by Amanda Davies | May 11, 2018 | Gardening Posts
Dear Gardeners,
I’m afraid I have been an April Fool. We went on a much needed holiday to the New Forest the day after the Easter Bank holiday. My first holiday since the cancer and heart failure, the weather down in Hampshire wasn’t the best, but the break was.
I’d planned the timings of all the greenhouse chores so all seedlings were transplanted, all recently sown seeds were in propagators, and all plug plants were establishing nicely. Mum and my best friend were asked to just check on things and give a good watering to them midweek and especially if the weather turned nice.
Best laid plans and all that! Mum had her sister home from Scotland, and also was on babysitting duties for both of my brothers’ children, as it was half term. In-between she was helping my youngest brother with his new business venture, so she wasn’t home much. My best friend unfortunately has a memory like a sieve at the moment and at least owned up to totally forgetting my plants, even though she walks her dog past my house at least once a day. When mum eventually had time to check on my greenhouse (the day before we came home,) the poor plants had all dried up.
My favourite quotes from mum are-
“Were they like that when you put them in the greenhouse?”
Nope. I don’t believe they were crispy.
“We had a really bad frost one morning. My shed roof was white!”
No one else remembers this.
And my all time favourite:
“Do you think I should have come down earlier in the week?”
Erm let me think about that…
I went through a myriad of emotions, but couldn’t really hold anyone responsible, as I did say to mum, that Rachel will check on the greenhouses and vice versa.
So confession time, how bad was the damage?
In The Office.
- Expensive to buy in plug format, but grown from seed Himalayan Blue poppies all dead except two I had left in the tray in the kitchen.
- Cape Gooseberries all dead except three left in the kitchen.
- Trial Strawberry Blonde Marigolds. One seedling left after the whole packet germinated. As T&M gave me these seeds, I was mortified that I had killed their plants, so I ordered another packet from their website. I still have to trial them.
- Trial Sunflower Shock-o-late seedlings all dead. Luckily I had only sown half the packet so I had some left over, which I have re-sown
- Sunflower Velvet Queen same as above.
- Lewisia, Basil Lemonade, Mint, Grasses, Foxgloves, Forget-me-nots, Hollyhocks, French Marigolds, Buddleja and Hyssop all dead.
- Rainbow Beetroots – stressed. I rehydrated them little by little watering every few hours for the first two days.
- Sweet Peppers. Hugely hardy and responded well to a good drink.
- Just Bee flower mix, stressed, but stable.
- Lettuce Mix. Difficult to say, some had died completely, some had thrived.
- Dad’s spider plant – looking green again, with a little new growth.
- A few stray beetroot seeds had germinated, along with radish, borage, chillies and a different variety of sweet pepper.
- The trial Sweetpeas Turquoise Lagoon, were in pretty good shape as I had left a lid over the blue bread basket they were in, conserving the water in the soil by reducing evaporation.
- Lavenders and Christmas cacti thriving.
In Ty Mawr,
No,damage whatsoever, in fact plenty of growth on everything.
It’s taken me up until the end of the month to clear the staging, between 35°c temperatures under the glass and torrential rain showers, gardening has been difficult. Once sorted the disaster out, I then decided to book another holiday in the New Forest, because that’s just the way I roll!
I told Mark that I wouldn’t buy any more seeds as I had enough, but as I had to replace the trial marigolds, it seemed silly to pay postage for just one packet of seeds, so I went onto the Special Offers page and looked at the 99p range. I set myself a budget, and for once actually stuck to it.
The Office.
Even though I haven’t sown all of my seeds I bought last week, I have started with six Glory Lily seeds. At around 16p each these beauties grow into six foot climbers. The tubers are not hardy so will need to be stored like a dahlia. It takes a few years to flower, so I really hope I get these right. Another new seed I picked was herb Golden Feverfew. I would like to add this perennial pretty yellow mound forming leafy plant to the grassy knoll area. Its daisy-like flowers should soften the structure of the other strappy grass fronds. I am trying achieve a low maintenance area without the use of gravel, concrete or man-made products. I next sowed African Marigolds Spinning Wheels, followed by Garden Pea Alderman. I love this vegetable it’s sweet, abundant and easy to grow. Again, a new seed I chose for 99p was a Potentilla named Monarchs Velvet, this too, is a perennial, I am hoping it will fit in with the black and blue grasses in the knoll. If not, then maybe I will grow it in clumps near the wildlife borders.
As the basil had died and I didn’t have the lemonade type left, I decided to grow both Rubin and Sweet Genovese instead.
Then I sowed Rudbekia Green King, and although I haven’t grown this variety I have had success with Rudbekias. Finally, I sowed some free seeds from Gardeners’ World Zinnia Orange King and repotted some of the aubergines from my completely unscientific seed trial. Oh and I’ve also re-sown the both types of sunflower mentioned above, as well as the Strawberry Blonde Marigolds, plus the Mint and Hyssop.
The Office border has turned into a mess. The money tree has re sprouted, but thanks to the extra space the aloes have almost carpeted the soil. Fighting for survival are two houseplants, some violas, a rogue cornflower, and an unexplained poppy and foxglove. Mark and I have come to the decision that we are going to try and remove some aloes to the grassy knoll. I have no idea if they will live, but I have to do something.
The same day these arrived I potted up some rosemary cuttings, I had left to root in water before going away.
Ty Mawr.
The first job was for Mark to earth up the potato sacks, feed them, and move them to their final growing positions outside. Then he planted up the stored Dahlias. Once he had done that, we realised that growing Cornflowers under glass was probably not my best idea. They loved the conditions too much, so on the hottest day of April he evicted them to the garden, where they are now flowering. Mark also transplanted eight tomatoes to their final growing places. Part of my trial plants and some of last year’s yellow stuffers. He then transplanted some of my beetroot. Another of my unscientific experiments – I am seeing if they grow better under glass or out in the fresh air. Also growing happily in the borders are Turnip, Garlic and English Marigolds.
In Rhett’s House (aka) The Cold-frame, I have the Coleus Canninia, they survived the unintentional drought and to prevent them going sappy were moved there as soon as we were back. Keeping them company are some marigolds, some larkspur, Bee Mix plants, a random geranium I found in the back of The Office, a Malva and something that I can’t identify as the label has disappeared. It looks like a primula. Plus several Borage plugs. You’d think that would have been enough wouldn’t you – but no, in my infinite wisdom after doing a happy dance that not only my chillies designed to do well hanging baskets had germinated, but also the super hot ones in the fire bucket Andrew (younger brother) had given me had germinated too, I remembered that Richard (youngest brother) had given me a funky veg kit. So I had a go at that too.
The funky veg kit comes with cardboard type pots, soil disks that expand in water five packets of seeds and five labels. Lucky me had six packets. Although I’ve only chosen to grow three due to the fact that the greenhouse will be a bit full shortly. For now I’m trying Purple Brussels Sprouts, Purple Carrots and Yellow Courgettes. The instructions were simple. Place disks in water and leave to expand until they are seven times bigger. Squeeze out the excess water, put most of the soil in the pots, add the seeds, then cover with leftover soil. Label, leave on a kitchen windowsill.
I’ll let you know how it goes!
Until next month.
Happy Gardening,
Love Amanda xx
My name is Amanda and I live in Pembrokeshire with my fiancé and our garden is approximately 116 meters square. I want to share with you my love for gardening and the reasons behind it, from the good to the bad and ugly. I want to do this for my own personal pleasure. If you would like to take the journey with me then please read my blogs and share with me your gardening stories.
by Sonia Mermagen | Mar 30, 2017 | Gardening Posts
Thompson & Morgan sweeps the board at the Grow Your Own Great British Growing Awards for the third year in a row
This week we’re celebrating our success in the Grow Your Own magazine’s annual Great British Growing Awards. We’re so proud to have won gold in five categories – Best Fruit and Veg Seed Range, Best Plug Plant Range, Best Online Retailer, Most Innovative Growing Product for our revolutionary TomTato® plant and Best One-Stop Shop for Gardening. We were also awarded silver for our award-winning incredicompost® in the category Most Effective Composting Product.
Clare Dixey, Thompson & Morgan’s marketing services manager commented:
“We’re thrilled to have been voted the winner in five categories of the 2016 Great British Growing Awards. We’re particularly proud to have won Best Online Retailer. Knowing that we’re up against some very serious competition in the horticultural online marketplace, this really means a lot.”
The well-known and well-respected gardening magazine invited its readers and online visitors to vote for their favourite gardening companies. Over 12,000 people voted.
The Great British Growing Awards are nominated and voted on by the British gardening public, which makes these awards all the more impressive. Thompson & Morgan prides itself on its wide product range and high levels of customer satisfaction. The fact that the nation’s army of gardeners voted us Best Online Retailer over big players in the market, such as Amazon, is highly commendable.
Paul Hansord, Thompson & Morgan’s commercial director said: “To be so highly rated by the great British gardening public is a true testament to all the hard work and effort that the people at T&M put in to ensure that our products and service are the best in the business”.
Sonia works at Thompson & Morgan in the role of press and communications officer. She is a self-proclaimed ‘reluctant’ gardener and is generally amazed if anything flourishes in her garden. Sonia has a ‘hands off’ approach to gardening and believes that this helps to encourage bees, butterflies and other wildlife. (That’s her excuse anyway!)
by Katy Runacres | Dec 20, 2016 | Fruit, Gardening Posts, Vegetables, Your Stories
A quick update from the garden after the growing season.
So now the colder months begin and the long, darker nights draw in I am reflecting back on the last growing year at certain successes and trials in the garden and allotment sites. One of the big successes has been the runner beans. I planted 3 different Thompson & Morgan varieties – all with different coloured flowers. I planted these down at the allotment mixed up so that when they grew it created not only tasty beans but also a lovely mix of different coloured blooms on the plants too, winding up the canes. These were perfect simply chopped up and boiled for evening meals in pastas or grated for seasonal, fresh salads. I simply kept picking them every few days and they kept on growing right into end September/October which was fantastic. A real crowd pleaser both for ease of growing and for taste value too.
Another massive success was the raspberry canes. Now I know I mention these every time but it is simply because I have been so impressed by them each year in the summer. In particular the ‘Glen Moy’ variety has flourished. Fruit started appearing nice and early in the growing season and from then on gave a regular and heavy crop each week till late. I loved picking these fresh, juicy raspberries as I wandered past to feed the chickens I keep and try to save the raspberries to go with my breakfast porridge. However, most of them did not make it back into the house for cooking desserts or breakfasts as they were consumed earlier on the garden walk.
Jerusalem artichokes have been a new discovery for me this year – trying to grow and cook with them. They were easy to grow and I have experimented with cooking them in different ways. They are a faff to prepare and peel but are a nice addition to a potato gratin with tasty layers topped with cheese and cream – perfect in autumn!
The spring onion (White Lisbon variety) crop I have had this year has been immense! Simply so easy to plant and grow with little intervention apart from regular watering. I have had a formidable crop and have used them mercilessly snipped into fresh salads, mixed into potato salads and as a quirky addition to scrambled eggs on a Sunday (with wild garlic).
Overall, I cannot wait to get cracking with the next growing season and focus on one particular element next year. I haven’t decided which project yet but possibly thinking salads or unusual varieties of vegetable.
Katy is a smallholder, cook and writer. She keeps Chickens, Bantams, Meat Rabbits and has a resident cat called Podge. She takes an interest in all aspects of homesteading and has written pieces for a number of magazines including Backwoods Home, Bushcraft, Country Smallholding, Home Farmer and Smallholder. Katy is a member of the Essex and Suffolk Poultry Club and has a Diploma in Countryside Management.
by Graham Ward | Aug 23, 2016 | Gardening Posts, inspiration for the garden
Many years ago I remember watching the great Geoff Hamilton on Gardener’s World making “fake rocks” from something called hypertufa and even though I was too young at the time to do it myself I always recall wanting to try it when I was a grown up.
I’m not quite sure I’ve ever actually “grown up” but I do love my garden and I also love trying to be creative, successfully or otherwise, it doesn’t matter, as long as I’ve had a go!
With that in mind, a few years ago I made my first batch of hypertufa, I made pots, used boxes for moulds and actually was quite pleased with the results, I have moved a few times since then and the pots either got left behind, or broken so it was about time I made some more!
The recipe
There are various mixtures all over the internet, I used 2 parts cement to 3 parts compost and 3 parts perlite, you can add some synthetic strengthening fibres to the mix but as I was only making small scale so I didn’t need them. If you are planning on making something huge then they would be a good idea to stop it breaking when you lift it.
- 2 parts cement
- 3 parts perlite
- 3 parts compost
As with any cement mix, add water and thoroughly combine the materials – the important thing with hypertufa is not to make it too wet! If your mixture is sloppy then it will crumble back to dust when it dries and all your hard work will be wasted! A consistency of clay is almost ideal, if you hold a handful, squeeze it and let go, it should hold it’s shape without falling apart or oozing between your fingers. (I should have worn gloves by the way)
Moulding and making
The mix was ready and I had found a few things to use as moulds for the first few pots, one of them was an old glass kitchen lampshade which was going to make a nice shallow bowl, I covered it with cling film – to make sure it didn’t stick later on – and started pressing handfuls of the mix inside it, starting near the middle and working my way out, I tried to make it about an inch thick all the way around until I had covered the inside completely.
I also used an old sweet tin (sprayed inside with WD40 to stop any sticking) a small cardboard box, a fruit box and, bizarrely, I decided to fill up a latex glove with the mixture too to see what it came out like and I also made a small, free-form, shallow container too
Patience is now vital, I covered over the various pots and troughs and left them for nearly a week to completely dry out, I’m not usually this patient but I knew that to interfere with them now would probably break the things I made and mess them up completely.
It was worth the wait, with only one mishap – my tub of builders PVA came in handy at this point..
Further waiting followed to let them cure even more, however, this was a good time to go out and buy lots of lovely plants to put in them!
I chose alpines including Sempervivum, saxifrage, mazus and delosperma, that will all look good in this particular setting, all being low growing ground cover type plants. They are low maintenance plants, making them ideal for a beginner too!
I planted up some of the pots I had made, using ordinary multi-purpose compost but not using any additional feeds etc, top dressing it all with a silver grit finished off the look nicely and I found a few large “rocks” to decorate the top a little.
Overall I’m very pleased with the result and the plants are already filling out nicely and looking very “natural” in their new homes.
I’ve been gardening for as long as I can remember, my first earliest memory being planting seeds in my Grandfather’s prestige flower bed and having a prize lettuce growing there, which he proudly left to show everyone.
Since then, gaining knowledge and experience from both my Grandfather and my Father, I’ve continued to garden, both as a hobby and later on as a professional gardener and landscaper for 12 years. I love all aspects of it, from the design and build, to the planting out of summer borders with plants you’ve either grown from seed or raised from plugs. Unusual varieties always catch my eye and I’m keen to try growing them, even if sometimes it means learning from my mistakes.
by Rebecca Tute | Jan 4, 2013 | Your Stories
With excitement and well drawn plans of the new year, I began 2012 with aspirations of extending my vegetable growing knowledge and growing some good crops at home in my small garden. Still a beginner and only in my second year of anything garden related… ever, I wanted to have another go at growing tomatoes, introduce some beans and grow some potatoes in bags.
My first year of growing tomatoes ended poorly with virtually all my fruits inedible and plants catching blight. However, I love tomatoes and they are very popular to grow at home; my parents always used to grow them in grow bags, so I wasn’t put off, yet!
My 3 x 1 metre raised bed which I built in my first year was tidied up in early April and ready to take my small plants which I had potted on from the young plugs I bought in March. I chose to try the variety Tomato Ferline for that extra blight resistance, plus you get a bit more substance from your crop as it’s not a cherry variety! If my limited experience in gardening was going to result in a minimal yield, I wanted it to last a few more seconds on the plate! What was picked from last year’s experiment never even made it to the kitchen.
So the weeks passed by, endless rain and little warm weather, I was beginning to feel that I was on track for another failure. The plants hadn’t put on much growth and the garden was a right mess. However, on closer inspection, I did notice that the raised bed was draining very well. Although it had been topped up with standard compost earlier in the year, I never really put any plastic lining underneath, so last year it was not retaining the water, this year it was draining it nicely!
Eventually over the summer, the plants had grown up, looking sturdy and beginning to flower – let there be tomatoes! Come early August, fruits were on show and I was eagerly waiting them to ripen and increase in mass. I did read the T&M guide to growing tomatoes very early on, so I was familiar with side shooting this cordon variety, watching the T&M How to Grow Tomatoes video on the Youtube channel also helped. You’re probably reading from top to bottom here, so you haven’t yet realised I’m part of the web team at Thompson & Morgan. I’m a bit of a techy and usually more diverse to html code than gardening, having experienced gardeners around me, spurred me on further!
On a mild, dry August evening, yes we did have a few, I stepped out of the conservatory with bated breath. The salad was already prepared and just needed some of the tomatoes from the garden. I knew they were there, but this moment hadn’t been experienced before and I was really hoping they would be great. We had my parents round for dinner and I was about to plate up some salad fruits that I grew in the garden. I was able to pick 10-12 good sized fruits from the 5 tomato plants, whilst others were left to continue to ripen. I was very impressed with their flavour, size and shape and fleshy inner. They made very good sliced tomatoes for the burgers that I also cooked that week.
Since joining T&M, I caught the gardening bug immediately but it took me until my second year to reap the reward. Growing your own veg at home is more my theme at the moment, as opposed to flowers. I was later provided with a good crop of French and runner beans which I planted over the summer alongside the tomatoes, which surprisingly required little attention, my experience was the same for potatoes really.
2013 will be another challenging year for me as I would like to introduce some lettuce and other salads like radish and spring onions, alongside my tomatoes. They sound simple enough to introduce and I’m keen to get on with it again come spring. Wish me luck… and if a gardening geek can do it, then so can you!
Why not reply with your favourite memories?
Rebecca works in the Marketing department as part of the busy web team, focusing on updating the UK news and blog pages and Thompson & Morgan’s international website. Rebecca enjoys gardening and learning about flowers and growing vegetables with her young daughter.
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