Search - Articles

, as with comfrey, is as a plant food. If you soak the crushed nettles in water for about a month, you'll end up with a liquid feed that should be diluted by one part in ten before application. If sprayed on plants it can also prevent fungal disease. Nettles also

I have just ordered a whopping great pile of manure. A couple of weeks ago we finished cutting everything back and hunting down any perennial weeds that were hiding beneath the plants in readiness for mulching: had it not snowed we would have

Over the past few weeks we have been wrapped up in a flurry of tree planting. It is the very tail end of the planting season and, as I am mostly pretty disorganised, things that should have been done earlier in the season are being done now

-forgiving whiteness has gone and left behind it … well, a lot of soggy, mucky chaos. Hedges are staggering slightly after supporting all that weight and my flower borders look about as attractive as roadside ditches. I tend to leave my herbaceous plants standing

will sparkle. By February, however, I am bored of these tottering corpses that trail across the gardens like refugees from the Battle of Austerlitz. Most plants have lost their oomph and they are but broken shadows of their former selves.The time has come

and sour-tasting berries. This latter is the more famous tree, however, because (as every schoolchild knows) it provides about the only food that a silkworm will tolerate. The grubs feed on the mulberry leaves before wrapping themselves into cocoons made

of Worms outlined the contribution made by worms to the decomposition of vegetable matter (fallen leaves, dead plant material etc) and thus to the fertility of the soil.Darwin kept worms in tanks in his study and spent many hours observing their behavior

doing their Christmas shopping in the late night garage and wondering whether the last frozen chicken could stretch to feeding twelve.Then there's a third group into which I am fortunate to fall: those of us deemed too incompetent by our partners