One of the memories of my early childhood in England just after the second world war is a small patch of earth that I could claim as “mine”, and the tousled greenery of my carefully tended carrots. Grandad was a farmer a long way out in the country, but here at the back of our house in the middle of the town was my very own farm!

As the decades have passed, children in towns have increasingly come to think of their food as coming from a supermarket, ready-wrapped in sterile plastic. Its true origin has largely been hidden. It is therefore gratifying to observe the trend toward including gardening in the activities of early school years.

More and more schools are starting school gardens. Children are learning how to grow a variety of vegetables, and recent research in the USA has shown that as a consequence they are eating more of them - a welcome trend away from the junk-food culture. Long may it continue.

Teaching children gardening, and getting them actively and enthusiastically involved in growing both flowers and vegetables for the kitchen has other educational benefits. It helps with many aspects of the basic science curriculum. The life-cycle of plants of many kinds are actually seen and experienced rather than being merely boring pages in a textbook.

Chemistry is brought to life, and the pseudo-scientific nonsense of “chemical free” growing is countered as kids learn that the garden compost is actually a rich cocktail of complex chemicals, produced by natural processes and containing elements needed for a further round of plant life. They’ll learn also that not all things “natural” are safe; that some plants produce chemical poisons and are not to be eaten, just as others produce chemicals essential to our healthy living.

Simple gardening projects can help teach the skills of planning, measuring and recording. Analysis of the results can include arithmetic and other mathematical methods such as the creation of graphs and charts. Detailed observation of the structure of plants can be translated into art work. Furthermore, in an age of immediate gratification the weeks of waiting between seedtime and harvest teaches patience.

Teaching gardening to children can in these ways and more have major beneficial impacts on their educational development and their learning of basic life-skills. Long may it increase, both at home and at school.

Tags: children gardening

In the northern hemisphere Spring is coming.  The snowdrops and crocuses have in many places already burst out into flower.  Maybe this has set your mind working, and you’re wondering what to do with that spare plot of earth at the back of your house.  Well how about a vegetable garden?

Vegetable gardening for flavour

I’m not sure whether it really is true, in any scientifically provable way, that my home-grown veggies from the kitchen garden taste better than what my wife buys in the local store, but I know it feels that way.  There’s certainly something special about eating what you’ve grown yourself.  What’s more, you know it’s fresh; you picked it yourself just an hour or so ago.  And if you have children in the household they will know that food does not come from a plastic bag but from God’s good earth.

How was it grown?

Personally I’m not opposed to chemicals.  Why?  Because everything we eat is chemical.  Even the cleanest air we breath is chemical.  The freshest, most unpolluted water we drink is chemical.  The materials of our bodies are chemical. The green leaves of a plant are chemical.  It’s not that chemicals are bad in themselves, otherwise everything around us would be bad, but it’s a question of what kinds of chemicals.  Plants need food, and they often need protection from pests and diseases. When you grow your food yourself you know exactly what has been used to fertilise the soil, what has been used to guard the growing crops from insect damage and plant disease.  The uncertainties are removed.  You know what you’re giving your family to eat.

Good food and good exercise

For many of us our modern lifestyle does not make it easy to keep our bodies in good condition.  Obesity and slack muscles are all too common these days.  Half an hour a day looking after a kitchen garden can make a major difference to a person’s physical fitness.  The variety of movement involved exercises many different muscular groups including legs, arms, back and more.  It won’t be long before you start to feel the difference.

So why not?

Whether you’re looking for more flavourful food, trying to save the planet or aspiring after a better-toned body, a vegetable garden could do you good. Spring is coming. It’s time to be clearing the earth and sowing the seed. You’ll not regret it.

Tags: Kitchen Garden, Spring, vegetable garden

I have to confess that in recent months I’ve been neglecting my garden-related sites.

A project in a completely different online niche that was supposed to take around four weeks took nine, and then demanded quite a lot of day-to-day support to get it off the ground. Well, we’re through that period of 14-hour days, and 2009 is starting with something more akin to normality.

Herbs.at.Gardening-Notes.com has now been thoroughly checked.  All its links are working again.  One of the problems was that our main UK garden centre affiliate changed its marketing service company, so many of their old links no longer connected to anything very meaningful. Now you can once again go to our herb garden site with confidence and I’m hoping to add some more pages very shortly.

The Fuchsia File has also been given the same treatment.  Once again we faced changes made by an affiliate company, this one moving from running its own system to using a contracted service.  All links are now updated.  There are now twenty-one varieties listed and and described. I plan to add more, especially those which are easily available for online ordering of fuchsia plants within the UK.

A great feature of this site is the fuchsia news service.  The site software scans newspapers and magazines around the world to find articles relevant to fuchsias and puts brief notes about them on each page.  Most of the time it works well, although sometimes the news items can look a little strange if the fuchsia variety name includes words that have also been in the news recently. I’m trying to find a way of refining the selection process to avoid this; meanwhile it can sometimes add a little humour to the site.

My next task is to tackle the main site at Gardening-Notes.com, which will be a major job for the same reasons mentioned above.  This time I must redesign it so as to make updating far easier when affiliate companies change their catalogue management arrangements.

Meanwhile those of us in the northern hemisphere continue to go through the winter looking forward to the warmer days to come when once again we can get into our gardens.

Tags: Fuchsias, herb garden, Herbs

It’s July already!  In fact we’re almost half way through the month.  Where did June go to?  And my next question, when will Summer start?

Here in the English Midlands and North we’re not suffering the floods of last year, when thousands were left homeless, but we are getting a lot of dull wet days.  It’s great for the weeds, but the sun-loving plants are feeling rather deprived.

As I look out from my desk onto the vegetable patch I can, however, see my four golden yellow courgette plants flourishing.  No large fruits for the kitchen yet, but things are looking good for the next few weeks.

I decided to leave my broad beans last month as they were not quite ready, but yesterday we had a great meal including freshly picked beans.  It seems a long time since sowing them in one of the raised beds in January, but the wait has been well worth it.  There are many more good pickings to come.

On our bookselling site we have a great selection of kitchen garden books. Take a look.

Happy growing …. and eating.

- David Murray -
Gardening-Notes.com

ps.  Switching away from vegetables, don’t forget to take a close look at this excellent Fuchsias DVD.

Tags: broad beans, Courgettes, Fuchsias, Kitchen Garden, raised bed

For the past several years I’ve had very little success with butternut squash, but courgettes have been very different. Both green and yellow varieties have added to our kitchen table year after year.

This year I was rather late getting to grips with the greenhouse and vegetable garden due to a period of poor health, but eventually dug around to see what seed packets I had in store. I didn’t find any green courgette seeds but did discover a three-year-old almost empty packet (just four seeds) of the golden yellow variety, Golden Dawn III F1, dated 2005 and to be sown by last year

Not sure whether they’d germinate or not, I put one each in four small and even-older peat pots filled with general purpose compost, watered them liberally and left them in a shady corner of the greenhouse to see what happened. All four are now thriving as rapidly developing seedlings and last night I put them in the ground outside.

For each plant I had dug an 18-inch deep hole, put a layer kitchen waste (straight from the kitchen composting bin) in the bottom, covered this with a layer of well-rotted farmyard manure, covered that with a layer of shredded paper, and then backfilled the hole with a mixture of one part manure to two parts of the soil taken out when digging the hole. So from last night my four courgette plants, about three feet apart to give them a fair amount of room, are luxuriating in a nutritious soil which I hope will lead to another great harvest.

We still have a slight risk of late frost here in mid-May, but I’ll have to put a bit of fleece over them if the weather forecast looks threatening.

Happy growing,

- David -

Tags: Courgettes

Today I was in several city-centre bookshops and noticed that one of them in particular was displaying vegetable garden books in a big way, so I thought I’d follow suit here. Below I’m showing some of what appear to be the most popular kitchen garden titles here in the UK.

I’ve put three of our British authors and TV gardening presenters (Carol Klein, Alan Titchmarsh and Sarah Raven) on the first line of the Amazon.com display as these books appear to be most readily available outside the UK.

Happy reading, and happy vegetable growing.

- David Murray -

When we moved into our present house I was adamant that I wanted a kitchen garden. It didn’t have one, but with a bit of effort I managed to get family agreement to digging up the part of the lawn area outside my study window. It’s been a great blessing. (See here just a few of the crops we’ve produced from it). And now this makes it possible for me to participate in a practice which has been popular here in England for getting on towards four hundred years. That is, it’s mid-February (2008) and I’m about to sow my tomato seeds.

I suppose those early Spanish conquerors of Peru could not have guessed that their transportation of this red fruit to Europe would result centuries later in a major international food industry and a widespread kitchen gardening hobby. After all, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many people still believed that tomatoes were poisonous and grew the plants for decoration.

So then, which varieties shall I sow this year. I usually grow a few of the small and juicy Gardener’s Delight, but in recent years I’ve lost a lot of the outdoor plants to blight so am going for a change this year. A couple of years back I grew some Ailsa Craig, which gives a medium-sized fruit with great flavour and although I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that it’s blight-resistant my experience with it then was very good so I’m planning to have some this year in the greenhouse and few outdoors as well.

On the larger side I’m thinking of a return to Costoluto Fiorentino, a great Italian beefsteak variety with fruits anything up to four inches across. At the smaller end of the spectrum I’ve sometimes grown the bush tomato Balconi Red, and the cherry-sized fruits have been beautifully flavoured. Unfortunately, though, I find it such an ugly plant so this year I’m switching back to another bush variety, Garden Pearl, with which I had good success a couple of years ago growing them in plastic troughs with the plants about fifteen inches apart. Moving away now from the red varieties I think I might give blacks a miss this year, but do plan to sow some Golden Sunrise to give a little colour variety to the summer salad plate.

I’ll not turn this into an article about tomato fertilisers, but I’m hoping to experiment a little with fertilising this year. Mind you, nothing quite matches the fruits my grandfather used to produce in the 1950s. Those were the days when the milkman, the coalman and lots of others still delivered their goods from horse-drawn carts. Grandad would be out at any opportunity shovelling up the manure. I never did quite work out what else he put into the mix, but certainly his tomatoes were fed with water from a forty gallon barrel into which had gone great shovels of horse manure, soot from the chimney sweep and who knows what else. Completely unscientific, maybe, but what results! I was only about ten years old at the time, but can still almost taste the fruit as I think about it now.

Just what nutrients I’m going to feed into the compost for my tomato-growing buckets this year I haven’t yet decided. For the time being I’ll focus on the germination stage.

Click here to buy tomato seeds on-line

And here’s a very special guide to tomato growing from Australian authors whose advice has helped both hobbyist and professional tomato growers around the world.

I’ve two main points today, one relating to our general gardening site; the other to our specialist fuchsia site. Gardening-notes.com now has some additional shop pages for (i) Plants and Seeds and (ii) Raised Beds.

As Spring approaches (although given the temperatures these past few days one might be excused for thinking this to be along way off! ) the mind has to turn to seeds. A week or two ago I dug out my small seed trays and propagator, and gave them a good wash. They’re now ready for sowing and placing in my heated propagator cabinet. It’s around this time that I usually sow my tomatoes so as to give them a good start and get an early Summer crop in the greenhouse. I know that many people will have sown their onions at the end of December, especially if there’s any intention of growing for size and exhibiting in the local shows, but mine are simply for transplanting outside in the garden and growing for general family consumption, so about now is OK.

While we’re thinking about the vegetable garden it’s worth mentioning also that we’ve now included a shop section on raised bed equipment. You can, of course, build your own from timber, brick or other materials but many people like to buy ready-made structures so we’ve added this page to point to some useful products. Gardening-Notes.com also has an article on raised bed gardening.

The-Fuchsia-File, our specialist fuchsia site, is steadily growing. I still have to find more photographs to illustrate the various cultivars for which there are separate pages, but the written content is being added without waiting for these. Recent hardy fuchsia additions includes cultivars such as Preston Guild, Army Nurse, Empress of Prussia, Hawkshead and Sleepy.

That’s all for this time/ Enjoy your preparations for the coming Spring.

- David -

It’s several weeks since I added an article to the main Gardening-Notes site. In the limited time available I’ve been thinking more about the new fuchsia site, which I hope to be ready very shortly. However, today there’s a new article on starting a new herb garden. We have a few more herb-related articles in preparation, so look out for more. Our main bookselling site also has a good variety of titles on both growing herbs and cooking with herbs.

- David -