There’s a miracle ingredient that can keep your potting compost going on and on… but it comes with an environmental price-tag. This time last year, I was astounded by how well my greenhouse tomatoes were doing. Twelve months on, I’m truly gobsmacked at how well this year’s plants are faring. My astonishment has nothing to […]
Plants will salve the wounds humans have inflicted on the landscape – but a little citizen rewilding can speed the process… and sow joy. It’s taken two decades for me to fully realise it: I’m gardening – in the foothills of Eryri in North Wales – in a land of industrial, human-made scars. A buzzard’s […]
‘Expert’ advice is good for filling column inches and boosting social media profiles – but much of it is altogether less useful when it comes to getting new gardeners growing. Whatever happened to simplicity, to straightforwardness, to easiness – especially in our gardens and greenhouses? Amid spring’s usual gardening febrility, there’s a noticeable explosion of […]
As fuel prices and the cost of living escalate, greenhouse gardeners – who can grow their own food by plugging into free, infinitely renewable energy – are ahead of the game. Our greenhouses did us proud during the worst, dragging stay-at-home spells of the coronavirus pandemic. They helped restore our spirits, let alone our sanity. […]
Snowdrops are an endangered species now, and as for frost… welcome to the winter wonderland. I was on my way to visit winter. Real, authentic winter – so the invite said. I wasn’t quite there yet. Big black slugs glided over the sign that read ‘GalanthoArk – 200m’. It pointed to the huge domed greenhouse […]
Why would you want a blight-beating tomato in your greenhouse, where blight is rarely an issue? Because in these increasingly unpredictable times, it pays to think laterally. Solutions to gardening problems sometimes arrive in moments of sheer serendipity. My greenhouse was the setting for such a moment last summer, when the conditions inside flipped from […]
Seaweed ticks every earth-friendly box: it’s natural, renewable and packed with growth-boosting nutrients – and bagging your own lets you give back to the planet in the process. Facing into a howling gale, sand grains stinging your cheeks as you’re ducking spume, might not seem the obvious conditions in which to harvest a free and […]
An inspiring new book on the wonder of woodchips is packed with must-try ideas that let you play a part in climate cooling – even while heating your greenhouse. Gardening books abound, but every once in a while one appears that’s clearly been conceived in earth-friendly gardening heaven. These are the books you feel were […]
With the world’s focus on ways to cool the global ‘greenhouse’, the onus is on all of us not to add to the problem. Earth-friendly under-cover gardening can make our greenhouses part of the solution. Being on life support is serious stuff. It means we’re so poorly that we need extra, emergency help to actually […]
Embracing the alchemy of decay will enhance the life – plant, soil, wild and human – in your garden. It was a gamble, but it was also a back-saving, pragmatic experiment from which the wilder life in my garden and I are now reaping rich, dark rewards. Wood – as chips, mulch, paths, poles, stakes, twigs, […]
When the climate crisis took hold, the effects on gardening were devastating. Thankfully, technological innovation is allowing us to get growing again. ‘Just imagine what this kind of weather did to greenhouses in the late 2020s,’ shouted Cally over the thunderous din. Unlike the group she was guiding, she didn’t flinch as 3in-wide hellstones – or hailstones, […]
A green energy byproduct that allows compost to be revitalised and reused offers a potential pathway to a future beyond peat. Out of all the new stuff that’s appeared on the gardening block in the last few years, plant-derived digestate – the fibrous, chopped-up remains of forage maize and other grasses that have been fed […]
