Everyone wants the harvest to last as long as possible. In a good root cellar, many vegetables easily will keep 5 or 6 months. You don’t have to process vegetables going into the root cellar. It’s a true low-energy food preservation system. A steady cool temperature (35°-45° F.) is the main requirement. Read the rest of this entry »

Many of these seeds are chewed up and destroyed by animals and hers are broken down in the alimentary canal of birds, particularly of chickens, pigeons and seed eaters with strong beaks such as most the finches. A great number, however, have hard enough coats to remain intact while the fleshy parts are digested and are finally voided by the birds, sometimes after being carried for long distances. Birds which do not have the powerful beaks of true seed eaters do least damage; Read the rest of this entry »

I blanch it with its own leaves

A thriving row of cauliflower is a spectacular sight in the vegetable garden, but few people think they can have great success with it. I think it’s as easy to grow as any cabbage family crop. Cauliflower is less tolerant to hot weather than its relatives, though, so it’s important to set your plants out very early or plan on a fall crop. If the heads mature in the heat, they’re apt to have a bitter taste or go by very quickly.

For your first crop, set out some plants 3 or 4 weeks before the average date of the last spring frost. Pinch off a couple of the lower leaves.

As cauliflower heads get to be 4 to 5 inches across, they should be blanched by preventing sunlight from reaching the heads. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s exciting to discover the first thumb-sized broccoli heads in the row and watch them grow. Sometimes they’ll get to be 6 or 8 inches wide at the top. Other times the heads will be quite small when it’s time to pick them.

The center head must be cut before it blossoms, even if it’s on the small side. How do you tell when the head is ready to blossom? A head of broccoli is a cluster of flower buds. When the head is young, its individual buds are packed very tightly. Rub your thumb over them and you will feel that tightness. As long as the buds stay tight, let the head grow. But when the buds loosen up and spread out, they are about to pop up and produce little yellow flowers. Again, pass your thumb across the top of the head—if the buds are loose, you’d better harvest. Read the rest of this entry »

Some gardeners are hesitant to try celery and I understand why. It needs a long time to grow—up to 4 months of mostly cool weather. Celery also demands steady water and fertilizer because its root system is near the surface. But if your soil holds water well and has plenty of organic matter in it, you’re in good shape, especially if you plant early and harvest early.

Because celery takes such a long time to grow, start the seeds indoors early. Celery seeds are slow to germinate, so you can soak them overnight to speed the process. Plant them indoors 10 to 12 weeks before the average last frost date. Read the rest of this entry »

Peppers are the prettiest plants in the garden, especially when they’re loaded with dozens of red, green, orange, and yellow peppers.

Peppers are easy to grow, but people have trouble with peppers because they push them too hard. Giving them too much fertilizer is the number one mistake. I have a big stack of letters from people who say, “My plants are tall and dark green, but I don’t have any peppers yet!” This is a sure sign of too much fertilizer.

Peppers don’t need much fertilizer, and what they get should come in small doses. Give them a teaspoon of a complete fertilizer like 5-10-10 at planting time and no more than a teaspoon or two at blossom time.

Each year I grow pepper plants that at first glance seem awfully small, yet when you look closely you discover 15 or 20 peppers on each plant. Read the rest of this entry »

Five ways to cultivate the soil

Digging is usually necessary to incorporate bulky organic materials, relieve compaction, improve drainage, improve soil texture and control growth of weeds.

• Single digging Type of digging in which the soil is cultivated to the depth of the spade blade. The most widely practised form of digging, adequate for most ordinary soils of reasonable depth which do not overlay an intractable subsoil. First, take out a trench one blade deep, then fill this in using adjacent soil, turning each spadeful upsidedown as you do. As you move in this way across the areas of ground, the trench moves with you. Soil from the first trench is used to fill the final one at the other end of the plot.
• Double digging Digging soil to two depths of the spade. Especially useful on land which has not been cultivated before or where a hard subsoil layer is impeding drainage and the penetration of plant roots. Read the rest of this entry »

These plants are suitable for growing around the base of winter- or spring-flowering shrubs, for bright splashes of colour in the border..

• Bleeding heart (Dicentra spectabilis) Pink and white heart- shaped flowers in spring above attractive foliage. 45-60cm/ 1¹/2-2ft. A pure white form is becoming popular. Moist peaty soil and dappled shade.

• Christmas rose (Helleborus niger) Evergreen hand-shaped leaves and white single-rdse-like flowers in winter. 30cm/12in. Fertile moist soil and partial shade.

• Elephant’s ears (Bergenia species/varieties) Large, shiny, leathery evergreen foliage and dense heads of pink, red or white flowers in spring. 30cm/12in. Foliage often turns reddish in winter. Moist soil. Sun or partial shade. Read the rest of this entry »

Most herbs are easy to grow. The following selection provides a variety of flavours to complement home-grown vegetables and enhance everyday food. Site the herb patch in a sunny well-drained spot near the kitchen. Some of these herbs will also grow well in containers.

• Angelica (Angelica archangelica) Aromatic leaves have various uses; stems are candied and used in cake decoration. Biennial grown from seed. 180cm/6ft tall. Sown outdoors in late summer, under a cloche in cold areas. Transplant to 30cm/12in apart the following spring. Remove flower heads. Read the rest of this entry »

In the open garden autumn is a time of cutting down, tidying up and battening down the hatches against the onslaught of winter. In the more restricted garden on the window sill there is a little more scope for planting, to provide interest and perhaps colour for the grey days to follow. It is the greyness of the days, and hence the lack of light, rather than the cold that makes the late autumn and winter such a dead season as far as flowers are concerned.

For early autumn you must have dahlias. Their paint-box colours are quietened by the softer light of autumn and dahlia blooms laced with cobwebs and beaded with dew are, for me, a final confirmation that summer is truly over. Read the rest of this entry »

Flower patterns

Fabric designs over the centuries have mostly derived their inspiration from nature and in particular from plants and flowers. It is no different today: the largest choice in wallpapers and fabrics is still in the floral ranges. Even the occasional abstract design is more often than not based on natural forms. We all love flowers and therefore use them as decoration wherever possible. The choice is immense now and there is every style of design available from very smart, small- scale, all-over flower patterns to great splashy chintzes smothered with full-blown summer garden flowers, ideal for curtains. Read the rest of this entry »

You can also grow your own seedlings, or dig them up from your own or a friend’s garden. Taking growing plants from the wild is now illegal and so it is irresponsible to suggest that you look for suitable specimens on the local common, although I cannot see you being marched off to prison if you should carefully lift one tiny 4 inch birch seedling from among thousands in the wild. Wherever you find your seedling be sure to remove it very carefully, bringing as much soil as you can and not damaging the roots. Keep it in a sealed plastic bag until you are able to plant it in as small a pot as will comfortably take it. Don’t at this stage prune the roots, other than trimming any that may have been damaged, but leave it to settle in for a few weeks. Once you see signs of new top growth you can begin leaf pruning, reducing top growth and encouraging the development of side growth. Never strip a tree of all its leaves, for these are essential to the process of photosynthesis by which plants live. Read the rest of this entry »

Back to simplicity and the simple country feel of wood and brick and lots of fresh air. If you prefer Indian rugs, or dhurries, on faxed floors or deep-pile carpet and crisp cotton sheets to satin ones then your plants should look countrified too. Pelargoniums look right whether indoors or out and at one time few cottages didn’t have their pot or two of cheerful flowers on a window-sill. Busy lizzies are another good old-fashioned sort of plant, often badly grown and allowed to get leggy and sparse. They do like plenty of light indoors but not direct sunlight and as they are really very easy to propagate from seed or cuttings there is no reason why you shouldn‘t have a regular supply to fill your window-sills. Read the rest of this entry »

Dry Atmosphere

However hard you try some rooms just don’t suit houseplants., They are either too dark, and no plants can do without light, or they are too warm and this is a problem when it goes hand in hand with low humidity. Some of the problem can be eliminated by using electric humidifiers or the water-filled variety that is attached to a radiator. Grouping plants together improves their chances of prospering and maturing. Also standing the pots on a base of pebbles or plunging into peat, which is then kept damp, helps immensely. Alternatively you can give up the struggle with the fine mist sprayer and grow plants which naturally come from arid regions of the world. Read the rest of this entry »

Finding a plant to suit every situation in the house might sound impossible; so few rooms have the perfect environment. If we have a few failures we tend to become discouraged. However there are dozens of plants which are quite happy in extreme conditions from hot and dry to dark and humid and there are many easy plants which are not in the least bit fussy about where they live. Sort out your problem areas and you will find there are plants which will make the most of them.

Bathrooms

Bathrooms seem to be the perfect environment for plants. All that warmth and water splashing about makes us feel that anything growing there will thrive. Also, from the point of view of appearance, foliage plants, in particular, are most effective. Their leaf shapes and textures produce a strong contrast with the smooth monochrome forms of bathroom fittings. Read the rest of this entry »

Plants have a wonderful knack of not just enlivening a room but actually becoming useful decorative devices that make the most of good features or disguise the bad ones. Any room in a house can have things that need highlighting as well as lots of areas that you’d rather not draw too much attention to. Plants can work for you in solving difficult decorating problems and they are cheaper and a lot more fun than getting in the builders.

Many old houses which have seen years of changes and alterations, particularly to plumbing, may have tangles of pipe-work either exposed or badly boxed in. A hanging basket or container with a good easy trailing species such as an ivy or the grape ivy can disguise the ugliest bits and can even be trained along the parts you wish to hide. Read the rest of this entry »

Chives have a milder flavour than onion and a few leaves can be snipped over potatoes or potato salad or added to omelettes to enhance the flavour. Buy a small plant and grow it in a sunny box and it will soon increase in size. In winter it will die back and may perish altogether; if you divide the plant up at the end of summer and pot the small bits individually you will increase your chances of having a survivor. Bring one pot into the kitchen at the beginning of spring to force it into growth for an early supply of leaves.

Sage you will need only infrequently unless you are mad about sage and onion stuffing. It makes an attractive plant, however, if you have the space. There is a purple-leaved variety that is colourful and well flavoured and you may also see a yellow and green one—Salvia officinalis ‘Icterina’—or the variegated white, green and pink form known as ‘Tricolor’, but these are perhaps best grown for decoration rather than flavouring. Sage likes plenty of sun and should be picked over regularly to keep it bushy; replace it when it becomes too gnarled and woody, again from cuttings tucked in beside their mother in the spring. Read the rest of this entry »

In the large estates of the past, with their lovely walled kitchen gardens, acres of glass and abundance of labour, fruit was often grown in pots. Even exotics like oranges and lemons were planted in large planters provided with wheels, so that when summer came the trees could be moved out of the orangery into a sunny position in the open. Pineapples and grapes were grown under glass, and great was the pressure on the poor gardeners to provide early fruit for the table.

Today few of us have the time or means for allthis to-ing and fro-ing of pots and, besides, the shops are full of oranges and lemons, grapes and pineapples, usually throughout the year. You could have an orange or a lemon or a grapefruit tree in a pot on the patio and move it to a cool greenhouse or a conservatory during the winter, but even then the most you would be likely to see would be the occasional flower. Still, the plants will come, from pips (pits) sown in pots of moist compost kept close and with bottom heat if possible. In as little as three years you could have a 5 foot tree with attractive dark green shiny leaves. But fruit, no. Read the rest of this entry »

For many years orchids were considered to be the elite of all greenhouse plants, requiring specially built glasshouses and carefully controlled conditions. This was certainly true in the earliest days of orchid cultivation when knowledge of them was limited and the plants obtained were those which had been imported from the wild. However, several decades of selective breeding have produced a wide variety of hybrids for the potential grower which not only produce larger and more colourful flowers, but will bloom more freely, and, most important of all, will grow happily in a variety of surroundings. These plants have an extremely wide tolerance with requirements which are simple and easy to reproduce almost anywhere. While there can be no doubt that the finest specimens will be achieved in greenhouse conditions where the light, temperature and humidity can be exactly balanced to satisfy their individual needs, the same plants will produce a brave show given similar conditions indoors, although their growth may be slower. Read the rest of this entry »

Once again there arose a demand for a case similar to the once popular Wardian Case. The modern equivalents are called indoor greenhouses or planteriums, and bear little resemblance to the original Wardian Case. Although both were designed for holding plants, the modern planterium

is built to house orchids permanently, catering for their every need, while the Wardian Case was mainly intended to hold plants in flower creating a short term display. The modern case, beautifully finished and pleasing to the eye becomes a piece of furniture in the room. They are obtainable in a number of materials including various coloured woods to suit decor, or stainless steel for office or hotel lounge. The main features are the large sliding glass doors and glass sides which allow an uninterrupted view of the flowers inside. The bottom section of the case consists of a watertight fibreglass tray concealed in the base, which may be 12-15 cm (5-6 in.) deep. Read the rest of this entry »