Pruning hydrangeas improves their shape, encourages new flowers, and increases the size of the blooms.
21.08.2023 - 12:00 / theunconventionalgardener.com / Alan Titchmarsh / Emma Doughty
A few weeks ago I received a press release from Waitrose about their new Alan Titchmarsh gardening range. It’s a fairly routine set of offerings, all nicely packaged up. The one that caught my eye was their ‘Broadfen’ horseradish thong, which they said is a “heritage variety first grown by the Egyptians (1500 BC).”
I did a quick Google, and the internet appears to agree that horseradish was probably first grown by the Ancient Egyptians. But there’s no (online) evidence that it was any particular variety, and it seems unlikely to have been passed down through history to land up (exclusively) on Waitrose shelves. I enquired of the PR people whether Waitrose had any evidence to back up their claim. Stony silence. There’s actually very little reference online to named varieties of horseradish at all.
I was going to Waitrose anyway, so I invested £2.50 to buy a Broadfen thong. It’s not an unreasonable price; if you buy horseradish from a seed company you’ll pay maybe £6 for a handful, and I only wanted one plant. If you have an allotment, or a gardening friend, you can almost certainly get your hands on horseradish for free, by asking them to divide their plant and give you a bit. Horseradish is a thug of a plant. If it’s not confined in a big pot (some people recommend a dustbin) then it could well take over your entire garden. And most people don’t eat that much roast beef.
So, what’s a thong? Well, it’s basically a root cutting. My Broadfen thong looked like this*:
I took that photo a month ago, when I planted it up in a big pot on the allotment. So far it has shown no signs of life, so I’ll have to keep you posted on its progress. According to the growing instructions, the best time to harvest my horseradish is in the autumn,
Pruning hydrangeas improves their shape, encourages new flowers, and increases the size of the blooms.
How to Make Your Own Cactus Potting Soil
Learning about dahlia care is a great first step for beginners who want to grow these showy, colorful blooms in their gardens.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Many years ago, long before my gardening obsession began, I spent a season or two living in a ground floor flat in Newbury that had patio doors that opened onto a backwater. Shortly after moving in we made friends with the local duck population, to the point where we bought poultry corn from the pet stall on the market for them – bread not being the best food for ducks.
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.
There’s nothing quite as British as a nice cup of tea, and sitting down for a good cuppa can certainly brighten up your day. A tea bush is unlikely to thrive in most UK gardens (although there are a couple of tea plantations) because of the climate, but there are plenty of herbs that are easy to grow and make a refreshing brew. They’ll even grow well in containers – so they make ideal plants for a windowbox or a patio. Having them close at hand means you can harvest leaves as and when you need them.
If you’ve ever wished you lived in a tropical climate, simply so that you could grow your own chocolate, then the future is looking bright. Last time I touched on this subject I mentioned plants that might add a chocolatey touch to your garden (with their colour, scent and even flavour).