Weaving, Winding and Snipping

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Charles Dowding, Espaliered apple, Japanese wineberry, RHS, tayberry

Whether it’s an allotment or garden, most of us don’t have a lot of growing space and have ambitions greater than room will allow. There are ways of maximising space though. Fruit bushes and even trees can be trained in all sorts of ways making it possible to fit quite a selection into a small area. With careful planning and some nifty work with the secateurs it’s surprising just how much you can grow.

Training my tayberry

My tayberry is a perfect example. A cross between a raspberry and a blackberry its growth habits are certainly more blackberry than raspberry. The canes it sends out are long, really long, up to 9ft. It’s also a biennial cropper which means that it sends out canes one year which then flower and fruit the next. The idea when I first planted it was to train it into a panel of wire fencing with one year’s canes which would be bearing the fruit trained in one direction and then the fresh canes it sent up during that growing season trained the other. That was the plan anyway. I just didn’t give the plant enough space or metal fencing for this method to actually work. Instead, I ended up weaving and winding the canes around the metal support in a snake-like fashion. The problem came when the new canes started to grow from the base during the summer. It’s important to keep the two different years’ growth separate so that when you come to prune out the canes that have fruited you don’t mistake any of next year’s growth. If you do you’ll have no fruit the following year. In the end, I ended up allowing these stems to simply grow out along the ground. By August, the tayberry had stopped fruiting and I pruned those canes out at the base and removed all the growth that was on the metal support. The task then was to wrestle with the new growth. Fortunately, the canes remain really pliable and apart from the vicious thorns (you can buy a thorn-free variety) it isn’t too difficult a job to wind these stems in and out of the fence support, snaking them around just as the others had been. It is a bit of a faff but doing it this way means my tayberry only takes up a space of about 4ft. Ideally, each year’s worth of growth would have a space of about 6ft so that’s a space of 12ft in total but I’m not sure many of us could devote that to one plant.

A fellow allotmenteer has employed the same strategy successfully with a hybrid blackberry and Naomi at Out of my Shed recently wrote about training her Japanese wineberry which has very similar sprawling growth. Her ideas are much more aesthetic than mine! This summer I visited the kitchen garden of a local restaurant and I loved the idea they had had of growing a thorn free variety of blackberry up one side of an arch and on the other an apple was being trained to form an apple and blackberry crumble archway.

A blackberry being trained up an archway

I dream of having my own orchard but at the moment it certainly isn’t a possibility but I did manage to squeeze in an espalier apple tree into the garden last spring. I was impatient and so bought one that came already trained into 2 tiers but when I pruned it in July I spotted two branches that looked like the beginnings of a third level. With the posts and wire in place for the tree already Wellyman added another line of wire and I tied some twine around the 2 stems to the wire to start training the branches down into a horizontal position. We only got 6 fruit from the tree this year but I’m hopeful as the tree gets older that we should get a good supply.

I have toyed with the idea of adding some stepover apples to one of my beds at the allotment. These are the type that grow to about 1ft in height before the branches are trained out horizontally. I really like the idea that I could get several varieties running down the edge of one of my beds with space to grow salad crops which would not make great demands on the soil. Charles Dowding successfully grows crops like this at the base of his larger apple trees. Pruning of fruit trees grown in this way might seem quite daunting but armed with my RHS encyclopaedia it wasn’t actually that difficult. It is mainly about keeping the shape of the trained tree and encouraging fruiting wood by keeping the stems short and stubby. One of the great advantages of all this pruning and contorting is that it actually encourages the plants to produce more fruit, a bonus in a small space.

Pears, cherries and nectarines can be trained to fit smaller spaces and gooseberries can be made into beautiful standards giving your kitchen garden or allotment a sophisticated air. Currants can also be trained and look beautiful up against a wall dripping in glistening fruit. By concentrating growth to fewer stems and opening up the plant more light can get to the wood to ripen it, important for fruit production. It also means fruit will ripen more quickly and air flow around the plant is improved, leading to fewer problems with fungal diseases.

I’d love to see any of your own examples of growing fruit in small spaces.

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Flushed Away

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flooding, green manures, nutrient leaching, RHS, soil testing

Flooded field

Well what a week for weather. Gale force winds, so much rain and yet more flooding. After the summer we’ve had maybe it was too much to expect autumn would be kinder to us all. We’ve been lucky. We lost a fence panel to the wind but this can be replaced fairly easily come spring and the allotment is squelchy to say the least but compared to those who have had their homes inundated with flood water it’s nothing.

Much of the countryside around us is under water. The two main rivers, the Usk and the Wye have broken their banks and because we had such a wet summer the water table is already at full capacity. As a result, water is lying on saturated ground. It’s hard to tell what is river and what is a field in places. We popped into our local garden centre on Sunday to find the car park flooded and a makeshift walkway in place to access the shop.

Garden centre car park

Eventually the water will subside and the ground will dry out but the consequences of so much rain go beyond the immediate problems of flooding. For farmers and gardeners the impact on the soil can be significant. Nutrients are held in the soil by electrical charges and are released into a film of liquid called soil water after a series of chemical reactions and exchanges. This soil water is held around soil particles and plant roots are able to absorb nutrients that are held in it. However, after lots of rain this film of water becomes so thick and heavy the soil cannot hold onto it and the nutrients are lost as water drains away. Heavy rain is to be expected over winter and in agriculture the ground is treated as being totally deficient in nitrogen by spring. Nitrogen, essential for leafy growth is a particularly soluble nutrient.

For farmers, soil testing and monitoring of nutrient levels has become an increasingly important part of their job, allowing them to increase yields but use expensive fertilisers only when and where they are needed. For gardeners it’s a very different story. Incorporating compost and manure is normally enough to ensure a fertile soil in our garden or on the allotment. The major nutrients, nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium are those that plants use the most and can be satisfactorily replaced with organic matter. Generally, it is uncommon for soils to lack the trace elements such as boron and manganese that are vital to plant growth but are only needed in tiny quantities. However, it is difficult to know how the unusually heavy rain this summer followed by the wet autumn will have affected nutrient levels in our soil. Certainly, tests of agricultural land are showing significantly lower levels of nutrients, although not all of this can be attributed to just the rain and is a result of changes in farming practices.

I’ve never felt the need to test my soil before other than doing a pH test. Listening to Gardener’s Question Time yesterday though I heard Christine Walkden say that nutrient leaching has been a significant problem this summer. Certainly some plants on the allotment have struggled this year and whilst I’m sure some of it was simply down to the lack of sunshine and warmth some of it may well have been down to a lack of the vital food they needed.

Sandy soils and those with little organic matter which already have good drainage are particularly prone to nutrient leaching but we’ve all had so much rain this year that it could well be a problem for a lot more of us. It is possible to buy kits which enable you to test your soil but these will only allow you to check the levels of the 3 major nutrients, nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium. These are the most essential though. They can be bought for between £20 to £30 from most of the major online gardening suppliers. Having never used one before I would love to hear if anyone else has had experience of using them, whether they were easy to use and were worth the trouble and cost.

It’s also possible to have your soil analysed by the RHS. A service available to both members and non-members, the charge being £25 and £30 respectively, it gives you the pH level, an idea of your soil structure, the level of organic matter in the soil and the levels of the major nutrients. It is certainly something I may consider.

Growing green manures is one way of protecting soil over winter. The leafy growth protects the surface of the soil from damage and the plant absorbs nutrients and holds on to these in the plant which are then released back into the soil. The problem for me this year was that I didn’t have any free ground to sow the manure into in September and October and my experience last year was that the seed struggled to put on enough growth to be useful if sown in mid October. Mulching with manure or compost will again protect the surface of the soil but there can be issues with manure regarding the leaching of nitrates into water courses. Although farmyard manure has much less nitrogen that is immediately available, unlike poultry manure, applying it to soil when there are no plants actively growing to take up soluble nitrogen means, particularly in periods of heavy rainfall, that it may leach from the soil. Although, just to confuse matters some growers believe nitrogen isn’t so readily leached from soils in the first place.

Nutrients are not only important for the plant, when we then eat that fruit and veg it is those nutrients that have allowed the plant to grow that we then absorb. It matters to all of us that our soils are healthy because in turn we too will be healthy. Perhaps the only way to find out the impact of all this rain is to test my soil.

The Rules of Gardening

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Daucus carota 'Black Knight', Ken Thompson, RHS, University of Sheffield, Vita Sackville-West

Daucus carota ‘Black Knight’

Much of what we do as gardeners is about following rules. We might not realise it because we probably do the jobs without thinking but somewhere along the line we learnt how to plant a shrub or the best way to get seeds to germinate. Maybe we were shown how to do it by a parent, perhaps we read about it in a book or possibly it was a Gardener’s World presenter that showed us the technique. Most of these ‘rules’ are based on sound horticultural science but are they always worth following or does sticking to what the experts say constrict us as gardeners and prevent us from being a bit more experimental?

Rosa ‘Nuits de Young’ growing in Vita’s garden at Sissinghurst in Kent

I’m reading In Your Garden at the moment which is a collection of articles written by Vita Sackville-West for the Observer newspaper in 1950. In her March 26th entry she writes about gardeners across the country, knives and secateurs at the ready, ‘brandishing these objects of destruction, battalions of professional and amateur gardeners advance, prepared to do their worst, as they have immemorially been taught’. During the war Vita had worked as a Land Army representative and came across roses that had been left to their own devices and she had found them to flourish and whilst visiting a friend’s garden, where she was daring to break the rules by barely touching her roses, she discovered the same results. As she wrote ‘it rejoices me to see that different ideas are creeping in’.

Often the difference is between those gardeners who have been formally trained and those who are self-taught. Whilst I did go back to college to study for my RHS qualifications several years ago, I’m an amateur gardener and see myself as having a welly in both camps, so to speak. I loved studying in greater depth the science behind plants and the soil, and knowing why plants did things meant I had more of an understanding of what I needed to do to help them grow but you learn the RIGHT way to do tasks and sometimes there was part of me thinking ‘really, does it have to be done that way?’ To achieve the levels of perfection attained by the RHS then the answer is yes but for the rest of us mere mortals some of the rules can be broken some of the time. For instance, the very precise ways to sow seeds may well guarantee better germination rates and be necessary on a commercial scale but when your shed is so small your seed sowing is done sat on the path outside the shed and wielding a sieve to dust my seeds with a covering of compost would be impractical you make the best of your circumstances.

This spring I tried to grow the beautiful flower Daucus carota ‘Black Knight’. As it is from the carrot family it’s advised to sow direct, as the plant does not like root disturbance. I dutifully followed instructions but the first sowing were eaten by slugs and the second sowing succumbed to the deluge of rain we had in April and May. Frustrated but determined I thought I’d start some off in a seed tray. Well perseverance paid off and I have been picking flowers for a month now and there was not a trace of the plants suffering from being moved from a seed tray into the ground.

When I got my first compost bin last year I was quite nervous about how to go about the whole business of composting, thinking I was just going to end up with a pile of slimy sludge stinking in the corner. I’d read so many books advising me to what to do that my head was swimming. Fortunately, I came across the writer, Ken Thompson, and his book, Compost. It was informative and fascinating but most importantly it was a relaxed book, there was no sense that there was a right or wrong way to do it. I don’t have time to be prodding and poking my heap so I leave the worms do their work. Admittedly, my heap is not the fastest at producing compost but I still get a result.

Zinnias attract wildlife too and are much more attractive to look at than nettles

Since then I’ve discovered two other books by Ken Thompson both of which continue his refreshingly pragmatic approach to gardening. A plant ecologist and senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield he uses his extensive knowledge to dispel some of the myths that have been perpetuated over the years. In No Nettles Required he explains that you don’t need a patch of nettles in your garden to attract wildlife or have to turn it into a scrubby, unattractive piece of wasteland just to get birds, bees and butterflies visiting His other book An Ear to the Ground which I’ve just borrowed from the library, includes snippets such as the disadvantages of solid windbreaks, such as fences, being over-exaggerated and not to be afraid to be experimental with pruning to see what gets the best results. I can see this is a book I’m going to love.

As the climate changes and the seasons become more blurred maybe we’ll all have to become more flexible in our approach to gardening. And whilst much of horticulture is based on very sound reasoning who knows what a little bit of experimenting every now and again might uncover.

I’d love to hear about the ‘rules’ you’ve broken in the garden and the outcomes, good or bad.

A Hidden Garden – Millgate House and Gardens

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Millgate House and Garden, North Yorkshire, RHS, Richmond, Rosa hellenae

Millgate Garden is one of those places you may well walk past if you had no inkling of what lay behind the 18th facade of the Georgian townhouse. In fact I have, on previous visits to the North Yorkshire town of Richmond. Lying just metres from the central market place, a simple ‘garden open’ sign was what we were told to look out for, by the lady in the tourist information centre.

What’s behind the door?

A door at the side of the house leads into an alleyway, or snicket as they are known in these parts, where there’s an honesty box to pay your admission and pick up a guide to the garden beyond. A small area at the side of the house, shaded and damp, might otherwise go unadorned; the perfect place to stash those encumbrances of modern life, such as the wheelie bin, but here it’s packed with containers of hostas and ferns.

A ‘snicket’ full of plants

Climbers such as Parthenocissus henryana and Clematis clothe the walls, there are pots of topiarised box and shots of colour from yellow poppies appearing from cracks and crevices. From here you enter the garden proper, through an old gate in the substantial stone wall enclosing the garden.

Looking back towards Millgate House

The house, with it’s Regency extension at the back towering over the garden, may feel grand but the garden at a third of an acre is the sort of space that those of us with even the smallest of outdoor spaces can take inspiration from.

The layout of the garden with its upper and lower terraces was established in the 1930s but the planting and the feel that has been created is the work of the current owners, Austin and Tim, who moved into Millgate in 1980. They wanted to create a garden with year-round interest, structure and movement. I loved it and I’m not the only who thinks this is a gem of a garden. Some years ago they won the RHS National Garden Competition from some 3200 entries.

Visiting a smallish garden like this, developed by self-taught horticulturalists for their own private pleasure is truly inspiring. Gravel paths wend through the upper part of the garden; stone steps lead down to the lower section with paths taking you to seating areas, one of which overlooks the countryside beyond and the waterfalls of the River Swale. On our visit, with river levels high, the roar of the water flooding over the rapids could be heard from the garden.

Rosa hellenae to the left

The use of trees and shrubs to create the bones of the garden, to give it structure, was for me the most inspiring feature and something I want to learn from. The upper garden is dominated by an incredible Rosa helenae, a vigorous climber that can achieve 6-8 metres in height and it’s not the only rose at Millgate with over 40 varieties scattered throughout the borders.

Acers, hollies and yews created some lovely shady areas where geraniums and martagon lillies were thriving. Clematis climbed their way up supports and through other plants. Dotted around were containers with lollipop pruned box and hollies. Purple campanulas tumbled out onto paths and spotted leaves of pulmonaris could be seen poking through gaps, hinting at what was on show here earlier in the year.

When you’re an avid garden visitor like myself it’s individuality and personality that you start to look for in other gardens and Millgate had plenty to keep me happy. I loved these little stone features.

I have no idea what their previous purpose was but you know when you’re in the garden of real plantophiles when no opportunity is missed to find somewhere to put a plant. A quote from Isaac Watts, the 18th century hymnwriter, etched onto slate and placed above a seating area was a great touch.

There were some stunning plants but I was particularly taken by this, apparently rare, Polemonium ‘Katy Daley’. A slate label said it was from Jackson’s Wold Nursery just outside Scarborough.

Polemonium ‘Katy Daley’

And, if all this wasn’t enough, Millgate House is actually a B&B. What better place to stay than somewhere with such stunning gardens and with Helmsley Walled Garden, RHS Harlow Carr and Castle Howard all in the area and my favourite plant nursery at Eggleston Hall, this has all the ingredients for the perfect gardening holiday.

For more information about Millgate House and Garden. It’s also a RHS partner garden so entry is free for members.

Collapsing Cloches and Pest Hunt

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broad beans, cloche, pea and bean weevil, RHS, slugs, successional sowing

Pea and Bean Weevil Attack

There are days when I wonder why I spend time growing my own fruit and veg. The sort of day when I think, ‘you know Wellywoman you could just buy this from the supermarket or pick it up at the farmers’ market at the weekend’. That happened on Wednesday when, after a night of strong winds and torrential rain, I went up to the plot to check everything was OK. The cloche I’d constructed over some lettuce seedlings to protect them from the cold, frosty nights we’ve been having had collapsed under the weight of the rain. Fortunately most of plants had survived. The ones that hadn’t had been got by slugs.

Our slimy mollusc foe isn’t the only pest that has already started the onslaught on the vegetation growing on my plot. My broad beans which were lovingly nurtured at home before being planted out have been chomped and my peas, which were likewise started off at home, have been nothing short of mauled. I had just assumed it was either birds or mice attacking the peas and beans. These are generally the prime culprits and a quick check of my RHS Encyclopaedia seemed to confirm my suspicions. There was little I could do about mice but I constructed a barrier out of chicken wire in the hope that this would keep off the birds. Regular inspections though showed both peas and beans were still being attacked.

After some research online Wellyman, convinced it couldn’t be mice unless they had acquired the ability and equipment to dangle Tom Cruise like in Mission Impossible, came across the true culprit, pea and bean weevil. A pest that doesn’t even get a mention in my RHS Encyclopaedia, it chews distinctive u-shaped notches into the edges of leaves. Brown and grey in colour and about 5mm long they overwinter in plant debris and vegetation before moving on to plants to feed in spring. Growing green manures overwinter doesn’t seem such a great idea now but my plot is surrounded by grass paths so even without the phaecelia the weevils would have had somewhere to hide.

My forlorn looking peas

The adults are normally not active until May but in milder springs can appear earlier. It gets worse, the adults come out at night so no chance of catching them and there is no other organic control I have come across, other than growing plants until they are a good size before planting out, which is what I ‘d thought I’d done!! My problems were probably exacerbated by the cold spell just after I’d planted them out, whilst the peas and beans sulked the weevil tucked in for dinner.

It’s only April and my great plans for successional sowing are down the pan already. Some of the peas appear to be growing ok but others aren’t going to recover, so now I’m left with patchy rows. This is my first year growing peas and broad beans and I’m beginning to wonder if it was such a wise move. Others on the allotment have been affected too, but some of the older plot holders soak their seed in Jeyes Fluid so that the mice don’t eat the seed and I’m wondering whether this is also why their seedlings haven’t been nibbled nearly so much as mine. I don’t plan on resorting to Jeyes Fluid, a quick look online and it seems fairly toxic stuff, being suggested as a way to get rid of moles to being diluted and used as a weed killer. Doesn’t sound like the sort of thing I want near something I’d eat.

I have got other batches of peas growing in the cold frames which were meant to be my second crop, so my plan is just to start again. I might try and keep the new plants at home a little bit longer this time, hopefully by the time they’re sturdy plants it will have warmed up. If not, I’ve suggested to Wellyman we start look at properties in southern France. I don’t mind changing my moniker to Sandalwoman if it means my plants actually grow.

Is anyone else experiencing early season growing pains? Please share your woes to make me feel better.

RHS National Gardening Week 16th – 22nd April

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Cannington Walled Garden, Cardiff Flower Show, Harlow Carr, National Gardening Week, RHS, Rosemoor, Wisley

RHS Cardiff Flower Show, the culmination of National Garden Week (photo courtesy of Picselect).

For the first time the RHS are hosting a week-long celebration of gardening starting on Monday 16th April and culminating with the first RHS garden show of the year at Cardiff. The aim of National Gardening Week is to bring gardeners across the country together and to encourage more people to be bitten by the horticultural bug.

The RHS have devised a packed week of events taking place at their headquarters at Wisley and their regional centres, Rosemoor in Devon, Hyde Hall in Essex and Harlow Carr in North Yorkshire. From composting clinics to meeting the gardeners and how to plant up an alpine trough to weed identification their should be something that tickles your fancy! It’s not just RHS sites that are taking part, other venues such as Woburn Abbey and Cannington Walled Garden are laying on events, too and the RHS are encouraging people across the country to come up with their own ways to celebrate, such as plant fairs and seed swaps.

Each day throughout the week has a particular theme, so the Wednesday is about careers and encouraging people to think about horticulture as a profession and the environment is the theme for the Thursday. It was Tuesday 17th that caught my eye, entitled Gardens of the Nation. The RHS want garden owners across the country to take photos of their garden on that day and then email their photos to them. The plan is to build a bigger picture of the nation’s domestic gardens, which will become a unique record of social and horticultural history.

The RHS already has an unrivalled collection of horticultural history that spans almost 500 years at the RHS Lindley Library, the world’s most important gardening archive. But gardening continues to evolve, and the RHS want to preserve for history a record of the styles and trends found in our gardens today. I love this idea, especially for those of us who don’t live near the RHS gardens or other venues hosting events for National Gardening Week. It means many more people can still take part in the event and what a great archive of material for future generations wanting to see what our gardens looked like on one day in 2012.

There will also be a daily Facebook gardeners’ question time when problems can be put to RHS members of staff. So any thorny issues troubling you, then why not ask the experts.

For more information on National Gardening Week and a list of events take a look at the dedicated website. This is also where you will find the email address for sending in your garden photos.

I’d love to hear if you have any plans for National Gardening Week and to see photos of your gardens next Tuesday.

Toby Buckland – Interview

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Gardeners' World, RHS, Toby Buckland

This is the second part of my feature on the gardener Toby Buckland. Toby started gardening after leaving school, working as a pinks and roses nurseryman at Whetman’s Pinks Nursery in Devon. He then trained at Bicton College, Hadlow College and Cambridge University’s Botanic Garden where he subsequently worked as a woodland supervisor. He has presented a variety of TV programmes including Gardeners’ World, writes for a host of publications and is the author of 5 books. In 2008 he won an RHS Gold medal and Best in Show for his Ethical Garden at Gardeners’ World Live. As he embarks on his latest project – his new online plant nursery he kindly took the time to answer a few of my questions.

1. What is your first gardening memory? – Gardening with my Uncle Bob. He took me down to the beach where I live to collect seaweed and put under the potatoes – it keeps off slugs. I remember being amazed when we harvested them that I’d been involved in growing something.
2. What tool couldn’t you be without? – If you’d asked me in summer it would have been the watering lance, it saves your back no end! But now, I’m quite attached to my Gerber knife – packing up parcels, cutting up string to tie up the bare roots – I use it all the time.
3. What is your favourite meal to cook with produce from your garden?– Well, it depends on what time of year. Pumpkin fritters in Autumn, broad beans and bacon, I love making curries with the chillies. I used to be a terrible cook but now I do most of the cooking. I like the variety and experimentation.
4. Which garden has seduced you? – Bagatelle in Paris – very seductive roses.
5. What has been your biggest gardening success? – The Marines Garden at RM 45 Commando Arbroath. I was asked to design a memorial garden for the families to remember the fallen. We brought in large boulders from all over the globe, everywhere that 45 Commando had served since 1971 when 45 Commando moved to Arbroath. It opened on Remembrance Day, 11/11/11. The marines are amazing how they just get things done. They raised more than £200,000 to build it through their fundraising efforts such as running double marathons. I was very honoured to be involved.
6. What has been your biggest gardening disaster? – Thinking I could open the doors of a garage whilst still driving a mower towards them, not a good idea. I was a reckless youth, and I did learn my lesson.
7. Which gardening book will you be snuggling up with this winter? – Truthfully, I’m more likely to read a novel than a gardening book. I prefer doing the gardening to reading about it.
8. Which garden in the world would you most like to visit? – Kyoto.
9. What would be your dream garden project? – If I won the lottery and could have a 1000 acre landscape to play with that wouldn’t be bad!
10. And finally . . . wellies or boots? – Boots definitely. I’m too hard on wellies – they always fall apart too quickly with all the digging. I live in rigger work boots that are easy to pull on and off when your hands are covered in mud.

Thanks to Toby. To read more about him and his new plant nursery go to his website http://www.tobybuckland.com/.

A Winter Project – Microgreens

Tags

coldframe, microgreens, pak choi, RHS, rocket

Last week was definitely a week for wellies. We had so much rain when I went up to the plot to pick up a leek the paths were squelching under my feet. It’s in weather like this that I’m so glad I put in the paths between my beds on the plot. No need to walk on sodden ground to pick my leeks and kale and because I haven’t damaged the structure of the soil I won’t need to rotivate the soil next Spring.

With little to do on the plot and plants still flowering in the garden so the post-frost tidy-up is still to come, I decided on a new little project. I love trying new ideas or ways of growing plants. This autumn I sowed some cut and come again lettuce, rocket and red pak choi in troughs and put them in my coldframe at the front of the house.

Salad troughs in my cold frame

They’ve worked really well, providing me with a good supply of salad leaves through the autumn and being just by the front door I can pop out on a morning and pick a handful to make up Wellyman’s packed lunch. I’m not sure how much longer I can keep them going though. Damp conditions and low light levels are the perfect conditions for botyrtis, a fungal disease that rots leafy tissue like salad leaves.

So I thought I’d give some microgreens a try.  Microgreens are simply leafy edible plants such as salad leaves, brassicas and herbs that are picked when they are about 5cms high. They are more of a garnish really, a bit like a multicoloured, multiflavoured cress. Microgreens became really popular a couple of years ago, especially in fancy restaurants. I have spotted some bags of them in my local supermarket and in delis but they are expensive to buy, so I’m not sure whether they have taken off or not.

I spotted an already blended packet of seeds at the garden centre at the weekend so I thought I’d give them a try and if they work and we like them I’ll make up my own blend. You can use all sorts of seeds – chard, beetroot, cabbage, broccoli, radish, coriander and basil to mention just a few. The packet does say you shouldn’t sow them between November and February but the RHS website says this is the perfect time of year for microgreens. So bowing to the RHS, and what I hope is it’s superior knowledge, I went ahead and sowed them.

Seed trays sown with microgreens

I filled 2 seed trays with peat-free compost, sowed the seed liberally on the surface and then lightly covered with compost. Finally, I stood the trays in some water and then let them drain before placing on my kitchen windowsill. I’m hoping there will be enough warmth and light for them to germinate and then once they have produced their seed leaves and then their first true leaves you can snip them off and eat them. Although the cuttings are small they have a really intense flavour. The RHS suggest you can even grow them like you do cress, in a tray with some wet kitchen roll. Unlike cut and come again lettuce though, once you have picked these they won’t continue to grow. So to have a good supply it is best to sow every 2 weeks. Hopefully in a couple of weeks I will be able to report back and say whether microgreens are a worthy winter project.

Book Review – RHS Nature’s Gardener by Matthew Wilson

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environmentally aware, Matthew Wilson, Pensthorpe, Piet Oudolf, planting plans, RHS

I received a copy of the updated, paperback version of the RHS Nature’s Gardener – How to Garden in the 21st Century last week. The author, Matthew Wilson, has worked for the RHS, managing 2 of their gardens, at Hyde Hall and Harlow Carr. These gardens have very different climates and will suffer in different ways from future climate change. Using this experience he has written a book that shows how gardeners can minmise their impact on the environment and adapt their space to cope more successfully with the changing climate.

For me gardening is about working with nature so I was particularly interested in reading this book.

As you would expect from a RHS book this is very comprehensive, covering all the topics you would want if you were new to gardening; from working out your soil type and pH, to how to make compost and how to plant a plant properly. Where this book differs is the emphasis on conserving resources, minimising damage to the local and wider environment and ultimately gardening in a more sustainable way. I particularly liked the chapter ‘Reuse, Recycle and Sustain’. The author shows how choices are not always straight forward. For instance, quarried stone would probably be seen as a bad choice by most people. However, if it is sourced from a local quarry, so has low transport miles and the quarry provides jobs in an area where employment opportunities are small and when the stone is in place it will be hard wearing and around for a long time, in this context it compares well with other choices.

I thought the section on understanding the importance of climate, both macro and micro was very useful and will certainly make me look at my own garden in more detail.

The emphasis of this book is very much on understanding what your growing conditions are and planting plants that will thrive. Rather than adapting your conditions to the plants you want to grow. Matthew uses examples of gardens with sustainable planting at their heart such as Piet Oudolf’s Millennium Garden at Pensthorpe in Norfolk and the Dry Garden at Hyde Hall in Essex. Ultimately this new approach is good for all concerned, plants, the environment and gardeners. Who has time to spend on plants that need mollycoddling?

I loved the ideas for greening garden structures but would have liked some examples of these in small, what I call ‘normal gardens’, rather than from an RHS garden, just so the average gardener could be inspired to try something in their own garden.

The book finishes with a selection of plants grouped into different growing conditions and different growing heights. I loved the choices and if you had a new border to fill you could easily use these as the basis of your planting plan.

I think this a great book for someone new to gardening. It manages to distill a lot of the information you would get in a much bigger RHS book and combine that with being a more environmentally aware gardener. As a slightly more experienced gardener I would have liked a bit more on how I could impact less on the environment. It would have been nice if the use of plastic and finite resources such as vermiculite and perlite had been covered, their environmental impacts and what gardeners could do as alternatives. Having said that it is an interesting read, there is no doubting the author’s passion for his subject and it is good to see the RHS embracing a more modern approach to horticulture.

Thanks to Karen at Octopus Publishing.