Posts under ‘pests’

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 [...]

Not everything in the garden is happy with this rain. I’m sure we have had more than our fair share of Smith Periods (the humid conditions which bring dreaded tomato and potato blight), and the aubergine was looking so grumpy I brought it inside. But under the raspberry canes, a frog has set up camp, [...]

I have overcome my lifelong fear of marigolds, and grown these beautiful Tagetes patula ‘Durango Red’ in my vegetable beds. When I was growing up, marigolds were the beasts of municipal planting, and they looked terribly miserable. I’m still not at all fond of bright orange and yellow cultivars, but these deep scarlet and gold-edged [...]

If you’re lucky enough to be outside and enjoying the weather today, here’s a list of jobs for July.

It was inevitable; it was in fact part of the deal, but still, it was hard letting go. Today I dug the billowing nasturtiums up from the front of the raised bed and tipped them onto the compost heap. All through May and June they have been rambling happily over the wooden frame and across [...]

This evening, as I poked around in the garden, admiring the smell of freshly washed soil and the sight of rows of carrot and onion seedlings pushing their way upwards, I found I had a number of little visitors.
I had been expecting these caterpillars ever since I saw a cabbage white butterfly inspecting the nasturtiums [...]

There’s still plenty to be done in the garden, even if you just fancy melting in a deckchair, so read our jobs for June to keep up with your flowers and veg this month.

Hoorah. The first carrots from the Garden from Scratch. I sowed these Autumn King II in September as an experiment to see if they would make it through the winter. Which they did. They have been growing in a deep container on the balcony, which gets the most sun in the garden, interplanted with rocket [...]

 
I met this slug as he journeyed across my compost heap. Unfortunately, it was his last journey, as I am one of the awful, brutal gardeners who keeps a pair of ’slug-cutting’ scissors in their coat pocket. I’m sorry, Mr Slug, but there’s just no other way. Either you go quietly now, or endure weeks [...]

Meet Tigger, the Garden from Scratch’s resident moggy. He’s an enormous RSPCA rescue cat who joined me on my 15th birthday, and has been jumping on to my bed at impossible hours of the morning ever since. Tigger is affectionate, demanding, huge. The last cannot be exaggerated enough. He recently scared off a door-to-door charity [...]