Well, gardeners have been warned, here in the North of England, that arctic weather is almost upon us. So that means I’ll need to get outside into the garden and do some physical work. I’ve been shrinking from that for the past few weeks since I bent over carelessly, picked up one of my potato growing bags, and wrenched my back. Now, however, I simply must get out out there.

Last year, before we moved from the East Midlands, I lost even some of my hardiest fuchsias in the coldest winter for decades. This year I don’t plan to repeat the experience. And then there are the less hardy varieties in pots. Having moved to a smaller house, being short of conservatory space, and so far not having re-erected the greenhouse that I so painstakingly dismantled and transported north, I’m having to think hard about the best way to overwinter them. When I’ve worked it out I’ll blog again about this.

Vertical Vegetable Gardening

As I explained in a previous post I now only have ground-level earth in the shade of a high wall so decided to experiment with something I never needed to do before. My experience of this first year of “vertical gardening” has been mixed, even against the south-facing wall. No doubt the lack of sunshine in the mid-summer months had a lot to do with it as even the runner beans were poor but I’m not sure that I’ll try it again, at least not to the same degree. We got a few decent tomatoes, some very miniature peppers, and a couple of courgettes, but overall the vertical kitchen garden experiment was not a success apart from the onions in pots which did very nicely. Down at ground level the potatoes in black plastic bags also produced well as usual but I don’t count them as part of the experiment.

Looking forward to Spring

Down in Nottinghamshire I worked out the best time to plant my tulip bulbs. There it was mid-November. I wonder what will be best here. I’m going to try a month earlier, put them in this week, some in pots, some in an area that does get just a little sun late in the day, and see what happens.

In a new environment what can one do but test and see how things go. Ah well, if anything is going to happen out there today I’d better tear myself away from this keyboard.

Tags: Fuchsias, gardening, vertical garden, winter

The question from the old nursery rhyme came to mind as I sat down to write this morning. Since moving to Cumbria I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that gardening up here among the hills in the Eden Valley is not the same as in the low-lands of the Trent Valley. Nor is working chiefly with containers and surrounded by high walls the same as gardening in an open space with wide lawns.

Some of my experiments with veg in pots have worked fairly well. The runner beans have been fine, onions are doing well, and we’ve had a few courgettes from the two plants that I tried growing vertically against a wall. My main problem with these came when I thought they would have been thoroughly watered by the semingly non-stop torrential rain so didn’t venture outside for a week, only to discover later that the pots were standing in a “rain shadow” and were bone dry while almost everything around them was drowning.

Tomatoes have not been a very good story. I put half a dozen plants of different varieties in large pots against what I thought would be a sun-drenched south-facing wall, theoretically exposed to ten hours a day of good warmth and light. The problem has been that the sun thought differently and decided not to shine very often, so they’ve been growing in the cool. Even so, we’ve had a few nice fruits and I’m still hopeful that more will ripen by the end of this month.

I put the fuchsia photo at the top as a reminder that one of the joys has been my small new collection of fuchsia varieties. The photo here was also an experiment, taken with my camera to see whether I could get a good sharp picture. Not as good as with a “proper” camera, but I’m reasonably pleased with it. I’ll write again with some thoughts on photographing garden plants.

Tags: container gardening, Fuchsias, Tomatoes, Veg in pots

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