Category: Gardening

Gardening describes all the physical things that you do in your garden, including planting, digging and pruning, as well as lifting and shifting. You can learn about ways to transplant; good watering techniques; drainage; managing pests and diseases; propagating from seeds, cuttings and division; when and how to prune and cut back; mowing; composting and mulching; fertilising and soil conditioning; and new ways of doing traditional jobs, like the ‘horticultural heresy’ of deep planting.

Reed Pugh suburban garage with beautiful new vegetable roof garden Suburban vegetables reach new heights

Reply

A friend recently introduced me to someone who has true passion for vegetable gardening in limited space. This new friend of mine has built a vegetable garden on the roof of her new garage! They recently rebuilt the garage with the intention of putting a deck on its roof to grow vegetables and keep bees. It is a tasteful and beautiful use of the space on display for the whole neighborhood. Continue reading →

You can buy pots of garlic Growing garlic

4

Garlic – yum! Our household goes through a knob a week or more, triple that when I’m harvesting tomatoes and making passata to freeze! Although I grew garlic many years ago, plantings in the last decade have been less successful because nowhere has quite enough sun in the old garden… but once again, hooray! Plenty of sun in the new area! Garlic is easy to grow as long as you meet its straightforward requirements. Continue reading →

Camellia minus all flowers and buds Who will rid me of the troublesome beasts?

6

Help!! The deer are somehow getting into our garden again. Can our international GardenDrum support network come to the rescue with some advice? I thought I had solved the problem 18 months ago when we got the front gates working again and put up deer fencing along a low section of the boundary wall of our garden in Argyll in the west of Scotland. Continue reading →

My own boots Thank you mum for my green fingers

1

With mothers being celebrated this month, I wonder how many gardeners can credit their mothers for igniting that magnificent obsession called gardening. The answer, I would bet, is many. Mine gave me a small corner of the garden to tend as well as providing a rambling, endless (to my child’s eyes) farm garden in which to dream and scheme. Continue reading →

I grow all of my veggies and ornamentals without using peat moss. Peat-free potting soil options

4

Most every commercial potting mix contains sphagnum peat moss because it’s a good, lightweight, organic amendment that improves drainage, as well as water retention and air circulation. The downside to peat moss is that it isn’t a sustainable resource. Peat moss is the decomposing remains of living sphagnum moss, and it is harvested at unsustainable rates from bogs in a manner than involves scraping off the top layer of the living moss to get to the saleable product below. Continue reading →

cups of tea Hello gardeners!

10

Hello gardeners! My name is Georgia and I am here to learn a) how to grow green things and b) how not to kill them. Up until now, these seemingly simple goals have proved extremely difficult and my 25 year past is littered with dead herb gardens, murdered bonsais and most recently, massacred flower bulbs (apparently you can’t leave them in a laundry for three years and then try to plant them). Continue reading →

Smashing Making muck

2

I recently finished an excellent book entitled, Resurrection in a Bucket: the Rich and Fertile Story of Compost, by Margaret Simons. It’s a light-hearted journey through the biological processes and social history of compost. I highly recommend it! Its arrival on my study desk was timely because I’ve been busy building large compost piles in preparation for reclaiming large areas of driveway for growing plants. By winter’s end I should have half a dozen large piles of compost ready for building up my existing soil. Continue reading →

Rosa ‘Jean Geldenhuys’ is a tough rose, with petals that do not fall, which means the blooms stay on the plants until the rich cream bleaches to white with pink tinges around the edges of the petals. The plant is disease-resistant and extremely vigorous There’s a garden in my backyard!

7

It is not the first time I am telling the story of my garden to an audience – I did that for five years when I had the most wonderful audience of garden lovers across sunny South Africa, all readers of the popular South African monthly magazine, SA Garden. Now – through GardenDrum – I hope to find a new audience of gardeners who would like to share my garden with me and share their gardens with me! For those of you who have not read any of my garden articles I published the past 10 years, let me introduce myself: I have gardening in my blood. Continue reading →