If you’re looking for a Christmas gift for a keen grow-your-own gardener, this Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) Vegetable & Fruit Gardening book, edited by Michael Pollock, might be exactly what you’re looking for. It’s attractively laid out, and full of great photograpy and essential information. The first part of the book covers all the main [...]
Every now and again a cookbook comes along that’s so visually stunning that my mouth starts watering as soon as I turn the first page. Eat Your Veg by Arthur Potts Dawson is one of those beauties.
Grow your own vegetables, herbs, fruit cheaply and save money. Enjoy fresh seasonal food and tasty ingredients, even if you have a small garden or no garden.
Here is a guide to everything I know about growing sweet peppers and chillies. It hasn’t been a good year for growing sun-loving plants, but we managed a pretty respectable and flavoursome crop against the odds, so you might like to get the benefit of the most recent experiments. At Golightly Gardens we grow our [...]
It has not been a good year for grow-your-own gardeners – rain, rain and more rain disrupted the growing season, and the sunny spells turned up a little too late for most of us. Slugs and snails multiplied, compost went mouldy, and loads of garden pests got out of hand… Took a bit more work [...]
The last couple of weeks have seen a fair bit of decorating, renovating, and general fixing up of the house at Golightly Gardens. I’ve managed to waterproof and paint the garden shed, decorate the living room and paint up a very ugly MDF bookcase to disguise it a bit so far. It’s all been done [...]
It’s been a strange year so far, weather-wise, and this has caused some problems in the kitchen garden. For starters, there was a mild March then a lot of waterlogging from heavy rains in April, followed by a spell of unusually warm weather in May. This has affected the growing cycles of some plants, and [...]
It’s been a late start for some of the kitchen garden this year, on account of getting the garden fixed up plus the rain slowing everything down in April. However, I’ll be making up for lost time wherever I can. I’ll be growing two main types of crops. Firstly, high yielding veggies, ideally ones that [...]
Herbs can lift a simple dish into something really special, but they’re ridiculously expensive to buy regularly in small packets from the supermarket. Growing your own herbs saves money and makes you feel like a bit of a gourmet. You can buy whole collections of different herbs for as little as £1, and even if [...]
It’s been quiet on the grow-your-own front here this year, hasn’t it? That’s because in March we had finally saved up enough to get the back yard cleared and done up like a proper garden. Here’s a picture taken this afternoon. It’s a gigantic improvement, and I can’t wait to get it all planted up [...]
If you have a small kitchen garden, or you’re growing edible plants on windowsills or in window boxes, you only need a few seeds to fill the whole space with plants. Unfortunately, you usually have to buy the seeds in large quantities, and they don’t always stay fresh and viable for that long after you’ve [...]
Last year I grew a few tomato plants and they were tasty so this year I grew a few more. I went for more varieties this time round, but they nearly all ended up with the same thing in common – the tomatoes wouldn’t ripen (apart from the Yellow Pear toms which I’ll certainly be [...]
It has been an interesting couple of weeks in the kitchen garden, mainly because we’ve had a bit of a heatwave which has had a positive effect on some of the plants. For starters I was convinced there would be no aubergines, then this happened: The big butternut squash ripened, but it somehow got bruised [...]
Welcome back to the dangerous, subversive blog that brings corporations to their knees. Alternatively, welcome back to the blog that potters around the garden a bit, picks some organic veggies, then wanders back indoors for a lovely cup of tea before getting the dinner on. Yes, it’s a garden round-up. Woo! Due to a six-month [...]
There isn’t much to do in the garden at the moment, apart from tidying up a little, keeping an eye on the sprouting broccoli and spring cabbages, and giving the soil in the raised beds a good dig to finish breaking up the soil after the winter frosts. Lots of overwintering herbs, salads and greens [...]
It’s time to get more growing on the windowsill, so my latest sowings are heat-loving plants that need relatively high temperatures to germinate and won’t mind the central heating and the South-facing location. Since it’s only February I’m not getting ahead of myself, and am mostly growing plants that are likely to stay on the [...]
