February Gardening

General Jobs in the Garden


If you have finished all the major tasks, such as digging over, creating leafmould heaps etc you will not have a lot to do in February but if like most of us you are scrambling to keep up, this is your last chance before spring.

Double check the greenhouse, ensure the glass is firmly secured and replace any cracked panes etc. If you've not managed to give it a thorough clean, now is the time before it is pressed into service.

Check last year's potato bed for any volunteers (left over small potatoes) and remove them to avoid passing on disease problems and blight.

You're going to be using your pots and seed trays next, so this is a good opportunity to wash out and sterilise them so you seedlings will get off to the best possible start. If you havent got any then dont worry. They are very cheap. An unheated propogator will certainly help and for an extra £2 is worth every penny

This years potato bed will benefit from a good application of compost or rotted manure that can be forked in or rotovated in to get them away.

You can cover soil with dark plastic sheeting, fleece or cloches to warm it up for a couple of weeks before you start to sow and plant.

Plotting for profit - slug hugging & Snow business in the garden

Plotters and profiteers


There is a class war going on in allotments. Allotment groups have hit out at private entrepreneurs attempting to make money from renting out plots to the 150,000-strong waiting list. The private New Allotment Company, for example, is renting out 100sq ft allotments for £150 each; treble the price but a third of the size of typical council plots.

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Matthew Appleby

Children in the garden: how to get kids interested?National Society of Allotment and Leisure Gardeners national secretary Geoff Stokes and National Allotment Gardens Trust chairman Neil Dixon are united in their opposition to commercial profit-making allotment companies. Dixon compares them to drug dealers, making hooked gardeners pay over the odds for what they are addicted to.

But serial entrepreneur Rudi Schogger, managing director of the New Allotment Company, which aims to build 10,000 allotments by 2012, says local authority allotments are “not viable” as a business model, and that if private businesses such as his take over provision for the shortfall in allotments, councils may no longer consider themselves responsible for the service.

He says: “It is a possibility [that new private allotments] might make councils lazy. But I’m not to be held responsible for the public sector. It is up to the taxpayer to demand them or not.

“It’s nanny state stuff - I don’t understand how we arrived at the modern system. It’s a socialist system - without wanting to get into politics. That’s why we arrived at the shortages we have.”

Allotments used to be for pensioners and the poor. Now they are for the middle classes. Do you agree with the new private initiatives?

Slug huggers

I ran a pop-up garden shop in up-and-coming London suburb Brockley recently. We sold the dream ticket of secondhand books, local photo cards of Brockley in the snow, cupcakes, and slug and weedkillers. Only the chemicals failed to shift. This retail offering may sound like a health and safety nightmare, and indeed one child complained about tinfoil in their fairy cake, but the event had a lovely community feel, with a ukulele band, Santa and mulled wine on offer. We used a cute baby as bait (my idea) and gave the proceeds to charity (not my idea).

However, no-one bought any garden products. Maybe it was the time of year. Maybe the trendy Brockley-ites want to do it for free. Maybe the seeds and grow-your-own thing is now so embedded that no-one thinks they need garden chemicals any more. Maybe they are all organic and self-sufficient. But I doubt it.

Last year, sales of chemicals went up overall, perhaps because the damp brought out slugs. Do you still use weedkillers and slugkillers? Or should they be banned?

Snow business in the garden

Is there anything to do in the garden at this time of year? I say there isn’t. Gardening publications say there is. Mainly involving looking at seed catalogues and tidying your shed. I recommend taking a photo of your garden in the snow. Email pictures to gardening@telegraph.co.uk (jpeg or tiff preferred) and we'll put up a gallery of the best.

Matthew Appleby is Horticulture Week's deputy editor. Matt also edits Garden Retail magazine and writes gardening news for the Evening Standard and other daily and weekly publications. He is a keen allotment gardener and blogger

UK Grandmother ordered to remove garden

Although this isnt a gardening tip as such, it is interesting to read that we are now told to disregard our gardens in such a hopeless manner by those we trust the most. Our council leaders and those who we pay our taxes to dont seem to quite grasp the importance of gardens or gardening in general.

In one of the most bizarre policies in modern history a UK grandmother has been ordered to clear some of her shrubbery in order to make way for three council waste bins.

The article from the Mail Online reports that Mrs St John was given the waste bins as part of a council edict enforcing all residents to now house them. While many of us already possess one or two of these wheelie bins most of us also have space to hide them. Not so for Mrs St John who has a frontage of only a few metres.

When Mrs St John complained to Harlow Council's recycling officer he suggested that she make way for the bins by removing some of her shrubs and installing paving to house them on!

Now, I don't mean to be alarmist but if every household in the UK were forced to do this wouldn't it mean that they could lose nearly 5% of their gardens overnight? I'm not sure where Harlow Council think they are going with this preposterous policy but it can't be good.

Interestingly, the Mail Online received more than 260 comments on this article and have since closed their comments. While some respondents were as bemused as I am, the odd detractor fielded comments such as;

There is plenty of space for bins in that messy, overgrown plot. They could be stored safely for her and easily hidden by some shrubs. Isn't that what normal people do? Why is she making such a fuss?
and;

Hmmm, not quite the shocker as it would seem when you read on. She doesn't have to pave her garden, and she has alternatives to the 'eyesore' of the wheelie bins in her front garden- she can wheel them through her house for a start. Reading what the council said they actually seem pretty reasonable.
Hmmm....wheeling rubbish bins through the house??? I can see why this guy thought the council was being quite reasonable!

This appears to be one of those issues where the "forest" gets missed for the "trees". On one hand, the Harlow council should be applauded for their efforts in assisting a recycling program but when the only way to achieve that is to remove gardens, one has to ask where the logic is in this?

Continue to support your local garden centres and get out there and prove the importance of gardening to the UK economy and UK culture.

The Pogues Shane Macgowan to star in New Gardening Show

In what is set to be one of the most unlikely -- and indeed, original -- reality shows of recent years, the Pogues' very own pickled poet Shane MacGowan and his wife Victoria Mary Clarke are set to be the stars of their own gardening programme.

The documentary, 'Victoria and Shane Grow Their Own,' features the pair's attempts to grow their own vegetables in an effort to emulate the premise of 70s sitcom, 'The Good Life.' Reportedly inspired by America's First Lady Michelle Obama, Victoria tries to grow enough vegetables for her and Shane to live off, as well as planning a summer's end party for friends and family using their own harvest.


The biggest obstacle facing Victoria is the fact that she's no gardening expert and Shane -- gearing up for a summer tour of festivals with the Pogues as well as the usual rock'n'roll distractions -- proves to be of little or no help.

'Victoria and Shane Grow Their Own' is scheduled to be broadcast on Ireland's RTE One on Tuesday Dec. 8. Sadly, there are no plans at present to broadcast the show on outside the Emerald Isle.

UK Gardeners will have to wait for something along the lines of David Beckham and his Gardening show. In the meantime, get down to your local garden centre and support UK Green Gardening.

Grow your own

Its been a bumper Autumn harvest for apples and blackberries in the garden. All over the country there have been reports of huge crops of lovely ripe fruit . This is the result of lots of lovely sunshine and rain at the right times over the summer. The cold winter also had its part to play as many fruits need low temperatures for maximum yields.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/howtogrow/fruitandvegetables/3349566/Gardening-Growing-fruit-in-Britain.html

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6788636.ece

As the climate gets hotter how will these fruits survive as we adapt to planting more exotic crops such as olives, kiwi fruit, almonds etc.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/oct/11/climate-change-britain-crops

Plants That stop climate change

Air pollution is an issue that few are ready to tackle. In Japan, however, Toyota is researching horticultural solutions to address this matter. They believe that certain enhanced species of plant life may contribute to improving the environment.

The Biotechnology and Afforestation division of Toyota is responsible for developing flowers that absorb air pollution. One such plant is the Kirsch Pink Shrub, related to the Cherry Sage, Salvia lamiacea, a semi-evergreen shrub with a long flowering period.

Together with Gardenia, Salvia now grows in the area surrounding the Prius car factory in Tokyo City. Both are utilized to absorb emissions from that building. By doing so, they also remove heat from the atmosphere. This lowers the surface temperature surrounding the factory, which in turn cuts down on energy requirements for cooling. In addition to Gardenia and Salvia, other plants included in the program to improve atmospheric conditions are Asteraceae chameomelum Cruz, and Heterophylla, aka Lamium lavandula Argent.

It is hoped that the plants will prove helpful in combating the “heat island effect”. This condition causes increased temperatures in cities due to buildings and infrastructure deflecting sunlight and heat. The expectation is that pollution-eating plants in city parks and streets will absorb both emissions and heat. This should result in improved atmospheric conditions for congested urban areas.

Salvia Kirsch pink is not available anywhere but in Japan and I have been unable to find data relating to its hardiness zone or growing conditions. Furthermore, there have been no other press releases about this project since October 2005. I think it’s time for Toyota to give us an update on this project.

Get pollution eating plant seeds here. Plant the seeds, water them and watch them change the world.

Grow Vegetables all year round

Do you wish you could extend the “fresh vegetable concept” of summer throughout the year by growing your vegetables year-round. Well, you can, and it is much easier than you think. It is an age-old concept borrowed from the French, called the “potager” or literally translated “soup garden”.

In France, a potager may be very formal and considered a jewel on an estate or situated on the succinctly elaborate grounds of a chateau. A potager may also be very humble, next to a small farmhouse in the countryside, by railroad tacks in the suburbs, or in urban plots outside a nearby town. Wherever they are located or however they are designed, they have been a foundation for French food culture, and the French tradition of eating seasonal fresh foods.

A potager is a French-style kitchen garden composed mainly of seasonal vegetables and herbs. A potager may also include a few fruit trees, and even seasonal flowers. The sole purpose of a potager is to provide a year-round supply of fresh daily produce for a family or a small group of people. It is usually a small and manageable plot of 10′ x 10′, or 9′ x 12′ in size.

A potager is divided up into plots that are individually managed and rotated as the seasons unfold each year. It requires some planning, management, knowledge of your specific growing seasons, and knowledge of what you are growing, on your part to be successful with a potager.

In the UK, generally speaking, our traditional backyard vegetable garden consists of planting the garden in the spring, reaping fresh produce over the summer, and sometimes utilizing the abundance of the harvest by freezing or preserving for use over the winter, or for another time.

English, unlike the French and other Europeans, do not normally have a vegetable garden year-round. This might be changing now. One of the hottest food trends today is “growing your own vegetables”. Gardeners such as yourself, want to keep the “fresh produce concept” alive after the summer has waned. We all know that fresh strawberries out of a morning garden for breakfast, or fresh green beans harvested still warm from the sun, are a delight to the senses and incomparable.

We are also being influenced by active local organic farms supplying restaurants and farmer’s markets with new and exciting types of produce to explore and enjoy. Their underlying message is “eat locally”.

This is an introduction to the concept of the “potager”. Follow along as I discuss further the elements of the potager, how to implement a potager, how to manage, and what you might want to plant throughout the four seasons in your potager. For a related post on vegetable gardening basics at VintageGardenGal see, 7 Basic Steps of Successful Vegetable Gardening.

Do you have a potager now? You can get a great one here. This is the cheapest one I have seen and I have the exact same one. Where did you first see a potager? What is your motivation for vegetable gardening year-round?

Expert gardening advice

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Also,if you subscribe online before the end of 2009 to poplar tree garden centre uk newsletter and free gardening advice magazine,they will offer everyone special discount codes for online purchases to stores in the uk worth upto %50 off chosen products.


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