Search - Articles

to discover that it was riddled with thin plastic strips, rather like the stuff you find inside a music cassette. Useless. Far too much to pick out and I certainly wasn't prepared to incorporate it into my lovely (albeit rather heavy clay) Hampshire soil

the garden. It's a bit 'pot luck', but then that's the fun of gardening. If I really wanted to maximise my returns I could collect seed by hand, picking off the pods at the moment they split, but before they've dropped their cargo. Kept on a sheet

or a bad thing - do they fill the rabbits up so they eat less of my vegetables, or do they merely serve as an appetizer, before the bunnies move on to my prized crops?). Dandelions are also popular with children, who love to pick the flowers and play

. Some emerged along the drive at Christmas, and from the responses to my daffodil blog it seems lots of other people had super-early (if somewhat confused) daffodils.My May daffs are in what we grandly call the 'picking plot', which is a slightly unkempt

pickings over the next month or so. If my eyes aren't deceiving me the ripe ones have gone. Is that blackberry juice dribbling down the beak of that bird up there?What I need is some netting ... a barrier to keep them away. I've covered fruit with netting

flowers work wonders bringing in pollinators like bees, hoverflies and butterflies.Vic has told me to help myself to his sweet peas and I have - very freely! It's far better to keep picking them regularly than let them go to seed as they stop flowering

are our best crop and the children especially like picking them. So when I first spotted all the flowers I knew we were in for a bumper yield this year.But two weeks later when I called in to see what was on offer I was met with bare stalks. Not one berry

Monday morning and a jay visited the kitchen window. I always think these are incredibly handsome birds and the small blue wing feathers still give me a childish thrill when I find one dropped. I can't resist picking it up to stick in my hat

next year. So here are my allotment New Year resolutions for 2009:I must grow crops that don't require regular picking as I don't live close enough to the plot to get there more than a couple of times a week. That's just not enough to harvest runner

by the snow.I regularly find queen wasps curled up, with their wings folded and tucked down underneath their bodies. With metabolism turned down to barely tick-over, they are immobile and can be closely examined (but not picked up) without risk of startling