Tag Archives: pests

You can buy pots of garlic Growing garlic

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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?

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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 →

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!

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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 →

Yummy - a kale smoothie Smooth as a baby’s bottom

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As soon as the baby arrives and begins this wonderful journey called life, it is medically suggested that nature has left the baby short of its needs. Vitamin K is now strongly recommended at birth and eight weeks later in the form of an injection or as an oral form for the baby. The reason is a possible haemorrhage that has life threatening consequences. I’m not wanting to pooh pooh the methods of science but to suggest that do babies having just experienced their dramatic arrival really need an invasive needle? Surely Vitamin K has to found in a natural form in a high dose? In steps our friend and new fashion icon; Kale. Continue reading →

Ripe feijoas Bounty of autumn – limes, herbs & feijoas

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WELL I’m in hog heaven. I’ve had a brilliant day scavenging fresh produce and then cooking the proceeds. I scored my first scavenge at a committee meeting for the Sydney group of Open Gardens Australia. Committee Chair Ros Andrews, had brought a basket of limes to share out. The committee meets at Ryde College of TAFE. In the kitchen adjacent to the committee room was a box of chokos pleading to be taken home. I took a couple, adding them to my stash.
Continue reading →

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA Top 10 vegetables to grow in pots

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If you want to grow some of your own veg, and you’re short on space, then growing them in containers is a great option. But it’s not the only reason. If your soil is rubbish, and you hate digging, then it’s easy to create beautiful soil for growing in pots… and I’ll be sharing my recipe for a super soil mix a little later on. If you’ve never grown anything before, then grabbing a few pots, filling them with mix and planting out some established seedlings is the quickest and easiest way to get a start. Continue reading →

Squill (Scilla siberica) loving the sun Why this spring seems late. But is it?

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Do you remember last spring…it came all at once in a massive explosion of color, leaves and pollen. Snowdrops, Squill and Daffodils all came at the same time, while Maples flowered and dispersed their pollen. During the last week of March in 2012, Forsythia, PJM Rhododendrons and Star Magnolias were already in full bloom and my tree lilacs, an early tree to leaf out, were already in leaf. However, this year you have to search hard to find any buds swelling and only this week did Squill start to appear and Daffodils start showing flower buds. Continue reading →

Welwitschia mirabilis The ugliest plant in the world

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As you all probably know I’m a mad keen plant collector and within the constraints of climate and the size of my garden I want to grow as many different plants as I can manage. Having said this I also wish to make my garden an attractive landscape (at least to my eyes) and not just a collection. Continue reading →