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September 13, 2010 | Soil rescue in the vegetable patch Our vegetable harvest has been pretty much a complete flop. We have giant pale marrows. Watery and with skins like toenails. Tomatoes tasting of fish and who wants new potatoes in September? All due to inattention to sowing times and now, nothing to look forward to but maudlin runner beans and leeks this winter. It’s [...]  September 7, 2010 | Weeds that deceive by lovely looks Neither a slate platter of sushi or a weed salad. I had spent half a day in the vegetable plot. To get the better of those just-too-large-to-hoe weed seedlings. After what seemed like a whole embroidery lesson of concentration, I knew them intimately. And began to hate them for their tenacity. Time to take their mug shots [...] August 11, 2010 | Top Ten Tips for drought in the garden August is a time for frazzled lawns, thistledown parachutes and gaps in the flower-beds. In the East of England, drought usually kicks in. Here is a handy list of how to combat that drat drought weather. As ever, the way is to work with nature. Get your soil right. This winter incorporate humus rich material [...] August 6, 2010 | All going horribly wrong in the vegetable patch For starters, a rat or mouse has been chomping on my oh so wierd squash zuccheta Serpente di Sicilia. It in turn is strangling the nearby runner beans. Trailing amain, it thirstily treats every watering can’s worth as an excuse to put on another 40 cms in tentacle growth. Over all, sunflowers like blocks of [...] August 4, 2010 | Trial fields and Wolsey woven together by Ernst Neto trial fields at Thompson and Morgan I had a very strange day that started with marvelling at stunted sunflowers in a rainy trial field by Ipswich. The rush of motorway traffic, made louder by the rain, dinned our ears. Pylons lurked and rain slanted down on a crowd of the horticulturally hooked . We put [...] July 24, 2010 | Plantaholic Post Stipa tenuissima with Knautia macedonica and pale cranesbill, possibly Geranium Mrs Kendall Clarke. Backlit by sun and running in the breeze. Evergreen, free seeding, loved by puppies to nest in. Be prepared to replant every three of so years. Like it? Click to share, tweet and save Hide Sites $$(‘div.d685′).each( function(e) { e.visualEffect(’slide_up’,{duration:0.5}) }); July 4, 2010 | Drat that bracken The first world war turned bracken into a serious menace. The exodus of agricultural workers from the land and with that, gone was the regular cutting back of this plant. Pteridium aquilinum. Long out of print, ’Weeds and Aliens’ by Sir Edward Salisbury, tells it straight: “one of the more noxious weeds of better drained [...] June 18, 2010 | This is the bed where Just Joey blooms Can’t think how the bucket got in the picture. An outward and visible sign of my worries? These, today, are all about yellow. Just Joey , a hybrid tea rose bred by Cants roses in 1972 is very 1970s. The colour is coppery orange and the blooms large. Bury your nose in them for the smell [...] May 22, 2010 | Oh no a surfeit of church rooves AND insomnia
but the upside of not being in bed asleep is that I can grab the moment of slack to post this image, taken 12 days ago, of the the high art of old shrub rose training. Carried out to perfection and executed at Sissinghurst (where else?). Rosa Ispahan, a damask rose, captured on camera newly [...] May 6, 2010 | Update on plug plant experiment I’ve just been for an early morning stroll in the garden with bare cold feet. Peering into my flowerbeds, its time to report on the success or not of those plug plants that I wrote about last month. I am totally in love with Tellima grandiflora, seen elsewhere as ground cover for shade, so snatched [...] |
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