Although I don’t have a lot of space in my garden for growing main crop potatoes, I do like to grow some early potatoes. I usually plant first early potatoes around about the first week of March, depending on the weather and if the soil is warm enough. But they never seem to reach maturity when I would wish them to. So, this year I am trying something different.Continue reading
With many of our gardens showing signs of spring, lots of us will be keen to get outside and begin clearing our borders and pruning back those wayward shrubs.Continue reading
Well it’s the 13th October and I have eaten several of our home-grown strawberries today!Continue reading
After carefully nurturing the sweetcorn in pots, until I had cleared the first bed of potatoes, I finally got to plant out the sweetcorn this weekend.
Always look forward to the first strawberries of the season and today I picked this beauty!
This beautiful plant is also known as Silverbush. It is a compact evergreen plant which has white funnel-shaped flowers and oblong, silvery leaves. It flowers profusely from early summer until the autumn.
I found the first Andrena fulva – tawny mining bee – whilst weeding the garden today. This is a solitary bee which nests underground, building a volcano-like mound of soil around the entrance to its burrow. They generally emerge in April, so this one is a few weeks early.
The tawny mining bee, Andrena fulva
I also found a queen wasp and two honey bees emerging from hibernation in our conservatory, where they have spent the winter.
Spring is definitely in the air; tomorrow is the Spring Equinox so we can look forward to longer days and next weekend 26 March, we move on to British Summer Time when the clocks go forward an hour.
Spring is the time of year when it is summer in the sun and winter in the shade.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations.
© 2017 Lavender Hedge
I first came across this variegated tree mallow, Lavatera arborea ‘Variegata’, whilst browsing a seed catalogue in 1999 and fell in love with the description (there were no pictures or website to look at). I ordered a packet, sowed the seeds and was impressed at the ease and speed at which it grew.
Every year I am bewildered when I see garden centres and supermarkets selling ‘painted’ heathers in a variety of garish colours.
Dorset Apple Cake (sometimes known as Somerset Apple Cake) is delicious served warm. Although this recipe calls for cooking apples, but I find it a great way to use up any type of windfall apples.Continue reading