As many of you may know I live in the wonderfully named village of Cold Aston, up above Bourton on the Water, and it lives up to its name wonderfully well because it’s chilly throughout the year.  Many gardeners get my village mixed up with Cold Aston near Bath, the home of Derry Watkin’s Special […]

You need a greenhouse to crop Feijoas though not to grow these as ornamental evergreen shrubs. For these are fairly hardy, tougher than thought. I’ve had a couple surviving outdoors here in Norfolk for twenty plus years which have never fruited. First introduced from S. America in 1898 these are found in Botanic gardens though […]

I know that autumn is looming. The French partridges have started sunning themselves on my low stone walls and they’re so tame and plump, having been reared in cages for dare I say the shooting season, that they only fly off when I’m feet away. They’re the Liz Taylors of the game birds, with exotic […]

From mid-summer until November, rhododendrons and camellias are forming flower buds for next year’s display, so it’s essential that the compost or soil around them doesn’t dry out at any point, if it does they simply won’t form buds or will demonstrate their disapproval by shedding the ones that have already formed. Check your plants […]

With a warm glasshouse you can grow this succulent salad crop year round. Originally from India long ago this self seeding annual is now found wild, worldwide. Introduced to England in 1582 it was in Maine, in quantity, by 1605. And by 1819 it had spread across the entire Americas in such local abundance it […]

Every greenhouse gardener needs a good compost in order to raise seeds and plants, but in recent years it’s been very difficult to find a good compost that’s consistent in quality. Historically price mattered more than anything else, so it was quite possible to buy a good bag of something one week and then get […]

Growing Peanuts in your greenhouse is an excellent way to get children interested. Pea, Ground or Monkey nuts are known to kids everywhere, if not as fresh nuts then roasted salted ones and certainly their famous butter. Actually Arachis hypogaea is not a nut from a tree but a member of the Pea family, somewhat […]

Apart from the few days of summer last month we spent most of last month in low light, constant rain and chilling winds, so the ground is still too cold and wet for sowing crops directly and will be for a while yet, so thank goodness there is plenty to do in the greenhouse. Seeds […]

A glasshouse gem often seen on a kitchen window sill is the Hot-water plant with its long flowering display of pastel trumpet blooms. Related to Gloxinias several dozen species were introduced from Central America in the late 18C early 19C. These were tropical plants requiring hot house conditions and were soon hybridised to be more […]

In the last 30 years I’ve had two gardens and, although there were only 20 miles apart, they were as different as chalk and cheese, a bit like my children! My old garden in Hook Norton in Oxfordshire, famous for its beer, was a stone’s throw away from the church. The one-acre garden was on […]