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for ages. I remember being a very confused three-year-old when, in April, my dad started digging a huge hole in the garden "for Halloween", which seemed an awfully long way off. It transpired that the holes would be filled with well-rotted compost, over

've resisted burning much in the way of garden refuse as I compost everything I can.Once a year I rent a great big shredder for a weekend and the peace of the countryside is completely disrupted as I spend a couple of happy days half-deafened and covered

Yesterday at a Gardeners' Question Time recording it was amazing to hear that Eric's Cumbrian plot had only had 5cm of snow. Not so here in Hampshire. The snow is 45-60cm deep and the icicles more than 1m long!What have I been up to during the snowy

by flooding. It’s hard to imagine anything worse happening to your home.Putting up with a wet garden could appear rather trivial in the context of major weather events, but the past few years have highlighted how variable and extreme our weather has become

chippings or compost.Where I live Christmas trees must be left in a brown bin (for food and garden waste), to ensure they will be recycled, otherwise they end up in landfill. I know this because last year I called the council's recycling department and asked

of cane (getting ever shorter as their ends break), lengths of hosepipe, wire, old compost bags, half-empty seed packets… You name it, I probably have it in my shed. Finding it, though, is another matter.I can hardly get in the door now — entering the shed

of leaves. But their larvae can kill plants by eating their roots.The adults will lay eggs anywhere, but prefer an open soil in which the larvae can move around freely. A light, peat-based compost is ideal for them. I don't use peat, so I consider

wrong I was.Someone gave me a kit of wooden block templates last spring, so I set about wrapping them with strips of newspaper, and crimping over the base to make small pots. Filled with compost, I sowed peas in each pot, then grouped them together in a

It's not often you get the chance to garden alongside thousands of other keen green-fingered types. With that in mind, I jumped at the chance to take part in the Gardeners' World Magazine Seed Club. I'm a gardener and garden writer living

on one side so we junked it and my quest began again.There's a lot of debate over which is greener. To make an artificial tree involves a fair bit of plastic and it's obviously not compostable. But the harvest and transportation of real trees uses a lot