Crop rotation is desperately important in any vegetable garden, but especially so if you have nobly decided to follow organic practices. If you plant the same crop in the same bed year after year, pests and diseases will flock to the site and happily breed and chomp away at your prized onions and potatoes. So [...]

Image copyright Call me Koko ‘Pinky Winky’ is an extraordinarily disgusting name for an extraordinarily elegant plant. Hydrangeas age beautifully, gaining pink and gold rusts on their paper petals. Plant in full sun or part shade in a well-drained soil which doesn’t grow too dry in the summer. ——————————————————————————————————————————- Fennel & Fern readers can get [...]

Meet Tigger, the Garden from Scratch’s resident moggy. He’s an enormous RSPCA rescue cat who joined me on my 15th birthday, and has been jumping on to my bed at impossible hours of the morning ever since. Tigger is affectionate, demanding, huge. The last cannot be exaggerated enough. He recently scared off a door-to-door charity [...]

New Routes: January 2009 by Jill Coleman One of the nicest things about getting through the post-Christmas/new year doldrums is seeing the days start to get fractionally lighter and longer because you know that the year has turned and that Spring is heading towards us. Despite the bitter start to the month, things [...]

Sambucus nigra by Remy ERRA Crushed elder leaves are the smell of childhood, of climbing through their soft branches and picking the landing-pad flowers. Now, picking the flowers supplies us with champagne and other elegant delights such as gooseberry and elderflower jam. And don’t forget the berries, black beady eyes in the hedgerow. If you’ve [...]

Pumpkins are one of our favourite vegetables. They can be used in so many different ways, as salads, soups, parfaits and pies. It’s important for us to grow enough pumpkins and winter squash to take us through the winter months. ——————————————————————————————————————————- Fennel & Fern readers can get 10% off on flower, vegetable and fruit seeds [...]

Lilacs, originally uploaded by NorthernLala Lilac (Syringa vulgaris) is a well-brought-up young lady of a shrub. She dresses beautifully, but without any gaudiness, and smells hauntingly beautiful. Plant in a sunny spot in a fertile and alkaline soil. Prune out a third of the branches every year to encourage the best blooms and remove the [...]

Image by Darren Graham If, like some of the Fennel and Fern writers, you are accustomed to stumbling down an icy garden path at doom o’clock every morning on the way to work, you should at least plant something to wake you up before you hit the gate. And if the fiery shredded petals of [...]

Patrick from blog Bifurcated Carrots makes the case for using open pollinated seeds. When you buy commercial garden seeds, there are two main types, Open Pollinated (OP) and F1 hybrids. OP seeds have one clear obvious advantage. If properly done, you can save your own seeds and re-grow OP plants in future years without having [...]