Greenhouse Ideas, Tips & Guides

Garden cloches are low enclosures used to cover plants and, depending on their style, offer protection against a number of factors.

Somewhere between a large cloche and a small greenhouse, cold frames are protective enclosures which provide invaluable protection for seeds, cuttings and tender plants, especially during cold months. Cold frames can make a gardener’s early spring and autumn much more active for growing, allowing peas and beans to get off to an early start, or giving tender young plants time to harden off, ready for the summer months.

A couple of those commenting on this blog recently have expressed surprise at how ‘tidy’ the greenhouse was, so this post is designed to shatter that misguided illusion. Firstly, I want to make it clear that what is shown above is not ‘the greenhouse’, but the Coop. Attached to the house, but only accessible from outside, it is more of a conservatory than a greenhouse  and hosts a range of tender plants and bulbs, all in terracotta pots. No potting up, planting or propagation takes place here, so there is little excuse for untidiness although the wind blows leaves in, spiders weave their webs there and I splash water and grit around. The working greenhouse at the bottom of the garden, however, is exactly that, a working greenhouse:

My husband and I bought our first home in a small West Virginia town in January 2023. The bright green dwelling sits in the middle of a dead-end street where retirees claim most homes as the original dwellers. From 1978 until now, our house had only one homeowner. So, for the past 45 years, the yard has been a neatly mowed lawn with a single tulip tree. 

How to Grow Fruit Trees in a Greenhouse

It has been a mixed week weatherwise, but although windy at times it has not been too bad and certainly not bad enough to prevent gardening; nevertheless, I seem to have flitted about and not done a lot outside, probably subconsciously putting off fitting the new liner to the stream reservoir. It won’t install itself though, so shouldn’t really be put off much longer…

Alison Van Eenennaam, a professor at the University of California, Davis, has a few very pregnant patients to look after this fall and into the new year. These patients require some extra care, as they’re carrying experimental fetuses. 

For gardeners who don’t have the luxury of an outdoor area to practise their hobby then indoor greenhouses can be a great investment. These small structures allow those with limited space to enjoy gardening with greenhouses that can live on windowsills, shelves, and even countertops.

Traditionally, greenhouses can be quite energy and water intensive, running on fossil fuels which are detrimental to the environment. This is why more and more UK homeowners and gardening enthusiasts are designing their greenhouses with sustainability in mind. In this article, we’ll talk you through the different areas where you can consider improving the sustainability of your greenhouse and how these could benefit you – so that you can garden with a green conscience as well as a green thumb.

Talking about my efforts last week to remove violets and ivy from under the apple trees generated an interesting conversation about the weeds whose presence we disliked the most in our gardens.

In an age where sustainability and environmental consciousness are paramount, integrating  solar panels  into your garden emerges as a smart and responsible choice. These innovations not only enhance your garden’s aesthetics but also align with your eco-conscious values.

Traditionally, greenhouses can be quite energy and water intensive, running on fossil fuels which are detrimental to the environment. This is why more and more UK homeowners and gardening enthusiasts are designing their greenhouses with sustainability in mind. In this article, we’ll talk you through the different areas where you can consider improving the sustainability of your greenhouse and how these could benefit you – so that you can garden with a green conscience as well as a green thumb.

In an age where sustainability and environmental consciousness are paramount, integrating  solar panels  into your garden emerges as a smart and responsible choice. These innovations not only enhance your garden’s aesthetics but also align with your eco-conscious values.

I have voles in my garden. While many people may see this as a serious disadvantage and a problem to be solved, I like to look at the positive and recognize the role that these creatures perform in garden ecology.

There are so many gardening techniques out there. Some are new techniques, some are old techniques, and some a blend of old and new. Electroculture gardening is an example of the latter. Electroculture gardening techniques have been studied since the late 1800’s to early 1900’s, but many of us have never heard of them. That’s because until recently electro gardening was deemed to have little to no benefit, often because those initially interested went chasing after another possible more profitable enterprise. New studies are proving that electroculture does influence plant growth as well as having other beneficial effects. Intrigued? Keep reading the following information on electroculture for beginners.

Cucumbers are a refreshing and versatile addition to any garden, offering crisp bites and numerous culinary possibilities. While traditional methods of cucumber cultivation are effective, exploring innovative approaches can elevate your cucumber-growing experience to new heights. Here are some Unique Ways to Grow Cucumbers that go beyond the ordinary.

I am probably doing the Duchess a great injustice by implying she is a floozy, as I don’t know her well enough, but when you are such a lovely shade of deep purply blue that you become the focus of a vase on Monday, then perhaps you need to be big enough to allow people to take liberties with your reputation.

Tomato blight, a fungal infection called Phytophthora infestans, spreads by wind and water-splash. It attacks tomatoes and potatoes and is triggered by warm, wet conditions, making outdoor tomatoes more susceptible than those in a greenhouse. The crop is quickly ruined and even if you pick the tomatoes at the first sign of infection, you can’t stop them rotting.

As far removed from an English cottage garden as you can travel, the passion flower (Passiflora) is one of the most theatrical and exotic of plants. The weird and wonderful blooms are embellished with many showy parts that together remind you of peering into a kaleidoscope as a child: in the centre, the anthers, stigmas, and ovary protrude over the filament rays, which are marked with circles of incredible colour.

Outside of the tropics, the only place you’re likely to see a cocoa tree (Theobroma cacao, the trees that give us chocolate) is in a heated greenhouse at the botanical gardens. They can be grown as house plants, and seeds germinate easily when they’re fresh, but their size, their requirement for heat and the fact that you need two plants for pollination means that they’re unlikely to bear fruit. And even if they did, the process of turning cocoa beans into chocolate is a long one.

It’s at this time of year, I think, that a polytunnel or greenhouse really comes in handy in the garden. Over the summer it may just be a tangle of tomato vines – productive, but a space that you really only go in to keep up with the watering chore, or to harvest ripe tomatoes. You know you’re going to come out with green stains on your clothes and hands that smell funny – tomatoes are like that. Those tomatoes will hang on longer into the autumn than you thought they would, and by the time you’ve cleared out the polytunnel the season will be so far advanced that it will be cold and dark and your crop of overwintering salads will barely be growing – just marking time until the days are long enough for them to actually grow.

Most vegetable gardeners lucky enough to have the use of a greenhouse use it for raising seeds early in the year, extending the season into the autumn, and of course growing tomatoes and cucumbers in the height of the summer. If you’d like to find something a little more exciting when you open the greenhouse door, these unusual crops will appreciate the extra heat.

It has been a difficult spring for gardeners, and their plants, here in the UK. If you’re lucky enough to have the space (and funds) for a greenhouse or a polytunnel then that goes a long way to protecting plants from the vagaries of the weather, but for everyone else cloches are a good solution to the problems it brings.

At the moment I’m building a new garden from scratch, and as I’m putting in hard landscaping it’s taking some time (which is frustrating) and the project has a budget. This is in complete contrast to when I started my first garden, which started small, had no plan, and no budget to speak of.

We half-finished the back garden last year, in that we installed and planted half of the raised beds. In truth, we did a lot more than half, as we had all of the paving done and installed the two sheds. But the wet weather over the winter stalled progress, and it has remained unfinished. It has been frustrating, but has become even more so since the sowing season arrived and I faced the fact that the plants I wanted to grow this year had no home to go to. And so it is with great excitement that I can say that weather, time and energy coincided over the weekend, and we have broken new ground!

Allotments are going to be all the rage this year. The National Trust recently announced that they’re making available enough spare land for up to 1000 allotments, via the Landshare scheme. British Waterways and British Rail are in on the act, too, looking for land along canals and railway lines that could be used to grow vegetables.

And so it’s done – the paving is complete. We have a shiny new path from the front door to the garden gate, which extends in front of the patio doors and widens into a large patio. At the top of the garden another strip provides hard standing for sheds/ a greenhouse and the arbour.

When the nice people at First Tunnels asked me whether I’d like one of their mini polytunnels to review, my answer was a swift “yes, please!”. I have serious polytunnel envy; I’d love to have one, but the garden isn’t big enough.

I grew up understanding the phrase “a bit Heath Robinson” as meaning something that had been cobbled together, but I wasn’t really aware of the fact that Heath Robinson was a real person. Born in 1872, he was an English cartoonist and illustrator, and he became famous for drawings of convoluted contraptions – ridiculously complicated machines that achieved things you don’t need a machine for. It was in this capacity that ‘Heath Robinson’ entered the dictionary in 1912; he became more synonymous with cobbling things together during the ‘Make Do and Mend’ campaign of the Second World War. In fact, one of the automated analysis machines at Bletchley Park – a forerunner of the codebreaking Colossus – was named Heath Robinson in his honour.

Food waste is a hot topic at the moment, and deservedly so – the environmental damage done by producing 10 million tonnes of uneaten food each year in the UK is impressive, associated with around 20 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. The monetary value of that food is over £17 billion a year, and 60% of the waste could have been avoided.

The Greenhouse People have come up with a nice infographic which outlines some of the challenges of growing plants in space, along with some of the research that’s ongoing, and some of the solutions already in place.

Over the past few weeks, Ryan and his dad have been working on the new workshop. We struggled with the groundwork because the weather has been so wet this autumn, so in the end we hired some professionals to dig out the space and lay concrete for the foundation. Ryan and his dad have built the cabin themselves. (One of our neighbours mistook them for professional installers and asked if they were able to install modern garden offices!). They have been varnishing it during breaks in the weather, and Ryan has painted the floor, and once that is dry he will be installing shelving. Ryan’s dad is making a bespoke workbench to fit. 

By Sam Humphrey

By Will Creed, owner of HorticulturalHelp.com

A cherry plum, sweet, thin-skinned and very prolific (you’ll also find it sold under ‘Red Grape Sugar Plum’). It was in the top three of our recent taste test and everyone liked it for its strong tomato flavour that’s sweet but not overly so, and its firm not mushy texture. It has a slight acidity running through it which all sweet tomatoes need. It ripens quite late compared to ‘Sungold’ and produces for a long period of time. It’s lovely in a mixed salad with the larger varieties. 

Can I grow acai berry trees? Often compared to the blueberry for its similar nutritional benefits, acai products made from this trendy superfood have been finding their way onto grocery store shelves. But due to their short shelf life, fresh berries are difficult to purchase outside acai berry growing zones. Learn all about how to grow acai berries at home.