First pick your blueberries

More and more these days, the media is full of stories of superfoods – usually fruits with high concentrations of antioxidants. The blueberry led the superfood charge, but has been left behind by newer and more exotic rivals, such as acai berries, goji berries and the yumberry.

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.

As its Valentine’s Day today, and the whole world is in the mood for love, I thought I would talk about one of the most enduring and productive relationships a gardener can have. Although plants (and even gardens) may come and go, if you invest in good tools and look after them properly they will be with you throughout your gardening life.

Mrs Green has set herself a new challenge this spring – she’s aiming to grow her own luffa (or loofah) to use as zero waste pan scrubbers. Never one to shy away from new plant experiences, I’m going to join her!

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.

There are many ways you can keep your slug population under control without resorting to toxic slug pellets:

I met the Duke of Edinburgh a few years ago. Shame I was stuck in front of a computer at the time, and not somewhere more exciting like the Chelsea Flower Show. Meeting human royalty might be a rare occurrence for most people, but you can surround yourself with royal plants and get that regal feeling every time you step into the garden. To illustrate my point, let me share with you an old joke….

Apparently more Brits watch gardening programmes than tuned in for Game of Thrones. I can see why – in the penultimate season of GoT the action was so slow that it would have been more interesting to go outside and watch the plants grow. I didn’t bother watching the latest season (but yes, I know who died, thanks).

Grafting is a time-honoured technique for growing fruit trees – it allows gardeners and farmers to choose both the variety of fruit they want to grow, and the rootstock they want to grow it on. You can even graft more than one variety of fruit onto one rootstock, giving you a ‘family’ tree that saves space and spreads the harvest time, or gives you both ‘cookers’ and ‘eaters’ from one tree. Grafting vegetables, on the other hand, is something relatively new that has burst onto the home gardening scene in the last few years. Last year T&M gave us the opportunity to grow the TomTato, a tomato plant grafted onto potato roots that grows both tomatoes and potatoes – catchily nicknamed the Ketchup ‘n’ fries plant. This year they have added a new dual-purpose plant to their range: the Egg & Chips plant grows both aubergines (AKA eggplant) and potatoes.

In times past, blackberries were deliberately used as hedging plants, and their prickles make them a very good intruder deterrent if you have an open boundary. They have also been used in herbal medicine. Chewing blackberry leaves was said to soothe a toothache, and frozen blackberries are great for soothing a sore throat or a tickly cough.

When I was younger (so much younger than today), I learned how to ride a motorcycle. Whilst discussing the effects of weather on road conditions, my instructor said, “the most dangerous effect comes from a type of weather you can’t see. What is it?”

There can’t be a more iconic symbol of Halloween than a witch riding a broomstick. In olden times it wouldn’t have been a problem to wander out into the woodland and cut a stout pole and then find sticks to make the sweeping end, and then you’d have yourself a fine broom, or besom. I suspect most of them were used for more mundane purposes – they are jolly useful things to have to hand.