Veg Plotting

It's National Gardening Week and it's timely the RHS have published the results of a recent study they conducted with Sheffield University on gardening and wellbeing. The results and the infographic above speak for themselves. To quote one of the researchers - the RHS's Alistair Griffiths - on Twitter: "The more 'doses' of gardening you get, the better your wellbeing :) " I hope those who discovered gardening as a great stress buster during Lockdown are motivated to continue - I've always said 'Gardening is the answer'. You can read the full published paper here . Happy gardening!

My article in ⁦ @weekendmagazine ⁩ on terrariums. Thank you ⁦ @jarandfern ⁩ and the wonderful ⁦ @VegPlotting ⁩ for a fun afternoon hunting out house plants! pic.twitter.com/xrkwP5D9kv — Constance CraigSmith (@Concraigsmith) January 5, 2019 Lovely mention of Veg Plotting in this weekend's Mail. We had a great time investigating how to make a terrarium with Jar and Fern late last year. Naturally, a terrarium is now on my project list for 2019. I need to investigate suitable sized plants first...

I was all geared up to bring news from this year's Chelsea Flower Show, but after I'd heard the dreadful news from Manchester this morning, it seemed crass and too flippant to do so. Then I remembered Interflora's Stories of Emotion exhibit whilst I was up at the plot this afternoon. The arrangements and their accompanying stories stopped me in my tracks yesterday, just as today's news has stopped me again. My heart goes out to the victims and their families. I've decided to show a snippet from the exhibit as a reminder that a glimpse of beauty can always overcome adversity.

Our local paper has a weekly From the Files feature and it's always interesting to see a snapshot of local life from 25, 50 and 100 years ago. A Chippenham snippet from 1917 particularly caught my eye as it refers to the town's allotments: "The Town Council are sparing no effort to provide allotments for all who require them. The total of applicants is about 120: of these 27 in the London Road district have already been provided with land and a portion of Harden's Farm has been secured for the remaining 27 applicants. To meet the requirements of those in the Hawthorn and Tugela Road district, and those who had chosen land at the back of Marshfield Road, negotiations are practically completed for a portion of the arable land of Cocklebury Farm and Miss Dickson has consented to give her pasture field behind Hawthorn Road." This has set up all kinds of questions in my brain... Were these the first allotments in Chippenham?  Who cultivated them? Who ...

It's not often I get to tick a garden off my 'Must See' list AND hear a great story, but my visit to Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons yesterday turned out to be a red letter day. Imagine the scene... ... it's an ordinary day at your magazine's office, then the postman brings you a sober looking solicitor's letter. What could it be? If you're like me, you'd immediately assume the worst. But stop and consider the complete opposite instead. You rip the letter open and learn someone has not only read your magazine for years, they've loved it so much they've left the magazine a sum of money in their will. Well, what would you do? That's exactly the delicious dilemma The English Garden faced recently and the result was yesterday's launch of the Future Fund. It comprises a bursary of £5,000 for 5 recipients (one per year) and is open for anyone to apply to fund their bright idea. There are no limits on what's included, exce...

Christmas is usually a time when unexpected, random things happen. Our share for this year occurred at 3.15pm yesterday afternoon when one of ash trees on the public land next door decided to hop over the fence for a visit. Ironically, it was probably the last huge gust of yesterday's storm which brought it down. I heard a loud crack and then saw what at first looked like part of the roof falling past our bedroom window. It turned out to be the top of the tree brushing against the house on its way down. We were very lucky as there's only minor damage - just a small branch stuck in the gutter, plus my apple tree in the pot next to the house is no more. The council's website says they'll respond to this within 5 working days. In view of the strength of yesterday's storm I suspect we'll be quite a way down their list of priorities, so I'm contemplating decorating it for Christmas ;) Update 30th December: After a slight hiccup (the council initially ...

According to the biodynamic calendar , Monday was a 'flower' day *. It also happened to be the chosen date for the first ever gathering of flower farmers, so it was an apt, definitely auspicious choice. I'm not a flower farmer, but having followed Georgie on Twitter, read her blog and happily sported a corsage or three of hers, I was keen to find out more about this side of the horticultural trade. It seems to me we've been having a quiet revolution over the past year or two, where many people have spotted the threat of imported flowers can actually be turned into an opportunity**. The UK's flower industry is worth a whopping 2 billion pounds a year. It isn't all petrol forecourt and supermarket flowers either***. How about some scented, floral confetti for your wedding? It's a memorable way to get around the ban many churches have imposed on the paper version. Or how about some Pick Your Own flowers alongside those strawberries? I was struck by the...

It's always nice to receive an award, especially when Veg Plotting is in such good company and the citation says: Vegplotting was pointed in our direction as one of the ‘Queen of the Blogs’. Excellent. It lives up to its name. I owe a beer to whoever said that :) You can check out all the other winners here . There's plenty of excellence and a number of sites I'd not found before, which is great. As usual with this kind of thing, there are plenty of blogs, websites and whatever that haven't had the recognition they deserve.* Therefore I'm pleased to see  My Garden School is asking you to mention your favourites in the Comments (via the above link), ready for consideration next year. * = which I mused about in relation to a certain list of top influential gardeners published in January. My thanks to Toby Musgrave for blogging about his inclusion, which led to my discovery. If you're interested in garden history, his blog is well worth a look :)

Last Friday I went to Harrogate Autumn Show for the first time. It was NAH's first flower show EVER and I'm happy to report we both had an excellent day. We particularly enjoyed the weigh-in for the heaviest onion class (top picture in the collage courtesy of NAH). It turned out we witnessed a world beater, weighing in at an eye watering 18 pounds and 1 ounce. The grower of this particular giant was Peter Glazebrook, who's very well known in championship veg growing circles. Unknown to NAH, he was standing next to him at the weigh-in and was briefly glimpsed on the local TV coverage that evening as a result. Peter Glazebrook swept the board in the six other heaviest/ longest/ biggest categories on offer at the show and thus earned the attention of the national media this week (and across the pond !). On Breakfast News on Monday he revealed his giant onion will be grown on next year to provide seed to add to his own world beating strain. I guess that makes it the wo...

Things are happening thick and fast at VP Gardens at the moment, but I couldn't let this morning's momentous visit by the Olympic Torch Relay team pass this blog by. Here's the first of the runners going through Chippenham at just after 10 am. NAH and I had a short walk to find our spot in front of the town's football ground. Whilst we were waiting every cyclist passing by was treated to a massive cheer from the crowd, as were the many vans taking police officers to their assigned places. Then we had a cavalcade of police motorcycles with blue lights flashing and sirens blaring, plus various sponsors lorries and the coach taking the torch bearers to their designated spots. I don't think I've ever felt so emotional about a complete stranger running by. The Olympics were  here :) Update: There's quite a few films of the torch relay in Chippenham posted up on YouTube now. Here's just one of them  plus another which was taken just a few yards d...

It was a privilege to attend the RHS' conference on Horticulture: A Career To Be Proud Of in London yesterday. It's part of National Gardening Week and was arranged in response to two rather shocking things: David Cameron's recent comparison of gardening with litter picking A RHS commissioned survey showing most young people consider horticulture as a career only suitable for the unskilled It's clear horticulture has an image problem. In contrast the 21 speakers yesterday were admirable ambassadors, demonstrating clearly just how good an option horticulture is for a career. The array of speakers was glittering and the day was chaired by Alan Titchmarsh. I took loads of notes - far too many to post as it would be soooo long. For me the best part of the day was hearing the four young people who spoke so eloquently about their struggle to get started in horticulture. I wish I could bottle their enthusiasm and love for their jobs and get everyone to have a go...

My allotment shed - in warmer and sunnier times This week my plot's shed was one of 13 broken into, which now means there's 13 unsolved crimes added to our local police's statistics. The first I heard about it was on Wednesday when I was telephoned by the local police. It was snowing at the time, so I wasn't able to get up there until yesterday to see what had happened. As I suspected, I was lucky. I don't keep anything up there I would miss if it was taken, so all I had to do was close the door. Sadly my new allotment neighbours' spanking new shed had a neat hole where the padlock had been torn off. They weren't there at the time (no-one else was either) so I don't know if they or anyone else had anything taken. We've not had a break-in for a few years and the colder, darker days means our site like so many others was less attended than usual. It must have been far too tempting a site for anyone looking for valuables to enhance their Christ...

I ignore most Press Releases, but the one I received yesterday is too good too miss, especially is it allows me to share the kind of plant picture I can't take myself... As you can see May 18th next year has been designated as the first international Fascination of Plants day . Many of our tippety top plant organisations in the UK are involved, such as the Eden Project, lots of botanical gardens like Kew, the Natural History Museum, plus various research and educational organisations. The full list of participating UK organisations will be here *. In the run up to next year's special day, Kew Gardens have selected ten of their most fascinating plants, from the giant titan arum rising three metres high to the smallest water lily in the world, with pads as little as 1cm across. The myriad of plants that has shaped history, and continues to affect our lives, is showcased by the John Innes Centre . Here's the amazing plant picture as promised, taken by Olivi...

There's been loads of comment on this week's announcements re the proposed BBC cuts, so I thought I'd add some personal and some more garden related thoughts to the mix, especially as there's quite a few things of interest which didn't made the headlines. Overall, I think the Beeb's been pretty savvy in snipping away across the board, rather than facing the active campaigning lobbies such as those which sprang up against the closure of 6Music and when deep cuts to BBC4 and the World Service were mooted. That's not to say protests won't happen - for instance there's already a strong campaign to #savebbcbirmingham - and I've also witnessed - and rightly so - some lively debates regarding more TV repeats and the changes to the BBC's news services. Here's some less well-known snippets: Gardeners' World , Countryfile and Chelsea Flower Show coverage are amongst the programmes set to move from Birmingham to Bristol. Whilst the...

It's been a rather good week for Wiltshire's public planting. Cricklade, often the lone banner carrier for Wiltshire was last night named 'The Champion of Champions' at the Britain in Bloom awards ceremony at St. Andrew's, which means it's deemed by the judges to be the best in Britain :) Cricklade has long been on my to do list of posts, not only because of its Britain in Bloom prowess but also because it's home to over 90% of Britain's wild fritilliary population. Yesterday's good news means it's moved up my list of OOTS must do posts for next summer. I've also added Corsham to the list as it was recently awarded Gold in the South West region's Britain in Bloom awards, marking steady progress from an inaugural silver in 2009, through to silver-gilt last year and now gold. Finally, Friday morning saw us at Bradford on Avon's station ready to catch a train to Weymouth as a birthday treat for NAH. It meant I just had time to take th...

Autumn is arriving early here at VP Gardens: here I'm contemplating the leaves which have fallen onto our front drive from the public land next door. I've never had to think about sweeping them up in August before and it's not the first sign of seasonal change either. Before our holidays last month I was exchanging tweets with The Woodland Trust who were asking if anyone was observing autumnal signs back then. I'd been noticing the rowan trees around here were positively groaning under the weight of extremely ripe looking berries - that's during our mid summer! Earlier this week the RHS issued a Press Release about early leaf colouring on the trees seen in various RHS gardens. Our evenings aren't dark enough yet to trigger this, so our extremely hot and dry spring is being blamed as the culprit. Despite the indifferent weather we've had since June, our soils still haven't had enough rainfall to make up for the loss they had from March through to May...

Sometimes a local issue comes along which serves to make my brain hurt very badly as it raises so many others and I simply don't have the answers. The news last week that a Chippenham farmer nearby is proposing to convert 35 acres of his land to solar panels falls firmly into this category. That's 'solar farming' on the scale of around 15,000 moveable panels, each the size of a door and arranged in rows in a field(s) to maximise their capture of the sun's energy. There was quite a lot of talk about it on Saturday at our local resident's association quiz evening which NAH and I attended*. We're now expecting a 'call for action' email any day now and naturally the main point of concern raised so far is what this means from an aesthetics viewpoint. That's the least of my concerns and I'm having a major tussle with myself over whether this is a good thing or not. My greener living head says it is because it means we're making more use o...

Toby Buckland (centre) at Malvern Autumn Show in 2008 - just after his helmship of Gardeners' World was announced So Toby Buckland, Alys Fowler and Greenacre are out and Monty Don, his Herefordshire garden and Rachel de Thame are back in at Gardeners' World . Quite a shock for us garden enthusiasts to take in late yesterday afternoon which inevitably set tongues wagging. I thought Sue Beesley summed up the BBC's retro makeover well in her Stop Press post about it yesterday and I'll endeavour not to repeat what she's said already. The reactions to The Telegraph 's breaking of the news also make interesting, if mixed reading. For those deploring the move, an equal number welcome it and inevitably the names Alan Titchmarsh and Geoff Hamilton also get a mention. There's also a call for fresh faces, but who that should be is much harder to tell. What's clear from the many people outside our cosy garden blogging world I've spoken to recently is there is ...

I never thought I'd have my own newspaper empire, but an application called paper.li is making me feel like I do. This clever software allows me to broadly define which content I want to look at via Twitter and then takes all links tweeted during a set time and re-formats and sifts them into various categories within a newspaper look-alike. I follow quite a few people and organisations on Twitter who not only promote their own blog posts on there, they also tell their followers about other interesting snippets of news and blogs, post lots of pictures and pick their favourite things they've found on YouTube. To follow all the links they tweet about would take forever and it's often hard to tell whether it would be something I'd like to read anyway. That's where my newspaper is really useful, because all that content is re-jigged into just a few pages and I can see at a glance whether I want to read the full article, play the video or whatever. There's al...

The UK debut of a revolutionary technique using perennials in public planting schemes was revealed by Bert Griffioen at the Palmstead workshop I attended recently. Bert hails from The Netherlands where his third generation family business focuses on the supply of perennials to garden centres and public space contractors across several countries in Europe. Around 5 years ago he had a major problem as the demand for perennials fell sharply. When he asked his customers why this was, the response was cost of maintenance and the knowledge required to look after them. Bert then came up with an innovative solution: an example of the result is pictured above. His technique is to mass plant a variety of tried and tested cultivars (typically 8-9 large plants/square metre) which can withstand close mowing by machinery in early spring just after the plants have started growing. These then grow back quickly to provide a low-growing, dense cover which suppresses weeds and reduces the need for irri...