Returning home from Wendy Shillam’s inspiring ‘Leaf Lore’ workshop (see previous post), I lost no time in sowing some leaf seeds in my equivalent of the Rooftop Vegplot – a far from picturesque container beneath my kitchen window. I’m hoping this will prove to be both slug proof and cat proof! The seeds were an…
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Salad days are here again and with this in mind my visit to Wendy Shillam’s city potager for a workshop on leaf growing could not have been better timed. After a disappointing lettuce season last year, I’ve been yearning for delicious homegrown salads and itching to crack open the seed packets and so when Wendy…
DetailsSnowy leads the way
One of the highlights of last weekend’s Shepton Snowdrop Festival was a guided walk through Edford Wood to see snowdrops growing in the wild. The wood, which is owned by the Somerset Wildlife Trust, is a designated ancient woodland, meaning that it has existed continuously since 1600. It mainly seemed to be made up…
DetailsFebruary can be a pretty bleak month in the garden so a new festival celebrating one of the month’s few horticultural reasons to be cheerful is good news. The Shepton Mallet Snowdrop Festival (http://www.sheptonsnowdropfestival.org.uk), which took place for the first time this weekend (17-19 February), is the brainchild of the town’s horticultural society (http://www.sheptonhortsoc.org.uk). The…
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Too much choice can be a difficult thing to handle, at least when it comes to choosing potatoes. This year my disappointment at not being able to attend our local potato day (http://www.potato-days.net), was tempered when I recalled how traumatic I had found last year’s event (the first I had ever attended). A potato day…
DetailsViburnum x bodnantense ‘Dawn’
‘Tis the week before Christmas and the newspapers are filled with seasonally adjusted book selections, and ‘books of the year’ round ups … I always love reading these but this year I’ve been scanning them with an extra frisson of anticipation, as The London Garden Book A-Z, 2nd edition has just hit the shops (and the…
DetailsSo, autumn is here and another growing season on the allotment has more or less come to an end (bar some stalwart Swiss chard, a few lingering, enormous beetroots, and some brassicas yet to come on stream). What with the recent Marmite scare and the news that olive oil is going to become more expensive…
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