Gardeners' Heaven

It seems awful early to be picking sloes, but yesterday on a lovely August Bank Holiday Monday morning, I did just that. And I wasn’t the first.  Bush after bush had already been stripped bare, smacking of a more professional approach than a  home-made past-time.  However,  my morning walk is blessed with hedgerows full of [...]

by Alan Titchmarsh If you’ve ever wanted to do something that ‘makes a difference’, here’s your chance. By taking part in a huge on-line survey of butterflies, you’ll be helping scientists to take the pulse of nature right across the country. The Big Butterfly Count is a citizen science project that relies on information send [...]

As midsummer rolls round most vegetable gardens will have gaps where early potatoes have been dug and rows of salads have been used up, so to keep your patch at peak productivity, it pays to fill any bare ground up again as quickly as possible. First clear away all the rubbish from the previous crop, [...]

by Alan Titchmarsh ‘What’s wrong with my tomatoes?’ At this time of year, it’s a question I hear all the time. Tomatoes are such a popular crop that it’s easy to think the plants ‘grow themselves’ and ‘can be left to get on with it’. But they can’t. And half their troubles are due to [...]

by Alan Titchmarsh If you’re new to soft fruit-growing, the best tip I can give you is stay at home for the summer. The picking season starts any time now, and if you’ve grown a full range of species, you’ll have your work cut out gathering, freezing and baking. The strawberry season started early this [...]

What to do in June. “It is the month of June, the month of leaves and roses, when pleasant sights salute the eyes and pleasant scents the noses” Nathaniel Parker Willis June is all about colour. The flowers in your borders are bursting into life and while the grass might not be as green as [...]

It seems we should all be fairly well versed with the concept of compost – the art of throwing unwanted vegetable peelings into a bin in the garden, waiting for around a year or two and then using the resulting organic matter in our veg beds and borders. As part of National Compost Awareness week, [...]

Gardening for most people is a relatively straight forward affair. Open back door, step outside, begin gardening.  However with the increase of inner-city housing and lack of outside space comes a problem for those who long for more than a window box or a small roof terrace. The popularity of the allotment has rocketed, giving [...]

A relatively new concept in garden design, Square foot gardening is a based on the principle of growing fruit and vegetables in raised beds in a richly fertilised soil. The beds are subsectioned with either string or canes, ie square feet. The original square-foot-gardening method used an open-bottomed box to contain a finite amount of [...]