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Archive for March, 2012
Friday, March 2nd, 2012
Alpine Gardening Society’s big Early Spring Show in Harlow on Saturday –
excellent plant sale first in the morning (Not just alpine)
Mark Hall School, First Avenue, Harlow, Essex, CM17 9LR. (M11 Jn 7,
head for Harlow; straight on for 3 miles approx; right onto B183 at
roundabout; school is immediately on right.)
Saturday, 3 March 2012 – 12.00 noon to 4.00 pm
Filed: Garden Shows
Thursday, March 1st, 2012
When deciding what tree to plant, consider things you can’t easily get in the shops. I love damson jam and can occaisionally get them at the local greengrocers for a short period in September. But I want to grow my own.
I will be buying one very soon!
Thompson & Morgan have this one! I will be ordering this week! They will delivery them by the middle of April!
Damson Plum ‘Merryweather’ – 1 feathered maiden £22.99
A medium sized Damson plum with good resistance to silver leaf disease. Damson ‘Merryweather’ produces heavy crops of large, yellow fleshed fruits for picking in late August. The blue skinned plums have a juicy, acidic flavour which is ideal for making delicious flavoured preserves. Grafted onto a semi-dwarfing rootstock, to produce a compact, productive tree. Damson ‘Merryweather’ is self-fertile and therefore does not require a pollination companion. Height and spread: 2.5m (8’). Rootstock: St. Julien A.
Filed: allotment, Thompson and Morgan
Thursday, March 1st, 2012
The crocus is one of my favourite spring bulbs.
These are in a massive tub in my garden.
They’ve opened fully today in the bright sunshine and there was a bee on them!
Filed: garden
Thursday, March 1st, 2012

It’s beautiful sunshine today so have been on my allotment again.
I have a new compost bin! I was given some big pallets and my partner has created a massive compost bin for me. It might look a big huge but I suspect I’ll fill it. Today we started to insulate the walls to help the bin heat up. We’d saved old bubble wrap for this.
I have dug a trench too and filled it with some of the manure from the heap that arrived at the weekend.
I’ve also removed the rocket stems that had been left from the end of the previous season and put them in … my new compost bin!
Filed: allotment
Thursday, March 1st, 2012
Vegetable Growing Month-by-Month is a fantasic book you’ll really use a lot if you want to grow vegetables. No fancy colour photos but you don’t need them with this practical guide to growing your own.
I have a very well thumbed copy.
Vegetable Growing Month-by-Month: The down-to-earth guide that takes you through the vegetable year
 
As it’s only a few quid, treat yourself to this one too – The Essential Allotment Guide: How to Get the Best out of Your Plot
Filed: Gardening Books
Thursday, March 1st, 2012
The Complete Garden Expert: The Expert you’ve been waiting for – All the gardening Experts condensed and updated into one enlarged volume by Dr D G Hessayon (1 Mar 2012)
I own several D G Hessayon books – this one has it all in one book!
The Complete Garden Expert: The Expert you’ve been waiting for – All the gardening Experts condensed and updated into one enlarged volume
 
From the Back Cover
Over the years the wide range of gardening Experts have become the world’s best-sellers.
Now they have been condensed into a unique one-stop guide to gardening – the Expert
you have been waiting for.
Learn about your plants – there are colour pictures and Expert-style wording
for flowers, trees, shrubs, vegetables, fruit, roses and herbs.
Learn the proper way to do all those gardening jobs.
Find out about garden styles and the secrets of good design.
Learn about all the features in your garden.
Put a name to plant troubles and weeds plus the up-to-date way to control them.
Learn how to name your soil and improve its quality.
Find out how to choose the right tools.
Reliable, easy-to-follow advice and information from EXPERT Books – the world’s
best-selling gardening books.
Filed: Gardening Books
Thursday, March 1st, 2012
Fab book – Booze for Free – will set you back just under £7 but teach you how to make free booze! Covers cordials to wines to beers, to spirits infused with a variety of different flavours. Takes the mystery out of home brew!
Booze for Free
 
To entice you in, here’s the ingredients for
BAY AND ROSEMARY ALE
1.5kg malt extract
10 large rosemary sprigs
20 bay leaves
250g Golden Syrup (or honey)
Packet ale yeast
13 litres water
2 tablespoons of golden syrup for priming
Follow recipe here or buy the book
Filed: Gardening Books
Thursday, March 1st, 2012
I was first told about tomato grafting by the oldest allotmenter on my old allotment site. Norman told me he’d been grafting tomatoes for years after a friend showed him how. His friend worked at a commercial tomato growing site where it’s done to increase yield!
It’s not just tomatoes that can be grafted – they’ve been doing it for years with fruit trees too but also now you can buy these grafted veg plants:
Suttons Seeds have:

Vegetable Grafted Plant Taster Pack £9.95
Pack contains 3 grafted pot ready plants (1 of each variety):Sweet Pepper F1 Magno – A first-rate, strong-growing variety that ripens from green to orange, shows good resistance to cracking and skin blemishes, and tastes superb! Cucumber Quatro – A first-class cucumber producing crisp,tasty fruits of 9-11cm in length. Plants are vigorous, and ideal for growing under glass or outdoors, in soil or containers.Tomato Conchita – A superb large cherry tomato with fine flavour. Gives huge crops on trusses bearing as many as 20 fruits.Grafted ‘Turbo’ vegetable plants! For your best ever crops! We’ve taken the best varieties available and grafted them onto an extremely vigorous-growing root stocks. Commerical crops have been grown in this way for a while and have been shown to:Be more vigorous, producing larger plants. Have greater resistance to pests and diseases. Have less susceptibility to nutritional disorders. Perform well with less heat in your greenhouse. Yield top quality fruit earlier and over a longer period compared to normal plants.Our trials have shown that grafted plants are incredibly healthy and give rise to larger, strong-growing plants giving earlier, heavier crops. They’ll perform well outside but are particularly recommended for greenhouse growing, where they will fulfill their full potential and allow you to get plants off to an early start in spring without paying a fortune on heating your greenhouse.Kitchen Garden Magazine have recommended our grafted veg plant to their readers!. Pack of 3 Grafted Pot Ready Plants (1 of each variety). Full growing instructions included.. . . .
Filed: allotment, Suttons Seeds
Thursday, March 1st, 2012
New product at Suttons Seeds
‘Must-have’ Veg Collection £9.99
A bumper crop of delicious, nutritious veg! Nothing beats the delicious taste of freshly-harvested veg, and in this collection we have put together a selection of ‘must-have’ varieties.
Comprises: 86 plants (18 Plug Plants of Beetroot Boltardy, 9 Cabbage Frostie, 9 Cauliflower All Year Round, 25 Leek Musselburgh, 25 Onion Santero) plus packs of seeds of Broccoli Purple Sprouting, Runner Bean Armstrong, Carrot Resistafly and Parsnip Tender & True.. .
Full growing instructions included..
Delivery will be in May.
Why I think this is a great buy for gardeners.
It offers you a variety of plug plants ready to plant out just as the last frosts are coming. It takes all the effort out of trying to grow plants from seed indoors. It’s a great idea for anyone with limited windowsill space or no coldframe or greenhouse. It’s ok starting seeds off on a windowsill but when they need potting on you need more room. This is why this plant and seed pack is so good. It’ll all arrive in May – so gives you plenty of time to prepare the soil for the plants.
It removes the stress of buying several packets of seeds and having to start them all off, and if you’ve not got a heated propagator then it’ll save you worries about seeds getting too cold too! It’s an effective and efficient way of gardening. Let the experts start your plants off for you.
The carrots and parsnips can be sown straight in the ground. The runner beans can be started in pots or planted out to grow but will need a bit of cover if a frost threatens.
If you’ve always wanted to grow more plants then this is the way of discovering just how easy vegetable growing can be.
Gardening is easy if you have a little help and advice from friends and experts. On most allotment sites there will be at least one person who’s been growing vegetables for years. Experience brings with it the advantages of knowing how many seeds to plant to feed a family with a particular vegetable, dealing with pests and problems and spotting things that need to be done.
Most people on allotment sites are happy to share their info and some will even share excess plants they have. Years of experience also mean plenty of equipment like heated propagators, cold frames, and greenhouses which mean they’ll be growing more seed earlier than most other people.
You don’t have to ask them for plants anymore though! You can buy a simple pack of plug plants that will be delivered in May to your door and enable you to enjoy growing vegetables after someone else has done all the hard work of starting them off.
Filed: allotment, Suttons Seeds
Thursday, March 1st, 2012
More common in supermarkets now, but rarely grown.
Sweet potato offer at Suttons Seeds
Sweet Potato Beauregard Plants £12.99
Traditionally sweet potatoes have been grown from ‘slips’, but quality can be poor and results disappointing.
At Suttons They have been working to supply a better product, hence the introduction of Pot Ready Plants, produced on their nursery from virus-free stock.
These are well-rooted and actively growing, they are a significant improvement on traditional ‘slips’.
Simply pot and grow on in a frost-free environment until June, then either re-pot or plant into the garden and you should be harvesting your very own sweet potatoes this autumn!Beauregard can produce good crops of medium sized tubers in British growing conditions. The tubers have that distinctive salmon-orange flesh with a sweet pronounced flavour packed full of vitamins and iron. Simply boil, steam, bake or mash for a delicious meal.
Pack of 10 Pot Ready Plants. Full growing instructions included.. . . .
Sounds a fab way to get started growing these rather lovely vegetables. So sweet sometimes you should just pour a bit of cream on them and eat them out of the skins as dessert!
I like roasting them. Give them a wash and dry, then prick all over with a fork. Put in a roasting tin. You can tell how sweet they are as they cook and the juices come out and caramelise. I serve them as veg but you can mash them and use them in other recipes too.
Filed: allotment, Suttons Seeds
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