Fennel and Fern

I have, as usual, been thinking about the upcoming season with the gardening club. I’m not sure if I do nothing but think or if my mind just regularly drifts off to the club. Truthfully, it’s both; I’m so worried about making a “wrong” purchase I put a lot of thought into, plus I am super excited about the growing season.

We only have three raised beds, a herb bed, a strip of poor soil near a fence and one-and-half grow houses (one large and one small). Written like that it sounds like quite a lot. Let 15 children on it and it seems minuscule.

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The tragic death of a friend spurred Roberta Hershon to found Hope in Bloom, a charity which plants gardens at the homes of breast cancer patients. She tells us about her work.

Exposure to nature helps to lower blood pressure, boost energy, reduce stress, sharpen minds, teach patience and can give way to spontaneous smiles. Gardens are magical. They touch our senses, let us escape from our daily routines, lower anxiety levels and give us a more positive outlook as well as increase the feel good hormone, serotonin, in our bodies. As if that’s not enough, taking care of a garden beats a trip to the gym any day. All these benefits are magnified when someone is sick.

My oldest friend, Beverly, heard the four words women fear most: ‘You have breast cancer.’ Continue reading →

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{Weekly wrap-up}
Hot posts, stories and images from the web this week.

The Guardian gives advice on growing potatoes, along with how to fight the dreaded late blight.

Sound words on growing raspberries from Lila Das Gupta on the Gardeners’ World Blog.

Patrick from Bifurcated Carrots gives a step-by-step guide to grafting.

A very sweet succulent colander/planter from Little Green Fingers.

Garden bloggers around the country are planning a meet-up at the Malvern Show.

And if you really must celebrate Valentine’s Day, Heavy Petal has come up with a list of gifts that are not pink, fluffy, or made of chocolate.

Trebah is a garden that leaves you wishing you were a child again so you could run through the forests of giant rhubarb and clamber through the ravine, pretending you were an explorer. Actually, when I visited  few years ago, I found myself secretly doing this anyway. This tropical ravine garden in Cornwall will leave you breathless. It isn’t just that the setting is sublime, or that the planting is so lush and exotic, or that so many of the trees, shrubs and plants are so rare. There is something extra to this garden, a little bit of magic.

Image by Claire Croft.

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…Hannah Nunn’s fabulous botanical lamps. The nights are still dark, and the mornings still more miserable, but these sweet designs would cheer even the most horrible winter evening.

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Kathy Brown takes us through the creation of her incredible Winter Garden at Stevington, which opens to the public this month.

A photographer once phoned me up in January and asked whether it would be worth his while coming to visit. I was forced to say ‘NO’. I was shocked by my answer, never having considered ‘Winter’ as a time of great interest. How wrong could I have been! A visit the next February to Anglesey Abbey’s excellent Winter Walk was one of those life changing moments. We decided to create a smaller version here. In just five years it has become a real joy.

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Acres Wild is an award-winning garden design practice run by Debbie Roberts and Ian Smith. They enjoy creating bold structures softened with naturalistic planting. Their portfolio is varied, ranging from windswept gardens to lush oases. And here are three of their most stunning designs. Continue reading →

Are you ready to start sowing? I was very excited this week when a parcel arrived containing my heated propagator for sowing plants that like it hot. And now the light is growing stronger, it is time to dig out those packets of seed which are sprawling over a shelf in my fridge and get to work.

I’m not advising sowing all your seeds now: you’ll end up with a very leggy, weak and miserable tomato plant if you start it on your windowsill this month, as it will have to wait until May before it can go outside. But for my sweet peas, passionflowers, onions and chillis, January is the time to sow. I’m incredibly relieved seed-sowing time is on the way: there are only so many hours you can fill by looking at seed catalogues.

So in celebration of the start of the season, here’s the F&F guide to sowing your seeds.

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It’s around this time of year that we start to clear our drawers of old socks which have got too many holes in to remain decent. It seems a shame to throw them in the bin, so cut them all up for compost. Stirred into a hot pile compost heap, these socks will rot down in no time, and come summer, I’ll be spreading the soil over my beds.

Cutting up and composting socks might be a bit hippy, but it is just one of the ways gardeners can cut down on the amount of rubbish that ends up in landfill sites. Here are a few other household items that you can compost:

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I’m pretty relieved January is over. It really is the most boring month of the year, and come February, there’s hope that your shoes won’t forever be full of rain and your hair won’t ping into a horrible, frizzy halo (or that might just be me). So now the new gardening season is on the way, here are some jobs for the garden in February. Feel free to add your own in the comments below.

Last year I grew sweet pea ‘Matucana‘ all over willow obelisks in my garden. I’ve always had an awkward relationship with sweet peas: some of the colours remind me of thermal vests, and I used to think them an old lady plant.

That all changed when a good friend of mine picked me some from her garden to sit on my desk at work. They were terribly distracting as they smelt amazing, and my very lovely friend had grown some real beauties. So, buoyed by my success last year with ‘Matucana’, here’s my 2010 sweet pea seed selection.

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I’m sneaking in a few last-minute chores before seed-sowing begins in earnest. One of the quickest and most satisfying is giving those autumn raspberry canes a little chop back. You should cut them down to ground level in winter, while the plants are still fast asleep, and then give them a little pick-me up in the form of some comfrey tea. I also draw a warm blanket of mulch around their shallow roots: some well-rotted horse manure does perfectly.

Of course, you can leave the canes to produce an earlier crop. But if you’ve planted both summer and autumn-fruiting varieties, there isn’t much point: autumn raspberries bring fruit just when other crops are starting to dwindle, so chop away now for a happy, fruity autumn.

Click here to visit the Fennel&Fern Flickr group and upload your own images

{Weekly wrap-up}
Hot posts, stories and images from the web this week

Stunning knitted vases on Design*Sponge

Fabulous shrubs for winter interest from A Way to Garden

Beautiful forced bulbs by Elspeth Thompson

Win a raised bed on the Guardian Gardening Blog

Don’t forget to enter the January giveaway from Seed Pantry and visit our offers page.

And Lia Leendertz has started a marvellous new gardening blog. Hoorah!

What was your favourite blog post this week? Post a link below to share it with other F&F readers.

…these mini squash from Marshalls. I have always loved Patty Pan squash for the UFO shape of their fruit, and you can grow them and eat them in the same way as courgettes. This year I am also going to grow these ‘Sweet Lightning’ squash on the balcony and over the trellis as their fruits are small and very ornamental, as well as tasting fabulous.

The walled garden at Rousham is one of those must-see sites, a fabulous example of English landscape design. Unlike many of the real gardens we feature on F&F, Rousham has remained largely untouched since its inception in the eighteenth century. There are still fat herbaceous borders, a small parterre and marvellous espalier apple trees.

Here are some shots from this beautiful estate:

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