Posts under ‘vegetables’

Row 1: ‘Ashbrook’ from Dobies; ‘Nymans’ from Nicky’s Nursery; ‘Erika’ from Nicky’s Nursery; ‘Bijou’ from Mr Fothergill’s
Row 2: ‘Revolution’ from The Cook’s Garden; ‘Tom Thumb’ from Seeds of Change; ‘Dazzle’ from Unwins; ‘Lakeland’ from Thompson and Morgan
Row 3: ‘Frillice’ from Unwins; ‘Delicato’ from Mr Fothergill’s; ‘Multy’ from Thompson and Morgan; ‘Sioux’ from Mr Fothergill’s;
Row 4: [...]

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 [...]

Image copyright Nobu.
I’m quite a fan of mixing purely ornamental flowers and veg, but sometimes I wonder whether this is rather silly, given the number of stunning flowers  which go on to produce fabulous edible crops. So before you plant up your patch with plants you can’t eat, here are some crops with very striking [...]

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 [...]

Parsnips have a reputation for being rather tricky beasts. It’s a shame, because once you’ve got them growing, there’s really nothing you have to do except wait nine months or so for their delicious roots to swell into something worth harvesting. Save a little bit of watering in hot weather, that really is it.
But starting [...]

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 [...]

A few weeks ago my fiancé and I set the date for our wedding: 12th June 2010. As some of you keen mathematicians will have noticed, this is a little less than four months away, which has a number of implications. Firstly, I now have little motivation to plant in my current garden, since I [...]

Anyone who has been reading this blog for more than a couple of weeks will realise I really, really love comfrey. It is probably the most important plant in an organic garden, especially if you are growing vegetables. I love comfrey because it means I don’t have to buy any fertilisers, because it perks up [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The snow and freezing cold weather has restricted our visits to the allotment to gathering winter vegetables. This lack of activity gave us the ideal opportunity to plan for the coming season and finalise seed orders. Now we have everything that we need to start the new season…except favourable growing and soil conditions.
It is tempting [...]

The snow has finally melted in my garden. It has revealed seven by five metres of uneven, scuffed lawn, a bare border, an empty patio, and a small, shabby greenhouse with broken panes of glass. The snowfall made the garden a perfect white, blank canvas.

My challenge this year is to start at the beginning with [...]

Parsnips are pretty ugly, curmudgeonly beasts. But one of the things I love about them is their sheer size. Perhaps it is because I’m expecting something the size of a maincrop carrot to come up when I start forking about in the soil in the middle of winter, or perhaps it is a chance to [...]

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 [...]

I am absolutely thrilled with how well the Good Growing Guide has gone down on the blog. And today I’m even more thrilled to tell you that you can buy these lovely little postcards in hard copy for yourself. I received my first batch of cards from the printers this week, and did a little [...]