News - Page 112
Boost your soil with green manures as your veg beds empty out towards the end of the season and you’ll replenish the essential nutrients your plants depend on and improve the soil’s texture.
Replenish essential nutrients with Green Manures
As the early crops finish and the potatoes come out of the ground and big bare patches start popping up all over the place, just broadcast-sow green manure seed (available from our garden centre he...
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The world’s longest double herbaceous borders have opened at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, sweeping along 320 metres of the Broad Walk through the heart of the world-famous garden.
Kew Gardens
The borders, along the approach to Kew’s Palm House, contain thirty thousand plants mixing bold textures and vibrant colours, with the display timed to peak in high summer from June to September. Many are unusual varieties propagated from Kew’s world-class co...
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Plant flowers for bats and win some fantastic wildlife gardening prizes in a new competition launched by the RHS in partnership with the Bat Conservation Trust and the Wildlife Trusts.
Create a Bat-Friendly Garden
All you have to do is plant a bat feast of insect-friendly flowers to give your local colony of bats plenty of food to enjoy, then take a photo and send it in. Among bat-attracting flowers you can plant in your garden are oxeye daisies, Ver...
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Have a go at square foot gardening and find out just how much delicious home-grown produce you can harvest from the tiniest of spaces.
Square Foot Gardening - Give it a try?
When all you’ve got to work with is a single raised bed, as little as a metre square, packing variety into your patch becomes incredibly important. Divide it up, though, and you can harvest nine or ten different vegetables.
You don’t have to stick to the minimum size...
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Gardeners can play a key role in preventing flooding after heavy rain, according to the RHS which is calling on everyone with a garden to do their bit to soak up excess rainwater.
Help prevent Flooding after heavy rain
Torrential rain and thunderstorms have caused flash flooding in the south-east this summer, and extreme weather events are set to become increasingly common. Yet gardens can play a massive role in reducing the risk of flooding by soaki...
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It’s National Allotments Week this week and we’re all Growing Together – this year’s theme for the annual celebration of all things allotment-related run by the National Allotment Society.
National Allotment Week
Allotment sites all across the country are opening to the public and welcoming in local communities to see for themselves how plots are open to all sections of society, from the unemployed to the professional, young or old, all races and rel...
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It’s all too easy to hit the gardening doldrums in August, so concentrate all your efforts on keeping the display at its peak. Here’s our list of jobs to be getting on with this month.
General tasks:
- Keep up with watering concentrating on hanging basket and container displays, plants in the greenhouse and newly-planted seedlings.
- Top up ponds in hot weather using rainwater wherever possible – tap water...
Just one in four of us come across hedgehogs regularly in our gardens according to a wildlife survey from the RSPB. That’s a drop of three percent on the previous year – showing that populations of our favourite mammals are still in steep decline. The charity asked 280,000 people to keep records about wildlife they saw in the garden over a year.
You've got more chance seeing a Fox in Your Garden than a Hedgehog?
The results included foxes for the fir...
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It’s been revealed that Garden Re-Leaf raised a whopping £140,000 for charity this year – the most successful yet.
Success for Garden Re-Leaf day
Garden Re-Leaf (www.gardenreleaf.co.uk) is a nationwide fundraising effort by garden centres all over the country, raising money through green-fingered events. This spring – the fifth Garden Re-Leaf Day – saw garden centre staff and customers joining in on dozens of events including 24-hour ‘plant-a- thons...
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Pick off male cucumber flowers once a week to avoid your cucumbers turning bitter. Most greenhouse cucumber plants produce both male and female flowers – it’s easy to tell the difference as male flowers have simple stalks while female flowers have miniature fruits forming behind the petals.
To avoid a bitter tasting Cucumber, pick off male flowers once a week
If you allow the male flowers to develop and pollinate the female flowers, the fruits that d...
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