Weblog : Hints and Tips
A selection of Garden Design hints and tips to help you with planning, maintaining or even designing your own gardens.
Landshare: For people who want to garden but have no land
Allotments are in short supply but the number of people after one has spiralled. Canny landless gardeners have cottoned on to the ingenious Landshare scheme.
Under the scheme, started by the River Cottage team, people offer up gardens or land they can no longer maintain themselves for people wanting to grow their own veg or get into gardening. And now the National Trust has jumped on board, listing hundreds of sites on the Landshare website. As part of their initiative to create 1,000 allotments by 2012, more than 20 National Trust properties around the UK are running allotments, community gardens and orchards through Landshare.
Since its launch in 2009, Landshare has grown into a thriving community of more than 67,000 growers, sharers and helpers. It has brought together people who have a passion for home-grown food, connecting those who have land to share with those who need land for cultivating food.
With The National Trust getting involved in Landshare it shows that anyone can offer up their land. If you have a plot of land or garden which is becoming neglected, visit Landshare to see if it could be the answer to your maintenance issues. Or, if you’re looking for a plot of land to tend, check out the matchmaking map to find a garden near you.
Landshare has benefited people who:
•Want to grow their own fruit and veg but don’t have anywhere to do it
•Have a spare bit of land they’re prepared to share
•Can help in some way – from sharing knowledge and lending tools to helping out on the plot itself
•Support the idea of freeing up more land for growing
•Are already growing and want to join in the community
Don’t miss September’s Malvern Show
A perfect autumn day out for food and gardening lovers.
After a long year, there’s nothing better than enjoying the fruits of your harvest. Celebrate the best nature has to offer at The Malvern Autumn Show. The event hosts a range of cookery demonstrations, gardening talks, vegetable displays, vintage tractors, crafts and more. Enjoy a day out to remember. with Mark Diacono and the River Cottage Team in The Good Life Pavilion, lending you their expertise in growing your own food. The Orchard Pavilion features the best of England’s orchards, an edible gardens exhibition and an artisan food market and a festival of tasty meat, jams and pickles to explore. If that’s not enough to whet your appetite, chef Gino D’Acampo will be cooking up an Italian feast.
It’s not all glorious food though. The keen gardener will be able to take in the RHS Glorious Flower Show, watch landscapers build a show garden live, watch the National FInals of the World Skills UK Landscape Gardening Competition and bear witness to giant veg at the Midlands Vegetable Society Championships. There are impressive flower and vegetable displays aplenty in the Harvest Pavilion and talks and demos from the RHS’s Tender Plant Committee in the Plant Demonstration Theatre. And of course, you’ll be able to stock up on gardening tools, accessories, plants and sundries. We don’t know how you’ll fit it all in.
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When is the best time to water your plants?
With the hot weather finally stumbling into action we look at when you should water your garden plants.
As a general rule the answer is actually pretty simple:
The best time of day to water is always in the morning.
This gives your plant time to absorb the water and get ready to handle everything it’s going to have to do during the day. You know the sort of thing: handling the heat & cold and absorbing all the yummy nutrients out from the soil and generally getting on with growing into the perfect plant within your garden design scheme.
Some plants need more water than others, some require less, so if you’re planning a new garden design we have oodles of experience with planting and can advise you on what plant needs how much water as part of our service.
It might help stop your garden looking like an arid desert… unless you want that sort of thing of course, in which case we can show you how to keep it looking nice and dry!