Posts under ‘fruit’

Patricia Fox’s modern take on the potager, ‘Freshly Prepped’, went down a storm at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show last year. The designer decided to create a kitchen garden (which was also a kitchen in a garden), where every single plant was edible. But that wasn’t enough - this isn’t just a working veg plot [...]

Unless you have many rambling acres of gardens in which to grow your veg, chances are that like most F&F readers, you’ll be trying to combine flowers, pumpkins and somewhere to enjoy the fruits of your labours all in one plot. And growing veg doesn’t mean that you automatically sacrifice the chance of having a [...]

Although we’ve been held back by the weather, there are some jobs which just had to be completed this month.
We applied a second spraying of winter wash, which will hopefully keep some of the fruit tree pests at bay. Winter washes are based on plant oils and are suitable for organic gardening. Before we started [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

A few days before Christmas, I took three streps out of my front door, slipped on a sheet of ice, skidded all the way to the end of the path, and landed on my bottom. I was so angry with the hard frost we had had overnight that I huffed my way back inside and [...]

December announced its arrival with the first real frost of the year. The onset of the cold weather meant it was essential that all necessary frost protection was in place. Outside the bay tree – at the moment more of a small bush – has been draped with a couple of layers of fleece and [...]

If you’re writing a list of resolutions today, the F&F list of monthly chores for the garden would be a good place to start. They’ll last far longer than that guilt-inducing gym membership or abstaining from chocolate. And they’re much more fun, as well.
Click here for January’s jobs. If you’ve got any of your own [...]

A new month and it seems like an entirely different country. Autumn now seems to be heading inexorably towards winter as posts in our weather blog show.
We made just a flying visit to the plot to harvest a few vegetables and make sure plants in the greenhouse had sufficient water. We didn’t even stop for [...]

On the plot and in the garden we have continued the big tidy-up. Weeds continue to grow and so dealing with them is still a major chore.
Whitefly are everywhere and are constantly being disturbed by our activities. This year they have arrived fairly late but seem to have reached plague proportions. Clouds of them [...]

Last week we dug the last of our potatoes and this week we have been browsing seed potato suppliers trying to decide which varieties to plant next year. There always seems to be so much to take into consideration. Suppliers are obviously going to present the seed potatoes that they sell in the best light [...]

I don’t normally mind the swing-about of the seasons towards winter: normally everything stays fresh and new and interesting until January (which, incidentally, is so disgustingly miserable and pointless that it should be illegal). But there’s one thing that flicks me into a grump as winter approaches: People Who Have Colds, People Who Think Their [...]

October was heralded by fierce winds that has either stripped most leaves from bushes and fruit trees or reduced them to tatters. The large felty leaves of the kiwi are now brown and shrivelled and the banana plants in the garden are completely tattered and sorry looking.

Several years ago when we first took the plot we inherited several old apple cordons and redcurrant and blackcurrant bushes. These had to be rediscovered in the overgrowth that soon swamps a deserted plot and were surrounded by coarse grass which each summer became overgrown and difficult to control.

When Toby was a child, he used to ramble over the South Downs with his siblings and pick lallies. Lallies are berries, any berry really, which you can pop in your mouth when no-one is looking. As a child, I used to sneak up to our vegetable patch and pick bucketfulls of lallies from the [...]