If you’re looking for gardening inspiration, Instagram is a veritable treasure trove of tips! We recently chatted to the robin-whisperer behind @aoifes_allotment_adventures who has transformed her plot into a vibrant space for wildlife and her local community to enjoy and share. Find out more about Aoife and her fascinating journey here…
Vertical growing allows Aoife to make excellent use of her space. Image: @aoifes_allotment_adventures
After a challenging career in the fast-paced industry of super yachts, I returned to England with a deep desire to reconnect with nature and grow my own food and flowers. Those early memories of helping my father in the garden and living in the English countryside never left me. After waiting over 1,000 days I finally secured an allotment. Having had very little growing experience I discovered this brilliant corner of Instagram full of wonderful gardeners and allotments, and everyone has been so supportive. It was all so inspiring and I was determined to create a haven for people, pollinators, and wildlife.
The Lottie has a stream gently rippling past and a road beside it that brings a steady flow of passers-by, and it’s a true joy to share this with those curious about the unusual plants and flowers grown here. It’s incredibly rewarding to see how an allotment space can spark genuine interest and excitement.
What are your favourite things to grow?
Aoife with her colourful harvest and bustling vegetable patch. Image: @aoifes_allotment_adventures
My sensory allotment is an everchanging mix of vibrant colours and experimental crops, incorporating perennials, biennials and hardy annuals for year round interest with a variety of pollen and nectar sources.
There are scented flowers like lilies and fragrant sweet peas, fascinating textures such as velvety Senecio candidans Angel Wings and strawflowers that are crunchy to the touch. I have a massive dahlia addiction, it’s just fabulous to have such colour even in November. I’ve fallen head over heels for Californian poppies and am growing lots of different foxglove varieties too.
I’ve discovered I love growing from seed. Some of my favourite vegetables are in the curcurbit family. Smallest are the Cucamelons which I adore, and then there’s the tromboncino squash. Not only is it delicious, but it grows to over a metre long and is such a fantastic conversation starter.
What are your proudest achievements?
A variety of climbing squashes, cucumbers, beans, giant sunflowers, poppies and dahlias. Image: @aoifes_allotment_adventures
One of my greatest joys has been developing my vertical growing spaces.
I’ve created a hazel stick and hemp net 5-metre wall of sweet peas that fills the air with their stunning perfume, and I’ve constructed colourful arches with a variety of climbing squashes, cucumbers, beans and giant sunflowers. It’s all about reusing and recycling on this plot.
Harvesting my first ever homegrown veg to give to friends and family was a massive moment for me. I’m also super lucky to have won the trust of my feathered friend RicRobin. He’s such a cheeky chap full of song and has brought up 6 broods with his mate Ruby. Very little gardening gets done when he’s in a chatty mood!
What are your future plans?
Aoife is no stranger to growing show-stopping flowers. Image: @aoifes_allotment_adventures
Next year, I’m using my new greenhouse to bring a Mediterranean flavour to the allotment by growing grapes, passionfruit, and beautiful bougainvillea. There’ll also be a variety of different melons and heirloom tomatoes, inspired by my time abroad. I’ll be expanding my butterfly bed too and growing more edimentals for both people and pollinators alike. It’s going to get even more colourful next year.
Grow like Aoife
Ric Robin and some bright edible harvests. Image: @aoifes_allotment_adventures
If you want to buy some of the products Aoife grows, here’s a quick shopping list:
We hope you’ve enjoyed learning more about Aoife from @aoifes_allotment_adventures. If you want to read about other inspirational growers, check out our series of #tmfeaturedgardens over on Instagram.
Since the first seed catalogue was published in 1855, Thompson & Morgan has grown to become one of the UK’s largest Mail Order Seed and Plant companies. Through the publication of our catalogues and the operation of our award-winning website, Thompson & Morgan is able to provide home gardeners with the very best quality products money can buy.
Alex Smith, the voice behind @AlexGrowsFood YouTube Channel and website, has been shortlisted for The Alan Titchmarsh New Talent of the Year Award 2024 at this year’s Garden Media Guild Awards ceremony. This award is sponsored by T&M, and so we were keen to find out more about Alex and his journey to this coveted shortlist! Here’s what he had to say…
Tell us how you got into gardening?
Alex’s first patio garden Image: Alex Smith
I was one of those outdoorsy people who was really good at indoorsy things and got trapped at a desk and spent 12 hours a day on a screen. I still walked everywhere, cooked everything from raw ingredients and had a vague pipe-dream of starting a small farm. But it wasn’t until the second year of the pandemic, when I had a garden and the time to start experimenting, that I properly started trying to grow food in some not very food-safe plastic tubs.
In the summer of that year, I got really ill and ended up spending all my time in that little patio garden and discovered so much about plants and insects. Later I decided that, if I was going to be ill, I might as well enjoy it. So I moved and rented a large garden (with an expensive house attached). Growing my own food then suddenly became a part-time job.
What’s been your greatest gardening achievement?
Alex painstakingly created ‘no-dig’ beds in his new garden using cardboard and compost Image: Alex Smith
I moved into that house in late February and I was physically unable to do much at the time. I remember spending pretty much every day trying to get the garden ready and only just about having it done for the start of May. It was a lot of unpacking to free up the cardboard, and then trying to find a cheap(ish) source of compost for the no-dig beds, and then making the beds with arms that barely worked, and these intense dizzy spells when I bent up and down too much. It was slow going!
I couldn’t drive, so I was cycling across town with bags of compost heaped on the pannier rack and sets of stakes strapped to either side of my bike with bungees, straddling them like I was John Wayne. I think I grew a few hundred kilos of veg that year but it was all won in the late winter and early spring.
How has a garden or landscape influenced you?
Alex likes to make use of the vertical space in his garden Image: Alex Smith
My gardening style is really just a mix of everything I’ve basked in online, plus the sad realisation that I have compacted clay soil and live in a very windy area. That, and being quite ill when I started gardening, led me to try to grow pesticide-free food, which meant I learnt about the destruction of soil biology and how it lowers the nutrient density of your food and makes your garden less resilient to both wet and dry weather. The combination of these things really pushed me towards ‘no-dig’ as a method of growing.
My first garden was too small even for that, and it was written in my contract that I had to keep the lawn the size it was so, after stealing as much as I dared to create slightly wider beds, I did a lot of vertical growing, especially on the patio area, in plastic tubs and in grow bags – and still do.
How has using social media impacted your gardening journey?
Social media is incredible. Instagram was my gardening diary in my first year of growing and you could quite literally feel the excitement transmitted between the accounts you’d follow.
YouTube is where I learned the most, as really it transferred a tonne of confidence which written instructions never quite achieve. YouTube is probably one of our greatest achievements, it’s such a great educational resource. It’s part of the reason I made my own channel – @AlexGrowsFood – I really wanted to give back and to leave some record of what I’ve done. Last year I was proud to win the GMG Garden Video of the Year Award – I literally went from a YouTube zero to creating award-winning content in about 8 months! Now I spend my time making little films about gardening and I’ve even started doing some freelance social media editing on the side.
What’s your single, most important piece of gardening advice?
A huge tomato haul Image: Alex Smith
Both you and the plant want the same thing – to grow fully formed (and delicious) fruit! So trust that the plant knows what it’s doing and that the garden will find a way to create something magic.
My unpruned summer fruiting raspberries have just put out an even tastier second round of fruits and I still get tonnes of marigolds, nasturtiums, sunflowers, rocket, chard – you name it – from letting things go to seed and decay over winter. If you’re short on time, just focus on keeping the bindweed and couch grass at bay and trust that your plants can do their thing without you. It’s not necessarily optimal, but it’s much much easier.
If you were stuck on a desert island and could only take three plants – one practical, one beautiful, and one unusual, what would they be?
A tropical island is going to be frost-free, and maybe even blight-free, so I’d take a tomato plant, probably a cherry like a ‘Sungold’ and hope that there are other plants there that I can turn into supports and that it rains at some point!
The beautiful plant is tough… I’d probably take some French marigolds because I try to grow them everywhere. They last most of the year and, for me, they signal the start and end of the growing season – maybe they’ll be perennial on this island.
My unusual plant is an even more arbitrary choice. I really like the coppery bark on a Prunus serrula and I definitely don’t want to live somewhere without trees so I’d probably pick that. That choice would probably change week-to-week, but I definitely want a tree.
What’s next?
Alex making a video for his YouTube channel Image: Alex Smith
I’ve been saying it for a few years now, but I expect that I’ll move house soon which means finding a new garden or plot of land so my plan for the current patch is a bit light. Instead I’m focusing on things that I can take with me so I’ve started studying for a horticultural qualification – it turns out that there’s a lot more to gardening than no-dig veg beds and companion plants, including learning Latin ad nauseum…!
I’m also trying to tie-in my physics & software background so I’ve started creating some free gardening software tools for people (and myself!) to use over on my Alex Grows Food blog which will hopefully be out in time for people to use next year.
More about the Garden Media Guild Awards
Each year, the Garden Media Guild celebrates talented gardening professionals with a selection of highly-contested awards. The shortlists include authors, journalists, photographers, vloggers, podcasters and gardening influencers.
This year, Thompson & Morgan is proud to sponsor ‘The Alan Titchmarsh New Talent of the Year Award 2024’. This special award is for “the person that has made outstanding first steps in the world of garden media, demonstrating talent and potential in his or her field.” Find the full list of GMG awards here.
Since the first seed catalogue was published in 1855, Thompson & Morgan has grown to become one of the UK’s largest Mail Order Seed and Plant companies. Through the publication of our catalogues and the operation of our award-winning website, Thompson & Morgan is able to provide home gardeners with the very best quality products money can buy.
Melanie Taylor of Hazelwood Plantscapes has just been shortlisted for a Garden Media Guild Award sponsored by T&M – The Alan Titchmarsh New Talent of the Year Award 2024.
Following a change in career from the tech sector, Melanie has spent the last two years retraining in horticulture and garden design. Here’s what she had to say about her love of gardening and the inspiration behind her career change…
Since the first seed catalogue was published in 1855, Thompson & Morgan has grown to become one of the UK’s largest Mail Order Seed and Plant companies. Through the publication of our catalogues and the operation of our award-winning website, Thompson & Morgan is able to provide home gardeners with the very best quality products money can buy.
Everything you need to know to preserve fresh produce for your freezer and pantry Image: Shutterstock
What better way to deal with a glut, eat healthy food, and be more self-sufficient than by preserving your seasonal harvests? Here we take a look at five different ways to make the most of your fruit and vegetable plants by preserving the surplus for future use.
From freezing to pickling, and drying to bottling, we give you the basics of each method. We’ve also asked some of our favourite bloggers to share their handy hints – preserving is easy, fun and guaranteed to make winter meals way more tasty.
Since the first seed catalogue was published in 1855, Thompson & Morgan has grown to become one of the UK’s largest Mail Order Seed and Plant companies. Through the publication of our catalogues and the operation of our award-winning website, Thompson & Morgan is able to provide home gardeners with the very best quality products money can buy.
Elizabeth McMahon from Ayrshire has sent in this cucumber pickle, which is great for using up a glut of cucumbers. Elizabeth says "It is very easy to make and delicious served with cold chicken any cold meat and salad - any left over juice can be used as a dressing for your salad. Also the cider vinegar is good for arthritic problems."
Put cucumber, onions, peppers and garlic into a bowl layered with salt. Cover and put into the fridge for 2 hours. Drain and wash out salt well.
Put sugar, spices and vinegar into a pan and slowly bring to the boil. Boil for 5 mins. Add vegetables and slowly bring to boiling point, but do not boil. Pot and cover.
Notes
Find helpful cucumber growing tips & variety advice at our dedicated cucumber hub page.Lead image: Cucumber 'Diva' from Thompson & Morgan
Since the first seed catalogue was published in 1855, Thompson & Morgan has grown to become one of the UK’s largest Mail Order Seed and Plant companies. Through the publication of our catalogues and the operation of our award-winning website, Thompson & Morgan is able to provide home gardeners with the very best quality products money can buy.
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