Protecting fruit trees from voles
Hungry voles can be a real pest on fruit trees in winter. Here's how to protect them.
Fight slugs with Vaseline
Vaseline is great for repelling slugs from your young plants. Here's how to use it.
How to control aphids organically
Use lemon juice as an organic way of killing and repelling aphids from the plants in your garden.
Protecting brassicas
Fed up of caterpillars munching their way through your tasty purple-sprouting broccoli? Make sure you're protected.
Tomatoes and tagetes
Here's a clever and good-looking example of companion planting tomatoes, tagetes, beets and onions at RHS Wisley. Find out why companion planting is so important in a stylish organic garden.
Repelling aphids with lemon juice
I love using home-spun potions in my garden. They're cheaper than sprays from the garden centre, and they are normally far better for the ecosystem in the garden as well. This cheeky little lemon spray will...
Garden soldiers
Not everything in the garden is happy with this rain. I’m sure we have had more than our fair share of Smith Periods (the humid conditions which bring dreaded tomato and potato blight), and the au...
Blackfly in nasturtium romp shocker!
It was inevitable; it was in fact part of the deal, but still, it was hard letting go. Today I dug the billowing nasturtiums up from the front of the raised bed and tipped them onto the compost he...
Catching caterpillars
This evening, as I poked around in the garden, admiring the smell of freshly washed soil and the sight of rows of carrot and onion seedlings pushing their way upwards, I found I had a number of li...
Hostas
Hostas are fantastic link plants within a garden, with lush, rubbery leaves sandwiching nicely between clumps of blooming perennials. But they also put up a splendid display themselves when plante...
Autumn (and winter, and a bit of spring) King carrots.
Hoorah. The first carrots from the Garden from Scratch. I sowed these Autumn King II in September as an experiment to see if they would make it through the winter. Which they did. They have been growing in a ...
Slugging it out
I met this slug as he journeyed across my compost heap. Unfortunately, it was his last journey, as I am one of the awful, brutal gardeners who keeps a pair of 'slug-cutting' scissors in their coat pocket. I'...