Search - Articles

desirable residence.The queen starts off by chewing up bits of wood to form a small, round paper nest. In it, she initially lays a small number of eggs, which become grubs and then wasp workers that help to feed more grubs the queen produces over the summer

your plant regularly and feed once a week with diluted tomato fertiliser when flowers appear. This encourages the plants to keep flowering and produce more fruit.Find out whether your plant is a cordon or bush type. Cordons usually produce regular

of this Chelsea perfection in my own garden. But then it wouldn't be mine. I like my scruffy, battered, half-eaten plants. I like the fact that there are caterpillars available for the birds to feed their chicks with, though I could do without the pigeons

, and most have evolved tactics to overcome whatever the weather throws at them.After such a 'challenging' year I'm treating my lawn this autumn to a combined lawn feed and weed. Autumn fertilisers are available with just the right balance of nutrients

to deny them food? After all, that’s what sharing your garden with wildlife should be all about, shouldn’t it?Or am I deluding myself, and these mischievous blackbirds have not got a taste for delicious organically grown apples, and I’m just feeding

nitrogen-fixing nodules feed the bulbs, but even if they don't the pots look a lot nicer in autumn with a covering of leaves. I then let them grow right through spring – they help hide the bulb’s foliage as it dies down, and of course, the flowers are a

and a pond. Every year a colony of buff-tailed bumblebees nests beneath the neighbours' shed and feeds on my mum's flowers, I'm sure the butterflies do the same. My dad has a nest of common carder bumblebees in his ramshackle allotment compost heap, just

if you have a family to feed.I don't have the luxury of a large allotment, so I'm keen to grow as much as I can in my garden. It's probably larger than average, but then gardening is my passion, and my job!Fruit trees and cane fruits grow around the edges

of interesting things about oaks:1. Oaks are host to an awful lot of insects, lichens and birds - not to mention the various fungi that hang around the root systems.2. Because of the number of feeding insects, oak leaves look a bit shabby by July but

go through this behaviour in autumn, and only the fertilised queens (females) survive through winter. In the 'solitary' species, the bees develop in their mainly subterranean nests, and although the grubs may finish feeding on the stored stocks