Composting Ideas, Tips & Guides

Trilliums (also known as wood lily and wake robin) are herbaceous, clump-forming perennials with large leaves and gently nodding, solitary flowers which stand on tall stems, above the foliage. Trillium flowers tend to be white or shades of burgundy, with the darker-flowered varieties known as ‘wake robin’ after the robin’s red breast. Native to North American woodlands, they thrive in full shade to partial shade. They are commonly used as ground cover and as underplanting for shrubs and roses.

August has been a strange month and although in parts of the UK has been particularly wet, here in the no-mans land between the East and West Midlands we have had rain throughout the month, but not in any great quantity, and it has been warm rather than hot Looking back, I am guessing this the reason behind the almost overwhelming growth in the garden, growth of annuals, perennials, shrubs  – and WEEDS!

Resilience. It’s one of the buzz words everyone’s talking about right now, part of the zeitgeist. And it’s true. We do need resilience in all walks of life – emotional, physical, spiritual, psychological. And the planet needs resilience, too, although a glance to any news bulletin will confirm that we’re not doing too well on that score.

As part of your Premium access, you can send your gardening questions to our horticultural experts each month. They will then answer a selection of the questions they receive, and share the advice at the end of the month.

Delaware State Flower emerges as a symbol of the state’s agrarian legacy and natural allure. Let us learn more about this plant along with its growing requirements and significance.

In-ground compost bins are great for your garden since they help with pest and odor control, look aesthetically pleasing, and save a lot of space. Check out these In Ground Compost Bin Ideas to create natural fertilizer that will benefit your plants.

Q: I bought some beautiful blue mophead hydrangeas last year that I planted in my garden, but I was really disappointed to discover that the plant’s flowers are pink this year instead of blue, and there aren’t very many of them. What’s happened? Is there any way for me to fix it? FL, Co Laois

I am bored of rain. Fed up with cloudy days. Sick of the grey drip-drip-drip of this cool, showery, sun-starved, stormy summer, and the monotony of a weather forecast that only predicts more of the same. But even so, I’m forced to admit that the silver lining to what’s been a very sodden growing season is that many of our most beautiful, late summer-autumn flowering garden perennials and shrubs are loving the biblical quantities of rainfall in recent months, a high note to what’s otherwise been a forgettable year.

Ever wondered – Do blue apples exist? Don’t worry! We’ve got you covered with the best guide on the Best Blue Apple Varieties, complete with Facts and Growing Information.

Discover a diverse array of Common Missouri Mushrooms with our comprehensive guide. From the prized Morels to the vibrant Chicken of the Woods, explore their seasons, habitats, edibility, and unique characteristics!

Potato blight, also known as late blight, attacks the foliage and tubers of potatoes, eventually causing the crop to rot. Caused by the same fungus responsible for tomato blight, it is a particular problem in wet summers. Potato blight was responsible for the Irish potato famine in the 19th century, devastating crops in the ground, and those in storage too.

Chlorophytum comosum ‘Vittatum’ — available from Hortology

After another weekend working hard in the garden, it looks very different again. Ryan was working on Saturday, so I spent the morning outside. The first thing I did was erect my new raised bed cover, which would have been easier had it not been a bit breezy! But I got there in the end. It’s basically a plastic cold frame that fits over the top of my raised beds. It has nice long anchor pegs to hold it down, and is now being used to harden off plants before they go outside, and protect my brassica seedlings (I bought Flower Sprouts and Purple Sprouting broccoli from the garden centre; now I have to spend the summer protecting them from every pest in the known universe!).

It’s raining heavily today, so there’s no point even trying to go outside into the garden, but if there’s a plus point to such dreadful weather then it does – at least temporarily – make people aware of what’s under their feet. Soil tends to be forgotten until it turns into mud, or you squelch along through sodden grass, or watch priceless fertility washed down the drain. Weather like this shows us the importance of winter soil care, particularly keeping soil covered (even if all you have is weeds!) so that plant roots can hold it all together for you.

Seed trays, modules and pots

Fungus gnats are tiny little black flies that love living in damp organic matter (i.e. compost). They thrive in warmer weather, so at this time of year – with all the seedlings indoors – the house is full of them.

When plants are grown in the soil they can send out roots, make friends with fungi, and source their own nutrients from their surroundings. In gardens we help them do this by improving and feeding the soil, a topic I will be returning to in chapter four. But when they’re confined in containers plants have a limited volume of soil and therefore a limited amount of nutrients to tap into.

What has changed in the garden since last week? Well, on Wednesday I got tired of waiting (for cold, windy days and then scorching hot days to pass) and planted out 3 of my squash plants. One Georgia Candy Rooster went out into the ‘allotment’ in the Sunset Strip, and two Rugosa fruilana courgettes went into a raised bed in the main garden. Each one was planted out into a mound of fresh compost, and protected with a plastic cloche and eco-friendly slug pellets. I replaced the black plastic mulch on the beds to give them extra warm and moist soil.

Mould (mold) spores are everywhere, they’re inescapable, and moulds love growing in the warm, damp and humid conditions that seedlings need to thrive. If you have biodegradable pots then moulds can rapidly colonize those; but they will happily grow on the surface of compost as well. A lot of the moulds we see won’t do much damage to the seedlings, but some of them will and having mould on the windowsill isn’t much good for us either.

An ideal seed compost is able to retain water, whilst at the same time letting excess water drain away to provide an environment that is damp but not waterlogged. It allows penetration of plant roots and is able to anchor plants, but has space for air. Its texture is consistent, and it is free from pests, diseases and weeds that would compete with the seedlings. As we have seen, it doesn’t need to contain many nutrients if seedlings are going to be pricked out; seedlings growing in modules will either need enough nutrients in the compost to support them through their first weeks of life, or suitable supplementary feeding.

There is a big trend at the moment in recycling containers to use in the garden (we’ve already touched on it with recycled food containers used for raising seedlings). There is also a large range of containers you can buy – from cheap plastic pots right through to enormous designer urns. What you choose is as much down to your budget as it is to your tastes, but all containers need to hold a suitable volume of potting compost and retain water whilst allowing any excess to drain away. If you are recycling containers to use for food plants then be sure that they’re clean and that they weren’t used to store anything toxic in their previous life. And remember that not all plastics are UV stable – some degrade when they’re exposed to sunlight.

Not long after I finished the first draft of my manuscript for The Alternative Kitchen Garden: An A to Z, I received an email from an editor at Black Dog Publishing, asking me whether I would like to contribute to a collaborative book with the working title “Growing Stuff”.

Potting on

I didn’t know whether the Bookazine was going to be available on Amazon – so you can imagine my delight this morning on finding out that it is!

As anyone who is anyone knows, the BFG (Big Friendly Giant) eats snozzcumbers. Because he refuses to eat people (human beans) he has to eat lots and lots of snozzcumbers. The snozzcumber is a giant vegetable, watery and bitter, but the BFG has a tasty drink called frobscottle to help wash them down.

The Pantry contains information about some of the items that are useful for a peat-free gardener, and gardening terms you may come across on your peat-free travels.

One of the big differences between now and the time before gardeners relied so much on peat-based composts is the rise in container growing. An army of modern amateur gardeners has to put up with small gardens, and possibly with no soil at all. Growing plants in containers allows us to garden wherever we like, and even to grow plants that would not thrive in our soil. Some plants are grown in containers to keep them under control; others so that they can be moved indoors in winter to ensure their survival.

There are no diseases that particularly single out plants grown in containers, with the exception of damping off – the fungal disease that affects seedlings, which we met in Chapter 2. As long as plants are kept well-watered and suitably fed (i.e. not stressed) then container culture should be very healthy, particularly if your potting compost was a sterile mix.

Ericaceous compost

A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for some statistics about the average UK garden size, and I found some interesting ones. According to the 2015 media pack for the RHS The Garden magazine, a document that is aimed at attracting advertisers to the publication, the 380,000 RHS members the magazine is sent to have gardens that are 10 times larger than the UK average, covering over half an acre.

Whenever I see demonstrations of composting on TV I’m always impressed by three things – the size of the compost heap, the endless supply of compostable materials to put on it and the enormous vigour of the gardener in charge of the heap.

When the sun shone on Saturday morning, and the rain promised to delay until midday, we hatched a plan to build two more of the raised beds in the garden. One half of the garden – 6 beds – was completed last year, leaving 6 more to go. We don’t have space for them all until we take the old shed down, but we found room for two next to Ryan’s workshop.

A burgeoning batch of seedlings is a thing of beauty, but it’s also a responsibility – each tiny plant is dependent on us for everything it needs. It grows rapidly, needing more space, water, light and nutrients. Although we lavish care on them in their early stages, each plant needs to be prepared for the challenges of the outside world. Allowing your seedlings to grow up is the key to growing them on.

Since Christmas I’ve been working on (and dropping occasional hints about) a big writing project. I can finally unveil it today – ‘Growing Vegetables is Fun’ is a Bookazine (a cross between a glossy magazine and a book) from Dennis Publishing.

Biochar

Over the bank holiday weekend, Ryan and I came to the conclusion that the front gardens aren’t working for us as they are, and came up with a fairly drastic plan to annex one of them into the back garden, in order to provide us with an outdoor dining area. That plan is simmering away in the background, as we work out one or two niggly little details.