News - Page 71
City gardeners will find inspiration and to spare at this year’s RHS Flower Show Tatton Park as the emphasis is firmly on gardening in an urban setting.
City Garden Inspiration
The show is highlighting ways to green up grey spaces and help create healthier, more sustainable cities while combatting some of the big environmental issues we face. The all-new ‘Future Spaces’ category is full of great ideas, including a garden designe...
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It’s not too late to be sowing more veg for your plot – in fact, late sowings made in July can be really helpful for keeping your patch productive right through autumn and into winter.
Sow more veg for your plot
Aim to replace your first harvest of new potatoes, broad beans and lettuces as soon as you clear the crop away. You can sow most varieties of fast-maturing vegetables two or even three times in a season. All the salad veg, fo...
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Cut herbs to store for winter right now and keep that just-snipped, fresh-from-the-garden flavour in your cooking all winter long.
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Keep your roses blooming at their peak into autumn with a little extra attention now to keep them flowering and looking at their best through summer and beyond.
Rose bloom
Dead-heading is the single most important thing you can do to keep those flowers coming: removing spent flowers encourages more buds to form. Snip the flowered stem right back to the next healthy bud below.
If it’s been dry, give each plant a thorough soakin...
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The world’s largest flower show opens its doors this week as the RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show gets under way.
Hampton Court Flower Show
There’s a new category this year, ‘Gardens for a Changing World’, with designers taking as their theme how gardeners can meet the challenges we face in our ever-changing world. Among the big subjects they tackle are extreme rainfall, the healing power of plants, and the use of plants to regen...
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Summertime… and the living is easy. The hard work drops away and you have time to relax and enjoy the beautiful garden you’ve created. There are a few small jobs you can be getting on with, though:
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Look after your tomatoes well at this time of year and they’ll reward you with baskets of gorgeous sun-ripened fruits bursting with juice and flavour.
Tomato care
Go through your plants weekly nipping out any side shoots emerging between the main stem and the leaves. Let them grow and the plant produces lots of greenery at the expense of fruit, so snap them off between thumb and forefinger at no more than 10cm long.
Keep...
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Plant globe artichokes now to enjoy one of the gourmet highlights of the veg garden as well as adding a handsome, architectural plant to your back garden display.
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Create an alpine trough to display the tiniest, most delicate beauties of the plant world to perfection, set off against sculptural stone and grit just as they would be in their mountainous homeland.
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It’s British Flowers Week – your chance to celebrate the best of British grown, beautifully fresh cut flowers and foliage. Put together your own gorgeous bouquet of in-season British-grown flowers to mark the occasion: right now you’re spoilt for choice, with roses, alstroemeria, lilacs, freesias, lavender, pinks and sweet williams all in season and flowering their socks off.
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Train your cordon tomatoes to encourage lots of fruit on a big, vigorous plant. Tomatoes either grow on a bush, in which case it doesn’t need training or a vine. Those grown as a single-stemmed vine are known as ‘cordon’ tomatoes and are trained to increase production and stop side shoots growing into an untidy plant.
Train Tomatoes
When you pick up your ready-grown tomato plants from the garden centre here in Thirsk make sure you co...
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Once early summer shrubs finish flowering, it’s time to give them a prune to keep them youthful and vigorous ready for a superb show next year.
Among shrubs you can prune now are philadelphus (mock orange), spiraea, lilac, buddleja, flowering currant (Ribes sanguineum), Kolkwitzia, Exochorda and Deutzia.
Give shrubs a prune
Start by investing in some good tools: you’ll need a sharp pair of secateurs, some loppers and for mature shrubs, a pruni...
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