firewood and kindling. Their needles are long gone, used as mulch for potted ericaceous plants. In a few weeks’ time I’ll smear the mistletoe from our festive decorations onto our apple trees,…

Chillies are amazing plants: their fruits (or technically berries) are grown, cropped, and have become a celebrated ingredient across the world. From the flavourful foods of Thailand and Western China to the humble ‘pepe’ pepper blend of West Africa (where they help preserve foodstuffs that would otherwise expire in the tropical heat), chillies are a spicy superstar. The great news is these plants are easily grown organically in the UK from seed, and take up little room, but there are a few tips that will ensure success. Feed little and often Chillies need a long run up in our cooler temperate climate and they benefit enormously from a warm early start. Sow them in a tray of good quality peat-free seed compost in late winter, preferably in a heated propagator.…

Happy new year fellow gardeners and welcome to 2025, which promises to be our best gardening season ever (we hope). Weeks before the sobering chimes of Big Ben rang in the new year, I’d drawn up a list of resolutions. Lose a stone - at least, cut out cake, exercise more, and… sow not a single seed ’til March arrives, opening the old, wooden garden gate that sees us gallivanting joyously towards spring. Depending upon where you live and local weather conditions, then heated propagators, cold frames and greenhouses may allow you to steal a cautious head start, but with only select seed varieties that are needing or tolerant of cooler, earlier starts. Despite the desperately itchy gardening fingers that January always brings, the majority of my collection of Amateur…

Paths are expensive to build. The lion’s share of any garden budget often goes into hard landscaping, yet there are thrifty and enjoyable alternatives that can save us buying what we don’t necessarily need. First of all, what about the humble but ‘does the job nicely’ grass pathway? Grass is often associated with pristine lawns and mowing, rather than as a way to get from A to B. Grass paths are often maligned due to poor drainage, as they can become muddy in winter and brown, compacted dust tracks in summer. Yet, they are porous and have their place, even just to help figure out which areas are most in need of a more permanent and solid solution. For the first two years of my garden, every path was grass…

By-products - things that are produced as a result of making something else - can often be put to good use in the garden. Coffee grounds are a great example, as cafes and coffee shops all over the UK grind tonnes of coffee beans every day, but don’t usually have a use for them after brewing up. However, in recent years, some coffee outlets have started bagging up their used grounds and leaving them on the counter so customers can take them away, free of charge, to use as they wish. I’ve been using coffee grounds in my garden for the past few years and I’m delighted to share some of the helpful ways that you can try them too. Bagged coffee grounds won’t store well for long periods of…

The UK’s largest citizen science wildlife survey returns later this month. The RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch is back on the weekend of January 24-26 and everyone is invited to sign up and take part. Across the UK, more than 600,000 people took part in Big Garden Birdwatch 2024, counting a whopping 9.7 million birds. House sparrows took the top spot, with over 1,440,000 birds seen, but counts of these chirpy birds are down by 60% compared with the first Birdwatch in 1979. Cheeky little blue tits bagged the second spot with over a million sightings, and starlings came in third place with 879,000 seen. Wood pigeons and blackbirds took the fourth and fifth spots. A spokesman for the RSPB said: “We’ve lost 38 million birds from UK skies in the…

One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2025 is to be more tidy and ordered and I’ve started as I mean to go on by finally making use of the collection of loo roll and kitchen paper cardboard inserts that has been building up on a convenient dresser for the past few months. I’ve been collecting them (and asking family members to do so too) for sowing this year’s sweet peas and beans and now that January has arrived, I’ve started on the sweet peas. Like all members of the legume (pea and bean) family, sweet peas produce long roots, which is why they are best sown in deep pots of root trainers that hinge open, allowing the root ball to be planted without much disturbance. The great thing about…

As we attempt to stay warm and ride out the darker, colder month ahead, please don’t be too disheartened or weighed down by the gardening year just passed. It was tough, but we survived and we are hardier green-fingered folk as a result. It was a tricky but useful experience in many ways, in between moaning about the weather and the slugs, to see first hand what thrived, and what did not, in such challenging growing conditions. There were many lessons to be learnt from it all. Ultimately, our changing climate means more erratic weather overall, so being prepared for anything is absolutely key. We will get caught out at times, of course, but the natural world can lend a generous helping hand if we allow it to do so.…

In a robust kitchen garden where plants are allowed to creep about or go to seed, there will always be surprises. In and around the hop beds once tended by our fully fledged son, vegetables have gone feral. There are pale green rosettes of self-seeded perpetual spinach and, pointing the way to buried treasure, the brown stems of Jerusalem artichokes. Many years have passed since I bothered to lift, sort and replant their tubers but these stalwart perennial vegetables have continued to thrive. Their slightly sweet, nutty flavoured tubers are delicious, but are also notorious for benefiting our bodies but sometimes embarrassing us with their digestive system-boosting powers, but I’ve heard that pickling can help. A new year is the time to make lists of seed potatoes. Last year’s crop…

New Year freeze It’s such a shame that a new year begins just at the time when you don’t want to venture outside. The impetus of a ‘fresh start’ is diminished by the fact that it’s too cold to get out there and do very much. But our plants don’t have a choice – they have to be outside! One question often asked is: does freezing kill a plant’s roots? Well, tender plants, such as dahlias and tomatoes, are usually killed outright if they freeze. However, hardy plants will usually survive. When winter comes, the above-ground parts of hardy perennials, trees and shrubs go into a slumber (or ‘dormancy’): the plants die back to ground level, or their leaves drop. These above-ground parts are no longer susceptible to damage by…

Why is my orchid leaf becoming scarred? Q One of my orchids has developed these unsightly scars. It has stopped producing a good spear of blooms. I don’t recall doing anything that might cause it. Jackie Fox, Ripon A Thank you for the attached image of your unhappy moth orchid (phalaenopsis). A common cause of brown spots and splitting leaves is inadequate watering – roots are too dry. The best time to water is in the morning. Initially, hold your plant to see if it feels light. If you suspect that it’s too dry, sit it in a bowl filled with about 2cm (1in) of water. If it’s thirsty, it will absorb the liquid. It’s vital to keep roots damp but not waterlogged. As all orchids prefer reasonably good light,…

Your plant recommendations from expert plantsman, Michael. During the past year I’ve been on my many travels, and had a particularly wonderful time in the Netherlands at the Royal Flora Holland trade event, where there really was something for everyone. So this issue, I’ll be looking towards the new year with some sparkling new houseplants, shrubs and even a beautiful new cut flower. These items should all be coming into garden centres sometime in 2025, so why not cut out and keep pictures of the ones that you like, so you’ll be able to find them soon. Lilium ‘Tropical Dragon’ (The Parrot Lily) When I’m out hunting for plants, sometimes I can get very distracted when I spot a gem. This absolute beauty was hidden in the corner of a…