Best Grow Your Own!

The rogue plant was a poppy (peony poppy or opium poppy) I have been told.  I will be collecting the seeds for poppy seed bread and spraying the heads gold and silver for Christmas decorations.  I still have no idea where they came from, but they are rather beautiful although the flowers don’t last long.  Today [...]

The plant shown has appeared where I should have a globe artichoke.  I have 6 of them dotted around the garden and they all seem to be going the same way.  The leaves look like those that I’ve seen online but the flowers are nothing like.  Is this a first year thing or am I [...]

The feasting birds have been stopped with netting well secured by the more knowledgable one without whom I couldn’t be doing this.  But I have been under attack from all fronts in the past week.  Firstly, the wind blew over one of my “greenhouses” (a covered plastic four shelf thing) that was weighed down by [...]

It is a day too hot for digging beds, but that is what we have been doing this morning.  I have had much greater success with my seeds than I ever really believed possible and have run out of space in which to plant them.  The exercise is good and as my hose connection broke [...]

The past couple of days have been fabulous so I am tempted to start sowing outdoor seeds, but then we have had snow in April for the past few years so I am  having a dilemma.  I have invested in some cloches so I may risk it.  I really want to get my peas and [...]

The better half fell of his chair laughing as I came to the realisation that my shallot sets, that are growing beautifully, will only give me one shallot per plant.  ”What is the point of planting an onion to grow an onion?” I exclaimed.  I was so proud of my shallots but at this point [...]

I made a huge error with potatoes this year.  As mentioned before I am a novice and ordered my early earlies before doing any research.  As I worked away digging the beds out of my lawn I kept seeing a bug I had never seen before.   Research shows that they are Wireworm, the blight [...]

So many books, so many different opinions…. The tradition kitchen garden with rows and 3 or 4 year rotation, the French potager, or an intuitive, mixed planting.  I’m tending towards the organic, throw it in the ground and cross your fingers approach!!  Sadly it isn’t that simple and you still have to make sure plants [...]

to my coming vegetable patch!  All good vegetable growers will be shaking their heads in horror to know that I am writing this in mid January and I haven’t planned out or dug out my plot yet, but I only moved in late autumn and it took until Christmas to get organised… and as we [...]