News - Page 117
Persuade your strawberries to fruit earlier by popping a cloche or fleece over your plants, trapping every last scrap of sunshine underneath and raising the temperature by a few degrees – just enough to bring them into flower weeks ahead of schedule.
Early varieties like ‘Honeoye’ work best for this, as they’re already bred to flower sooner than most types of strawberry. You’ll also need a cloche (easy-to-use clear polythene tunnel cloche are available from o...
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Garden gnomes are becoming a rare species in British gardens according to a new survey which found that sales of the cheeky garden statuettes have halved in the last decade.
A poll of 2000 British gardeners found most thought garden gnomes ‘tacky’, and 94% would ‘never have a gnome in their garden’. But over 100 gardeners came out in defence of gnomes, saying they loved the ornaments and had at least one in their gardens.
In an attempt to make gnomes m...
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Dare to plant your new potatoes this week: as frosts look less and less likely, you can take the risk to bring forward the moment when you can harvest those mouthwatering little nuggets of sheer flavour for your tea.
If you haven’t already got a tray or two chitting (forming sprouts) in eggboxes on a windowsill, it’s not too late to pop down to the garden centre here in Lymington and pick up a packet of first early seed potatoes.
Prepare your bed well...
Read more...Slugs and snails have been knocked off the no.1 worst pest spot for the first time in nearly a decad
Slugs and snails have been knocked off the no.1 worst pest spot for the first time in nearly a decade by a voracious caterpillar which arrived in the UK only five years ago but has made its mark on box hedges all over the south-east of the country.
The box tree caterpillar is the larva of an Asian moth. It feeds mainly on box plants, stripping them of their leaves and covering the bare stalks with a tell-tale webbing.
It accounted for 433 queries - 17...
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The results of the Big Garden Birdwatch are in and last year’s record-breaking mild winter has had a significant effect on populations of our feathery friends.
The long-tailed tit has returned to the top 10 most commonly seen birds for the first time in seven years, a rise of 44% on last year, while great tits and coal tits also benefitted from the warmer weather. It’s thought the mild weather – the third warmest on record for the UK as a whole – helped them...
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Gardeners are counting the cost of Storm Katie which ripped through the country in a devastating few hours during the Easter Bank Holiday, whipping up winds gusting 106mph which brought down trees and damaged buildings.
Among her victims was a champion tree at Nymans Garden at Handcross, West Sussex, one of about 30 champion trees in the garden. The Pyrus glabra – an Iranian variety of pear tree – was almost 100 years old, and had grown to be one of the talle...
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Japanese maples are the perfect choice of tree for any small, compact or courtyard garden. Their character and appeal makes them ideal for creating a focal point in your garden, brightening a shaded corner, or elegantly overhanging a pool or water feature.
Many acers are commonly called Japanese maples, but their parents could be derived from several different species including Acer japonicum, Acer palmatum, Acer shirasawanum or others. Among them are some ex...
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Doctors could soon be prescribing gardening to prevent Alzheimer’s disease if scientists have their way: a study carried out in the USA has found that regular gentle exercise, such as gardening, boosts brain volume in older people and cuts the risk of dementia by 50%.
The team studied 876 people over the age of 65 for five years and discovered increasing physical activity led to larger brain volumes, mainly in areas associated with memory and recognition.
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It’s time to prune your late-flowering shrubs including Buddleja davidii, Caryopteris and hardy fuchsias.
These shrubs are a mainstay of the summer garden, producing waterfalls of flower for months at a time, from mid-summer onwards. They’re also incredibly easy to grow, requiring little care other than a spring cut-back to keep them young and flowering well.
All these shrubs flower best on the growth they will make this year, so you can cut them back...
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Give fruit bushes and trees a good feed so you send them into the new season in tip-top health, ready to provide you with a bumper harvest later this summer.
After a long winter hunkered down against the elements, gooseberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants and whitecurrants will be starting to wake up as spring warms up. Top fruit, too, like apples, plums and medlars are all sending out new leaves.
It’s at this time that they really benefit from a dose o...
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