Dahlia has become something of a byword for cool of late, bolstered in some measure by flower power gurus, Sarah Raven, Blue Carrot, the fabulous Erin at Floret and a whole slew of other luscious flower champions and I like many have become enamored, nay completely overtaken by an unexpected greed for them in almost…
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Recipe – Red Currant Jelly
I always have great plans for preserves and jamming as much of my produce and foraging as possible as the seasons roll around but last year everything well to hell in a hand basket as life stopped for our RHS Tatton Show Garden. In theory it was only July but in practice it was most…
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Gloves
I’m on the hunt again. New gloves and glovey recommendations. I run through gardening gloves like a dose of salts they never last too long with my line of work and of course the well known pointy finger syndrome. I usually go through the top of at least one finger in a month of wearings…
Continue ReadingCultivar or Variety
Following the binomial system introduced by Carl Linnaeus in the 1700’s the they appear after the specific epithet (second term in the scientific name) almost final piece of the puzzle and a clear identifier for any plant is it’s variety or cultivar. The main difference between the two is that a VARIETY is a usually…
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Plant of the Month – December – Galanthus
December or is it really January when we expect to see those tiny white nodding heads lighting up the garden and heralding Spring, well at least the start of something moving underground. This year, 2016, it’s been a bitter December, admittedly with some highs but mostly frozen with a cold wind blasting through. My tiny…
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Recipe: Medlar Jelly
What is a medlar I hear you ask? Mespilus germanica is a small odd shaped fruit grown here since Roman times. A small sized roundish fruit with a rough mid brown skin a bit like a kiwi fruit in texture, but turn it to the base and it splits into a wide crack giving it’s…
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Flower Farming
Garden designing is a precarious business, at least for me as a small business, so I have been looking at other streams of income to run smoothly alongside and bring in some much needed cash flow. In fact I have had multiple streams of incomes since I started designing gardens, writing, garden maintenance, selling Iris…
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Recipe: Crab Apple Jelly
I am a preserver, by that I mean I make use of as much produce, foraged, home grown and free as I can. From my plot (400m2), from friends as well as the local hedgerows and parks. This year I made crab apple jelly for the first time. I’ve never really thought about it before…
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10 things to know about doing an RHS Show Garden
1. Read the RHS manual’s before hand and then read them again. Tomes I thought, one was 90 odd pages. “No time“, “not really going to be relevant“. BUT how wrong I was. They were mines of information and preparedness, not entirely infallible but unless you’ve read it/them you don’t know this. The H&S manual…
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How do you keep Slugs and Snails off your Hosta’s?
During the build up for the RHS Tatton 2016 show one of the neighbors suggested we might be getting some questions from visitors about how we had such perfect Hostas. On arrival from our nursery, Hortus Loci, the was not a single bite out of them. Of course this made me worry that a rout…
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