A former AIB banker-turned-gardener says he feels “like a five-year-old getting presents” after winning a major award as well as a prestigious gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show in London.
14.06.2023 - 11:57 / blog.theenduringgardener.com
10 basic gardening tips for beginnersSo you’ve finally got some outdoor space and you want to start a garden Here’s 10 tips to help get you off to the right start.
Buy yourself a spade. You don’t need to spend much in fact you can pick these up cheap at car boot sales. Weeding, digging holes for new plants, shifting compost, levelling ground, turning over soil – a spade does the lot.Get to know your soil. Before you go out and spend a your money on plants get to know a bit about your soil. At the very least see what plants seem to be doing well in neighbouring gardens.
The more scientific amongst you might want to invest in a soil testing kit. Find a theme and stick to it. Do you want to grow flowers or grow your own food.
If you’re not sure yet then perhaps a cottage garden is the way to go where you can mix and match as you see fit. Visit a garden show. Here in the UK there’s plenty of garden and flower shows on throughout the spring and summer, the RHS put on a number of these and they are well organised events with plenty of inspiration.
Get some outdoor furniture, at the very least a chair. That way you can sit and enjoy the fruits of your labour. The garden is probably the most relaxing place to sit at home.
Subscribe to some of the fantastic gardening channels on youtube. There’s a large community of people with similar interests to you happy to share their stories of success and failure. Grow some herbs.
They are easy to grow, useful and attractive to look at – what’s not to like ? Embrace failure. I suspect that the most experienced gardeners have killed the most plants and there’s no doubt that a few will die on you too. Gardening is all down to experience so the sooner you learn that things don’t always.
A former AIB banker-turned-gardener says he feels “like a five-year-old getting presents” after winning a major award as well as a prestigious gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show in London.
All these years of gardening and I can’t say that I was ever that crushed on Nepeta, well not until I found Nepeta Fassenii Junior Walker.
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Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants co-founder Rosy Hardy on one of the electric buggies used at the Hampshire nursery
It’s a testament to the ‘Dwarf Grey’ snow pea’s easy-going nature when I tell you one of the toughest issues is deciding whether to spell that name “Grey,” like the British and even most American distributors, or “Gray” as per common US spelling.Beyond forcing you to deliberate for, oh, 10 seconds or so over
Pink and white in a Victorian cranberry vase
If you love gardening, plants or gardens then gardening blogs are a great place to turn for inspiration. There’s so many fantastic blogs out there and featuring them all is going to be near impossible. To start with here’s a small list of my favourite gardening blogs which are well worth dipping into. No statistics
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