Giant Blueberries

Whatever the rights and wrongs of this situation, what everyone can agree on is that eating the freshest produce possible is the healthiest way forward – and that eating a variety of different fruit and veg is the best way to ensure you get maximum benefit. Berries are proven to be one of the healthiest ‘superfoods’, and luckily they’re also easy to grow.

So, which are best from the gardener’s point of view? And how can we get the most out of them?

Blackberries – if you’re put off by the thought of a wild thicket of prickly brambles, never fear – try growing a thornless variety up your house walls or in a pyramid in a pot if your garden is small – they’re easy to look after and give you large, delicious fruit.

Blueberries - these are easy to grow if you have acid soil (if rhododendrons grow well nearby) – if not, plant them in pots of ericaceous compost, which is widely available in garden centres. Grow at least two to ensure good crops of fruit, as they need to pollinate each other.

Honeyberries – a kind of honeysuckle, would you believe, these shrubby plants have beautiful blue berries with a complex flavour. Gardener and writer Mark Diacono, author of ‘Taste of the Unexpected’ raves about them. Make sure you buy two to get cross-pollination. They’ll grow in any soil so are great if you want blueberries but don’t have the right conditions.

Cranberries – these are commercially grown in bogs which are flooded to harvest them – cultivation as for blueberries, but, surprise surprise, more water, ideally rainwater if you live somewhere that the hardness of your tap water furs up the kettle.

Currants – under-rated but packed with goodness. So good in fact that monks used to dry them as vitamin C pills to ward off winter illnesses in the Middle Ages. If space is tight grow a standard redcurrant as an attractive patio feature. Unlike most fruit, they’ll also take a bit of shade.

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Rubeckia

It’s nothing to do with illicit substances or even anything vaguely highfalutin’ – merely a seasonal shearing of some of May’s more exuberant growth on your herbaceous perennials. But why, one might ask, on ear

th would you cut something back just as it’s starting to grow so well? Especially when there are legions of slugs waiting to do the job for us…

To answer this question, we must look ahead to the other end of summer. All those tall lanky stems currently zooming skyward will have bloomed madly in July and early August, leaving a late summer gap before the asters, salvias and early autumn performers hit their stride. Get the shears ready now, however and you can spread the flowering season of plants like phlox, feverfew (photos), echinacea, rudbeckia (see photo) and the taller kinds of campanulas and sedums such as ‘Autumn Joy’ (now known as ‘Herbstfreude’).

Pre-chop

If you’ve not tried it before I can thoroughly recommend it as an easy way to spread the flowering season of the plants in your garden. Remember to be kind to those which have been sliced; give them a feed and a water too, if the weather is dry. And enjoy those flowers when you come back from holiday – even if the lawn is parched, your borders will still be bright and colourful.

Post Chop

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Just like in the 1960s cartoon, herbs are a motley crew – they include annuals, biennials, perennials and shrubs. What they have in common is that they’re a delight for the eyes, mouth and nose, and an easy delight at that. Not even the most belt-and-braces gardener recommends double digging for herbs; there’s no staking, no complicated pruning and no real fuss. To grow them successfully you just have to understand that broadly, herbs fall into two categories; the hard and the soft.

Hard – these tough nuts stay green right through the winter and have twiggy, bushy growth, (for example lavender). The hard analogy extends to the leaves too – herbs in this group tend to have tough, leathery leaves (like sage and bay) or needle-like foliage (for example rosemary). Others in this group include thyme and hyssop. Give them the hottest, sunniest spot you’ve got, and don’t water or feed them too much. The idea here is to treat them mean so they grow slowly and have concentrated flavours. If you’re too kind to them (or try growing them in the shade), they’ll be lank and tasteless.

Soft – if it’s an annual (like coriander – growing and dying in one year) or if it disappears back to nothing in the winter (like mint), then give it rich moist soil and sun or partial shade.  Biennial herbs (such as parsley, which flower and die in their second year) tend to fit into this category too. Other herbs in this category include lemon balm, sweet cicely and chives. The premise with the ‘soft’ herbs is to keep them growing happily and cosset them for lots of lush tasty leaves. If you treat them like the ‘hard’ ones they’ll reward you with stingy growth (and a very short lifespan in the case of the annuals). So, it pays to plant them in rich soil and water them regularly.

Sweet Cicely

These two very simple categories cover an incredible variety of edible and scented plants, and inevitably there are a few exceptions to the rule. However, as a general guide, it works pretty well. I’m off to get some sweet cicely from the (semi-shaded, well-watered) rhubarb patch to add to my crumble. Its warming aniseed flavour will complement the rhubarb’s tartness perfectly – not only that but it even reduces the amount of sugar you need to add – what’s not to like?

Why not add some herbs to your garden?

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There are plenty of reasons why growing vegetables and fruit in pots makes sense. Not only can you fit more in to a tiny space, but growing in pots allows you to grow things you might not normally be able to, such as tender lemon trees or blueberries which need acid soil. Not to mention the satisfaction a home-grown fruit can bring, plucked straight from the bush while you’re sat down at a summer barbecue!

But what are the keys to having your own potted Garden of Eden?

TOP TIP 1

Big pots. Whether it’s a dustbin, a fantastic ‘shabby chic’ vintage olive oil tin, or a contemporary modern planter, make sure they’re as big as you can fit and afford. One sunny weekend away spells instant un-re-waterable death for a patio full of lots of tiny pots. I speak from shriveled experience! Big pots dry out much more slowly.

TOP TIP 2

Strawberries

Pick your plants: strawberries, salads, blueberries and tomatoes all do well. Don’t bother with plants that like a cool, moist root-run and deep soil, such as rhubarb and raspberries, or those that like to grow huge such as pumpkins and artichokes; they’ll need more water and space than you’ll want to give them. Modern dwarf fruit trees are particularly good in pots: imagine a summer full of beautiful peaches, plums, cherries and apples! An added bonus is that they’ll be easy to net if birds are a problem.

Blueberries

TOP TIP 3

Be kind. You’re asking a lot of your plants – you want them to look and taste great, and give you enough of a harvest to be worth the space. So use the best compost you can afford and feed them regularly. Water – this can’t be stressed enough – is key. Water them regularly. Or watch them shrivel (see Tip 1!)

The beauty of container gardening

A huge advantage of growing in pots is that you can grow things not normally possible in our climate, such as lemons. From mid-May to mid-September, you can enjoy the Mediterranean experience of sitting in a garden surrounded by lemon trees, fragrant with blossom and heavy with fruit. They’re tender – even at the garden in Tuscany where I worked as a student gardener, they took their lemons inside for the winter. However, their 50-year old potted lemon trees proved that citrus are well-suited to container cultivation. Every year as the swallows arrived, the big terracotta pots would be wheeled out; it was a moment of great joy as you knew – summer had arrived.

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Chicken

Anyway, analogy over… I’m about to put my theory to the test – by reversing it. I know I can look after plants, but what about animals? Yep, I’m getting pets; chickens to be precise, and I’m very excited! The last month has been spent hammering, sawing, sanding and above all scavenging the materials for a hen house on a budget. By using old pallets and a big bit of acrylic that was part of an old sign, I’ve got change from a tenner:

Chicken Hutch

Why chickens though? They’re a bit trendy at the moment, but there are some very good reasons for keeping chickens at home. Firstly, obviously, there’s the wonderful, tasty fresh eggs. Anyone who’s ever poached a freshly-laid egg from their own hens will know what I mean. Secondly, chicken manure is great fertiliser and if you put it on your compost heap it will enrich the final product enormously. Thirdly, hens are great company. They’re naturally inquisitive and often have lovely characters – it’s heartwarming to go into the garden and be welcomed by the patter of small feet and gentle clucking as they run over to greet you.

I’ve put my name down for three ‘ex-batts’ (ex-battery hens) from The British Hen Welfare Trust. Pickup date is the 18th May. The BHWT advises that they often arrive with next to no feathers, pale from a life in a cage with no daylight; but within weeks of re-homing they regrow their plumage and start enjoying life to the full. I can barely wait to give three of these poor creatures a new life under the apple trees.

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Courgettes – non-gardeners are frequently amazed that a courgette doesn’t have to be a boring old dark green truncheon. There are yellow ones, round ones, stripy ones and more – all easy to grow and all difficult to find in the shops. Sow two seeds in a 3 in (9cm) pot and remove the weaker seedling if both germinate. It’s worth remembering that courgettes are very quick to fruit, so you can sow a few different varieties over the next couple of months and pull out the plants as they get tired (or if you get tired of eating them!).

Sweetcorn – these really are the best veg to grow at home. This is because they lose flavour from the moment they’re picked – it’s an old gardening cliché that you should boil a pan of water before you go out to pick them so you can cook them straight away. Luckily today there are lots of great new varieties such as the ‘supersweets’ and ‘tendersweets’ which have much better flavour than the old cultivars. Sweetcorn hates root disturbance so sow it in old loo rolls or modules in the greenhouse, or hold off till mid May and sow them outside.

Giant Pumpkins

Pumpkins and squashes – some hard-won advice – don’t plant too many – they take up tons of room! Sow them as for courgettes. They grow really well on compost heaps if you’re short of space; if you’re feeling adventurous try growing a giant pumpkin – the biggest recorded pumpkin weighed nearly ¾ of a tonne!

Runner beans – the kings of the summer vegetable garden come in lots of different varieties. If birds tend to peck the flowers in your garden, try a white-flowered one such as ‘White Lady’. Some varieties are ‘stringless’, such as ‘Lady Di‘. Sow them as for sweetcorn.

String beans

French beans – so tasty, so easy. Sow in trays or modules, or wait till late May to sow outside – they really hate cold wet soil. Lots of choices, flat pods, ‘pencil’ pods, green, yellow or purple beans: just like courgettes it’s worth making a couple of small sowings between now and mid July to avoid a glut then a famine.

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Summer bulbs are one of the most sure-fire ways to inject a splash of colour into your garden. The reason they’re a good bet is that someone else has done a year or two’s work looking after the plant, it arrives neatly packaged and ready to burst forth into leaf and bloom.

‘Bulbs’ is a bit of a catch-all term, and when gardeners use it we also often mean corms and tubers. The easy way to distinguish them is that corms tend to have a netted, papery covering and are solid inside whereas bulbs tend to have layers, rather like an onion. Freesias, crocus, and gladioli are all kinds of corms, whereas daffodils and lilies are true bulbs. Then come tubers such as dahlias and many begonias.

Dahlia Twynings Smartie

Bulbs, tubers or corms, they’re generally great plants to grow in pots. For colour and sheer ‘oomph’, patio dahlias, such as ‘Twyning’s Smartie’, are hard to beat. Begonias are great for long-lasting colour, some are scented too – and they even do well in shady spots!

Eucomis

For an exotic touch, try the pineapple lily, Eucomis – with their amazing tufted flower spikes they’re sure to impress friends and neighbours. Sometimes they take a long time to appear in spring, but don’t worry, they will eventually appear. I find it helpful to mark where I’ve put them with thin canes or wooden kebab skewers (which also helps keep cats off the soil).

One of the best gardening ‘cheats’ I know is to grow lilies in pots. They’re perfect for dropping into beds and borders to add some instant impact if you find you have any gaps over the summer. Oriental lilies in particular are wonderfully fragrant, colourful and easy to grow. They prefer acid soil, so grow them in pots of compost if your soil is limy or chalky (alkaline). Otherwise, try the glorious Madonna lily which relishes limy conditions.

Whichever you choose, these pre-primed bundles of flower are sure to bring colour and scent to your summer garden. So get planting!

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Newts

“Oh My God, newts!”,  I muttered to no-one in particular, beaming like an idiot. The allotment pond, you see, is not a thing of beauty, its battered plastic edges poking out of a pile of bricks in the corner of my plot. Hence my surprise in finding such abundance of amphibious life. Soon they were joined by great jelly-like icebergs of frogspawn and the whole area came alive with the sounds of wet little animals having fun.

It just goes to show the value of one of the great ‘truisms’ of gardening – the single best thing you can do to attract wildlife is to make a pond. Another advantage of water gardening is that it allows you to grow a whole new range of beautiful plants that thrive in wet conditions.

Pond basics

There are a few basic rules to follow when making a pond. Number one is similar to the patio rule I wrote about back in January: always make it much bigger than you think it needs to be. This is primarily because by the time you’ve put in your plants, pump and whatever else you want, the pond will rapidly fill up and can easily start to look a bit pokey. And never under-estimate just how much pond plants will grow – successful water gardening is all about continually keeping them in check!

The advantages of having a bigger pond are many – a greater volume of water will allow a more stable ecosystem to develop – it won’t evaporate in summer or freeze solid in winter, and you’ll be able to accommodate more plants, which helps enormously in keeping the water clear and healthy.

Plants

Pond plants fall into four broad categories: Marginal, floating, submerged (oxygenators) and deep water plants.

*  Marginals are those such as our native yellow flag iris, rushes, pickerel weed (Pontederia cordata) which grow in pots of soil in shallow water.

*  Floaters live entirely on the water surface, such as duckweed and water fern (Azolla) – generally best avoided as they tend to take over.

*  Submerged/oxygenators such as the strangely beautiful mare’s tail (Hippuris vulgaris) are a really valuable group of plants, mopping up excess nutrients in the water, they help to keep it clear and full of oxygen for fish and wildlife.

*  Deep water plants such as waterlilies, for example the lovely yellow variety ‘Marliacea Chromatella’, – are useful for providing a bit of shade (which helps keep the water clear by depriving algae of light) and a refuge for aquatic wildlife and fish, which love nothing more than hiding under lily pads.

It pays to always always include at least a couple of plants in your pond, however small it is. Even a half barrel has room for a dwarf waterlily and a couple of oxygenators. Visiting wildlife will thank you for it, and you’ll enjoy the thrum of insects along with the unique colours and textures of t

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Today was such a beautiful day so I wandered around the garden snapping some of my daffodil/narcissi flowers and thought I would share them with you.

My Narcissi

They brought to mind words of Wordsworth’s poem:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils.

What’s also great is that these beauties at one time were only available in the autumn but now they are available in the spring already potted up.

Carlton, Ice Follies, Tête-à-Tête

Plus we also have the summer flowering varieties.

Erlicheer, Grand Soleil d’Or, Alavanche

I am delighted that we can now enjoy Daffodils/Narcissi in our gardens or indoors for more months of the year.

Click to Bakker’s website and give them a try!

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Now, if you read old gardening books this would be something of a heresy. After all, I love growing vegetables and roses. Victorian gardeners used to order manure not by the bag, but by the ton. However, times change and methods with them.

If you’d visited my allotment on a few windless summer evenings last year you’d have been forgiven for thinking you were next to a stable yard. A distinctly… how to put this…. animal scent wafted on the air. But I promise, gardener’s honour, no muck. Just vegetable alchemy.

The secret to huge crops of tomatoes, luscious raspberries and more sweet peas than you can pick? Comfrey. The abandoned plot behind mine is covered in the stuff. Rot the leaves down in a barrel of water and you have a fantastic home-made, if slightly whiffy, fertiliser. For a step-by-step guide on how to make it, click here.

I find that liquid feeds such as this, plus pelleted feed such as poultry manure or granulated cow manure and a generous application of home-made garden compost is more than enough to keep even the hungriest plants happy.

Comfrey is dead easy to grow, and is rich in all sorts of goodness, not least potassium, one of the holy trinity of elements when it comes to fertilisers – known by three letters: N, P and K. To break down the science I find it handy to think about them in terms of colours:

N: Nitrogen – think of nitrogen as green; bright green leaves and lots of growth

P: Phosphorus: think of phosphorus as brown – roots and soil

K: Potassium (potash) – think of this as red – bright flowers and ripe fruit.

As science reveals more about the chemistry of soil, gardeners are becoming less concerned about adding extra phosphorus. But nitrogen and potassium are still really important and valuable allies in getting the most from your garden.

So, back to the colours – if you want lots of lush growth, apply a fertiliser high in nitrogen. Spring lawn feed, and manure are high in nitrogen.

If you want lots of flowers and fruit, use a potassium (also known as potash) rich fertiliser, such as tomato feed.

And if you just want to generally perk up your garden, go for a so-called ‘general’ or ‘universal’ fertiliser which will contain balanced amounts of N, P, and K.

Slow release feeds are really useful, especially for container plants. The tablet forms are easy to use – just push a tablet into the soil and your plant is fed for a month, easy peasy.

Artificial versus organic

Personally I feel that it’s best to feed the soil with an organic fertiliser for the most sustainable and healthy way to garden. However, many other gardeners value the ease of use and quick results of inorganic (artificial) fertilisers. Whichever you pick, your plants will repay you many times over.

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