Monthly Archives: March 2012

What is red, white and blue? This is one of the ways that you can celebrate all sorts of big national occasions in your garden. This year we have the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics to bring out all of the best! So why not in the garden as well? Many of the seed companies have made it easy

The warm weather these past few days has brought my private tulip festival forward and some lovely goblets of colour are showing in the border. I grow tulips in containers mostly, so they are still waiting in the wings. They are in good leaf and large buds are showing in most of the containers. I wasn’t able to downsize my

A couple of weeks ago it was announced that Anglian Water , along with another 6 water companies, would be initiating a hosepipe ban on the 5th  of April. With the lack of rainfall we have received during the winter, this is entirely understandable. As I live in Milton Keynes, and I am an Anglian customer, I’m facing a hosepipe

Grafted vegetables, and especially tomatoes, are becoming more readily available. Pioneer in this area is Sutton Seeds (www.suttons.co.uk), whose grafted veg plants are grown in the UK to top-quality standards. Suttons began offering grafted plants some five years ago. A few weeks ago I was fortunate to visit the Suttons’s nursery where the grafted plants are raised and I saw

On Friday I went to the Edible Garden Show 2012 (www.theediblegardenshow.co.uk) held at Stoneleigh Park, Warwickshire. In 2011 the show was busy, but this year visitor number were up and 13,000 enthusiastic gardeners attended. The organisers are delighted to announce the 2013 show dates (March 15-March 17).

It was green fingers of a different kind for us on Tuesday as we helped to support our nominated charity Greenfingers on its inaugural Garden Re-Leaf fundraising day. Greenfingers help terminally ill children and their families by building gardens in hospices across the UK. This is a charity close to our hearts and along with fundraising activities throughout the year;

It is such a promising time of year. I drove from Suffolk to East Yorkshire a couple of days ago. On the drive I enjoyed seeing that lovely green blush of bud colour on hedgerow plants and the froth of white blossom of blackthorn floating on black stems. There was warmth in the air, too. Last weekend I went to

We asked our Facebook friends the best ideas for saving water, and this is a selection of their best ideas combined with ours : Remember if you are going to water, water early in the morning or, even better last thing at night. You lose a lot less water to evaporation that way and the water gets a chance to really seep

Yesterday the UK gardener woke up to the prospect of hose pipe restrictions in the South and South East. Ever since hose pipe restrictions were introduced into the UK (the first one was in the interwar period), they have meant widespread restrictions on using a hosepipe to water the garden and other non-recreational uses. But this year is different.

The odds are on it being a dry growing season, with gardeners up and down the country facing watering restrictions. There are many ways that we can cope and keep our plants and gardens looking good. Photo: Verbena bonariensis and Echinacea purpurea are two hard-working border plants for dry conditions. Close planting is a good technique as the ornamental plants