Lazy gardeners, here’s an opportunity to sit in the shade and watch thousands work for you. Try beekeeping. Bees love to work, and you’ll see a steady stream of the worker (female) bees rushing in and out of the hive from dawn to dark, storing honey and pollinating blossoms in your garden and orchard. To get all this, plus 100 or so pounds of honey each year, you’ll have to put in about six hours of work a year. Chances are you may spend more time than this with your bees as you get fascinated by the complex social structure that develops in the hive. Read the rest of this entry »

Every garden needs a little mulch. Mulch is a thick blanket of material laid on the ground near plants or in the walkways. It blocks sunlight, keeps weeds from growing, holds moisture in the soil, and keeps the soil temperature steady and cool. Mulch is a must for many dry-country gardeners who are trying to cut down on their watering, and for folks who haven’t got the time to stir up the soil every week to stop weeds from getting started.

People use all kinds of organic matter and material for mulch—grass clippings, bark chips, peat moss, pine needles, leaves, sawdust, black plastic, and so on. 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 »

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 »

Even more of us are besotted about strawberries and here the process is a good deal simpler. Barrels provided with planting holes, or terracotta planting pots with similarly distributed holes, make a most attractive sight when filled with merrily flowering and then ripening fruit. The plastic planters sold for the purpose are less pleasing to look at in themselves but equally good for growing good clean fruit, while growing bags and boxes can be used for alpine strawberries. These are rather more of a myth than a meal, since they tend to produce too little fruit at one time to satisfy anything but the most elfin appetite. But they are undeniably a treat. Read the rest of this entry »

We made a mistake with our first hedge in not cutting it down more drastically. We were so anxious for it to grow high enough to hide that disgraceful back door that it wasn’t trimmed properly for a long time, merely cut level. The consequence is that it did not grow thick at the bottom. After twelve years it was nearly four feet wide at the top but only a foot in width at the roots. Though we kept it well clipped the nature of the plant is not equal to the strain of supporting so much flesh. It waved about in the wind, quivering like a jelly, and when there was no wind the line was floppy and undulating. To bring it back it had to be cut down to two feet in height, and cut back so that the top is slightly narrower than the base, and it will continue to be trimmed in this tapering fashion. Read the rest of this entry »

After clothing the walls, Walter turned his attention to hedges. We had our high wall on one side and we wanted something equally high and impenetrable on the other side and along a low wall beyond the house on the south side. Our thoughts turned to Cupressus macrocarpa. We were warned that it had a limited life, in fact, just when we were considering our hedge the local doctor showed us a magnificent hedge he had planted at the back of his tennis court the year his son was born. That year his son was thirteen and the hedge was beginning to die. Of course we did not heed and we planted macrocarpa along the road beyond the house and between ourselves and the next house. The hedge flourished. It was well clipped every August and gave us no trouble. But in 1951, thirteen years after it was planted I noticed several of the trees were dying. Our hedge hasn’t made such a wholesale job of it as the doctor’s did but I have two nasty gaps where four or five trees had to be dug out. Now I have started a new hedge of Lonicera nitida behind so that I shan’t have to wait too long for a screen after the rest of the macrocarpa die. Read the rest of this entry »

The garden that went with the house was divided at the back into two tiny gardens, with walls and small plots of grass. We supposed that these went back to the time when the house had been two cottages.

In addition to the walls dividing the two little gardens at the back another wall divided us from the barton, and beneath all these walls someone had amused himself by making banks and sticking in stones vertically, like almonds on a trifle. We imagined the idea was a nice ready-made rock garden for us to play with. The first thing we did, when we really set our minds to the garden, was to remove all the walls and stones and pile them up for future use. They were quite a problem, those piles of stones, as they were moved from place to place as we dealt with the ground where they were piled. I could not see how we should ever use them all. Read the rest of this entry »

While the lawn and drive were being made I had to work as a labourer with Walter and the garden boy, but when they were finished I was at last permitted to go off and amuse myself in what was to be my part of the garden, the flower beds. I had long been considering what should be done with the ground on the west of the house. This was on a higher level than the rest and sloped up to a small orchard. We were lucky that our garden was on different levels. A garden that is completely flat is difficult to make interesting. We all know gardens that start as a field and finish as a field, no matter what the owners do in the way of trouble and expense. The kindest thing fate can do to you is to give you a garden that slopes away from the house. The upward slope is more difficult to deal with as great care has to be taken that it does not become top heavy.

When we bought the house this part of the garden rose sharply to the orchard without path or form. The speculator who sold the house to us had put in a few miserable gooseberry bushes, but they were choked with couch grass. In fact, it was nothing but a wilderness and looked the most uninspiring material for a garden. Read the rest of this entry »

It took nearly a year to get rid of the pole roses in my terraced garden. We let the house in September 1939 and went to London. Walter became Press Adviser to the Censor and I went with him as his secretary, so it was June 1940 before we saw our garden again.

I think it came as much as a shock to Walter as it did to me. Our tenants were busy on war work and looking after a family in war time. They had done the essentials, such as grass cutting, but the flower garden had received no check or restraint, and it had turned itself into a tropical jungle. The roses had forgotten they were meant to climb up poles, and had sent out long clutching feelers in every direction. An attractive, but particularly invasive, Michaelmas daisy had taken complete control of the garden. This Michaelmas daisy is deceptive. Above ground its fine feathery white flowers are just the foil for stiff flowers such as zinnias and dahlias, but underground its roots run hither and yon like ants from an ant heap. Read the rest of this entry »

When we bought the house our boundary, the ditch, was always full of water, and we bought the strip of the next orchard with the idea of making a wild garden, with water running through it. The banks on both sides were to be tamed and planted, leaving the willows just as they had been when the ditch was purely utilitarian. But again we were disappointed, because as soon as we had widened the bottom of the ditch, and had put down flat stones to make pools and waterfalls, the water disappeared. We never discovered why, because both orchards drained into the ditch, and there is never any shortage of rain in this part of the world. We could only think a new and deeper well had been dug somewhere in the neighbourhood, but gone it had, and now the only time there is water in the ditch is after unusually heavy rain. Read the rest of this entry »

I continued planting daffodils under the apple trees, acquiring cheap lots when I could, and lifting and dividing those already there. They were a great joy, because- daffodils undoubtedly look their best tossing their heads in long grass, but in the end they had to go too. We were faced with the problem of cutting the grass and there again the problem of labour defeated us. We had an Allen scythe, but no one to use it. We begged local farmers to help by cutting it with their big mowing machines in return for the hay, but the orchard had been used for chickens and was so uneven that the blades of the mowing machines were badly damaged. The sensible thing was to wire the orchard and let it for grazing, and that we did. Cows don’t eat daffodils unless there is nothing else for them, butthey trample them in a heartbreaking way, so that half the buds never had a chance to open. There was nothing else for it but to dig them up and plant them in other parts of the garden. Even if we could have solved the cutting problem and let the grass go for hay it wouldn’t have worked. If you take away all the grass you must in fairness give your trees some nourishment in place of it, and the natural way to do this is to offer your hospitality to cows or sheep, who will keep down the grass and leave thank offerings behind. Read the rest of this entry »

In our endeavours to make the garden more interesting we made every mistake that was possible, and I hate to think of all the hours of work I have put in undoing the result of our labours.

Very early in the game we decided we must develop vistas in the garden to add interest and purpose. In a small garden it is difficult to achieve the unexpected. A big garden gives ample scope with hedges, walls, varying levels and the size of the garden itself. We all know gardens that never achieve character, however much work the owners put into them. We wanted our garden to be ‘come hitherish’, for just as in a house one should catch a glimpse of something exciting that makes you want to explore further, so a garden should lead you on from one point to another. You mustn’t see it all at once, but there must be glimpses that make you wonder what is round the corner. Read the rest of this entry »

Description: A subtropical, deciduous shrub or small tree reaching approximately 5 m in height. The leaves are long and narrow, serrate, smelling of bitter almonds when rubbed. It has showy, white, pinkish or deep pink, sessile flowers which appear in early spring, before the leaves. The fruit is a globose, fleshy drupe, up to 14 cm in diameter, with a soft downy surface, orange-yellow with red or purplish tinges, and sweet, juicy flesh.

Origin and Distribution: Unknown in the wild, but widely cultivated as an orchard tree, originally only in China and later in warm regions throughout the temperate zone. Read the rest of this entry »