Saturday 23 July 2011

Populus deltoides ‘Purple Tower’: New for 2011

Posted by Graham Rice on 19 Jul 2011 at 08:24 PM. http://mygarden.rhs.org.uk/

Strolling round the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show earlier this month, I came across purple leaved tree I'd never seen before - Populus deltoides ‘Purple Tower’. This looks to be a valuable addition to the range of purple-leaved trees, especially as it develops into an upright, pyramidal shape, a good contrast to trees with a more rounded habit of growth.

This is a new form of the cottonwood tree of Eastern North America and not only is 'Purple Tower' tall and relatively narrow, but its colouring is delicious. With its rich, reddish purple leaves held on dark red stems speckled in beige, it will quickly make a bold statement in the landscape eventually reaching more than 10m/30ft in height and with a spread of about 3m/10ft.
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Sunday 17 July 2011

How to set up a garden cinema

Posted by Dawn Isaac mygarden.rhs.org.uk

I've solved it! Yes, the answer to "how do you get the children away from the screen and into the garden?" is....

...take the screen with you.

So, OK, this might not be 'gardening' per se but setting up a garden cinema is the perfect way to get the family outside. Best of all, it is far less expensive than you might suppose (less than £350 all in) and relatively simple to do. Here's how.

First, you will need a projector and it's worth getting something pretty good. Having read countless online discussions on this subject (yes, that really is how I've spent my evenings) I picked the Optoma HD65 - it's simple to use, good quality and gets enthusiastic reviews. One of these things costs over £500 new but they often come up second-hand on eBay which is where I found mine for the much more reasonable sum of £250.

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Tuesday 12 July 2011

Planting Leaks by Garry Preston

Posted by sheiladearing on 11 Jul 2011 at 11:54 AM

Leeks are traditionally raised in a specially prepared seedbed and transplanted later as young plants to their permanent site, but a Rosemoor we do things differently. We raise our young plants by sowing the seed direct into 7.5 litre pots and germinating them under glass. The ideal size for transplanting is when the young leeks are the size of a pencil.

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Saturday 9 July 2011

Taking Roses To New Heights - Into Your Trees

By Paul Zimmerman, contributor - fine gardening.com

Most of you have likely read in a book or heard someone talk about growing roses into trees. You may have seen photos of rambling roses spilling out of trees in a canopy of blooms.

But exactly how do you do it and will in work in an average sized garden? Let’s start with the first part.

A rambling rose is so named because they literally ramble to a great size - eventually putting out twenty-five to thirty foot plus canes. Left on their own they will grow into a mass thicket you could probably hide a small car in. They are also spring flowering, which means they put on quite a show for about 4-5 weeks.

Growing rambling roses into trees makes perfect sense because it’s a way to take advantage of the great size they can reach without them spreading out and taking over your garden. They also tend to bloom before the tree fully leafs out, giving you a great spring show and tree takes over for the rest of the season.

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Monday 4 July 2011

Grow Yourself Healthy: July

Posted in Grow & eat, Gardener's World Blog by Adam Pasco.

I’ve just picked, and eaten, my first home-grown tomato of the year – and it was delicious. It’s actually a brand new outdoor bush variety, and yet to be named, but on my sunny patio it has even beaten the greenhouse crops to produce the first ripe fruits.

Both greenhouse and garden are developing well, proving yet again just how much fresh produce can be grown in our gardens. And that’s the aim of our Grow Yourself Healthy campaign, to show people how a little planning can turn their gardens and patios into productive plots to feed their family.

So, what have I been picking? Salad leaves are an almost daily essential for me, and these have been augmented with chives, parsley, and self-sown rocket and watercress. To maintain continuity I need to keep up with my seed sowing, so a few seeds of different salads are sown in modular trays every couple of weeks. This raises nice young plants to use to fill gaps or replace older salads now past their best.

And by salad leaves I don’t just mean lettuce. Among my favourites are mizuna, pak choi, beetroot, spinach, coriander, and a host of others. I’ve even been enjoying some rat-tail radish, eating the small seed pods that taste exactly like, well, radish.

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Sunday 3 July 2011

Our website is finally back online

We're pleased to say that the main Garden Nursery website is finally back online after a gap of nearly six months!

Our problem began when the web hosting service we used closed down suddenly. Ordinarily that would mean transferring our site to a new provider but that was easier said than done as we did not have a full back up of the pages!

So if I can offer you just one non-garden related tip it would be to always keep a backup of whatever you do online and don't be reliant on anyone to do it for you (our web provider was contracted to do this).

We're still not fully up-to-speed and there are some bugs which we're still working on. So please bear with us.

Come and visit at www.gardennursery.co.uk



Organic Gardening: 10 Practical Steps

“Organic gardening is not just the avoidance of chemicals, in the larger view, it is organic living using nature’s laws.” I read this quote by an unknown person sometime ago and realized that my parents and others like them were organic gardeners long before the current resurrection of these principles. They didn’t use chemicals on the food they would feed to their children and gardening was a part of daily living to ensure there was sufficient food to preserve for the long winters. Everything was re-cycled and kitchen scraps were routinely thrown onto the garden to replenish the earth. Organic fertilizers such as manure were used and the only fertilizer on the roses was bone meal. My mother and father produced the best tasting vegetables and lots of them – enough to feed a family of seven throughout the winter. Birds, worms, and other signs of a living earth were welcomed into the garden.

In recent times synthetic chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides have become the practice most common among commercial agricultural practices. These practices have had some undesirable results such as the loss or depletion of topsoil, land becomes less fertile, and the excessive use of pesticides has resulted in pests resistant to the current chemicals resulting in the development of even stronger chemicals. Our environment is being damaged by toxic chemical spills, chemicals leaching into rivers and water supplies are contaminating our drinking water, and the effect of global warming is becoming a major part of the political agenda.

Our personal diet and health is a major topic of importance as more attention is being paid to the relationship between food and health. Research has demonstrated that organically grown vegetables are higher in vitamins and minerals than those grown with inorganic fertilizers. Gardening organically and growing as much of our own food as possible is one of the steps we can take to start healing the earth on which we live and in the process healing ourselves. Several key components are fundamental to the practice of organic gardening.


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