What's new, what's growing, what we're learning. Updates, guides and stories for people who take their garden seriously.
Which climbers actually close a balcony, how large the pot must be, and why hardiness in a container is a different thing from hardiness in a bed.
What fits this week in the beds.
What readers are digging into most right now.
Find posts about whatever is growing in your garden right now.
A rental garden is a vegetable plot that is already planted in May and handed back in October. What it costs in time, what comes out of it, and who it is worth it for.
In summer there are no ten metres of kitchen corridor between the bed and the pan. What you need for that, what is allowed in your own garden, on a balcony and in an allotment, and why portable is more often the wiser choice.
Cirrus, halo, thunderstorm tower, falling pressure, low hunting swallows and daisies that shut at three: what genuinely holds up, and why your look at the sky beats the app over the next two hours.
One wheel or two, pneumatic tyres or solid rubber, barrow or cart: what spares your back, how to load properly and which numbers on the label actually mean something.
The garden should not hurt. A raised bed at 80 to 90 cm, a table bed you can pull up under, long handles, kinder grips, lifting from the legs and working in twenty minute stints instead of three hours in the same position.
Under the canopy the grass thins out and then the moss arrives. Why shortage of light, root competition and throughfall work together, which mixture with supina bluegrass and red fescue actually holds, how to mow at 7 to 8 cm and feed less, and where the honest limit sits beyond which Waldsteinia, hostas and bark mulch are the better answer.
Your winter prunings are fencing material: willow rods strike root and turn into a living fence, hazel poles stay dead and last 5 to 10 years as a weave, brushwood becomes a Benjes hedge. Weaving technique, cutting season CW 46 to 9, service life honestly counted, and what neighbour law has to say about it.
Grasses plus low, tread tolerant flowers: white clover, daisies, creeping thyme, selfheal. Four to six cuts a year at 6 to 8 cm, no feed, no scarifying. How to sow a flowering lawn from scratch or overseed it into the sward you already have.
Root days, leaf days, waxing moon and ascending moon: what the moon-planting calendars actually say, what controlled sowing trials have found, and why the rules persist anyway.
