Oddly enough, in my neck of the woods, the dead of winter is one of the busiest times in my garden year. Sheltering in my ersatz greenhouse aka sunroom, when the snow is lying heavy on the ground (19 inches heavy, and even heavier further south, while I wonāt mention Wyoming), I have all the […]
Now that weāre well into fall, growing outdoors is almost impossible unless you have a greenhouse or some other protected enclosure. But how do you keep this environment sufficiently warm to prevent the winter cold from killing your plants, especially at night or on days without sunshine? There are more ways of doing this than […]
There can now be no pretence that anything else is going to ripen in the greenhouse this year. A greenhouse can do a lot but the clocks have changed, the dark is creeping in, and the weather has cooled, and we have to give up thinking that those final rays of low sunlight might turn […]
Okay, I was misled into getting seed for this greenhouse ādelightā, from the advertisements I foolishly imagined the flavour would be delicious. From itās parentage it looked promising; the Solanum family gives us many tasty fruits, so this āeasy annualā Lychee / Litchi Tomato, S. sisymbrifolium could be an excellent crop. Coming from Brazil this […]
At Hartley Botanic, we believe that growing edibles from heritage seeds is one of the biggest trends amongst Greenhouse owners this year. Interest in heritage, edible varieties, some of which can be traced back to as early as the 1600ās, has been largely driven by the rediscovery of their unbeatable flavours. Often tender crops, requiring […]
Clear autumn leaves from gutters as they start to fall. Prevent downpipes from clogging by putting a pan scourer in the hole at the top, then clearing the debris as it backs up, from time to time. Collect rainwater in a waterbutt, when it is full, water at the base of fences under the eaves […]
Itās bulb season. This will be a two-part column about how to enjoy growing bulbs inside a glasshouse. Most of this advice will also be useful for growing on a sunny windowsill. Next month I will talk about forcing other tender and hardy bulbs indoors. But this month, Iām talking about Amaryllis with Christian Curless, […]
Unlike the costly high-tech carbon capture and storage strategies being proposed to mitigate climate change, tree-planting is free, simple, people-powered ā and proven. Iāve beaten the redwings to it. The crowd has skirted along the edge of the wood and descended on my neighbourās rowans, where theyāre now merrily stripping them of their dazzling orange […]
āIf you can read a book, you can do anything.ā Short of embroidering it on a cushion, thatās a mantra Iāve lived by since my best friend in high school wised me up. Iāve packed in a lot of reading since then, researching the history of garden design and landscaping for the books Iāve written, […]
A year or so ago, a friend was throwing out a dozen ten-foot-long, one inch-diameter, galvanized pipes. I said I would take them with the thought in mind of building an affordable hoop house. Having filled my 300-square-foot heated greenhouse with more than 200 plants, and with more plants than I intended in my unheated […]
Winter is knocking on the door once again and thereās lots to do in the garden in preparation. The trouble is you can never predict what winter will bring and I would like every gardener to be provided with their own personal crystal ball ā particularly now that our climateās so changeable. What will the […]
Whether you want to plant for wildlife or deter burglars, the humble bramble has many attributes I have a long and chequered history with the humble blackberry. As a child I lived on a crescent of houses and in the middle of the crescent was an allotment site, where we had a plot. We didnāt […]
