Veg Plotting

I'm exhibiting my first ever quince for all the world to see 💛 I've had the tree for years and I've monitored it carefully previously for any signs of flowers or fruit; then I threatened its days in my garden as numbered many times when none appeared; so of course the year when I've ignored it completely is the time when it presents me with one solitary fruit. Naturally, it is truly a prince amongst all quince. I made the discovery when harvesting the figs, which have gone bonkers this year and screened off the quince tree from the rest of the garden. Perhaps that's the secret to success? At first I had quite a time deciding whether it was ripe, but that initial lime green I saw has now morphed into a wonderful warm yellow and a fruity fuzziness that tells me it's time. Now what shall I make with it? 🤔 Your ideas are welcome... You may also like: I've just fished out the link to my recipe for poached quince , which in turn links to my recipe for quince tar...

I'm loving the sweet peas I've started picking this week. They're such an easy and bountiful plant to grow, though it nearly didn't happen for me this year, as lingering long Covid meant I got terribly behind with all things garden. Luckily there were trays of seedlings on offer a couple of months ago when I went shopping at Lidl which was an opportunity too good to miss. I just about had enough energy to improvise a couple of supporting tripods from bamboo and plonk them in a couple of my grow pots going free. These are usually part of my patio allotment, so it was great to find an alternative use for them. And here they are, the flowers now gracing the vase my aunty Lily gave me decades ago. I had no idea on the colours or scent on offer and I'm pleased to find plenty of the darker shades and scent I love in this selection. It's been mentally uplifting to have such a positive result from a much darker time earlier this year. I've wanted to grow flowers for...

What a quiet spring we had pest-wise here at VP Gardens , apart from hordes of aphids which obviously like the dry sunny weather we've had. Thank goodness I've learned patience over the years to leave them and sure enough the small garden birds targeted the roses and carried off beak fulls to feed their young voraciously calling for attention at the bottom of the garden. Elsewhere, plentiful ladybird larvae cleared the blackfly from my dahlias in a matter of days. The one pictured above has grown large and fat on what was on offer and is ready to pupate and transform itself into the adults we love to see. Now we're in June - and with a fairly reasonable rainfall - other pests have arrived in droves to be dealt with. For some strange reason I only ever find rose sawfly caterpillars on my 'Kew Gardens' rose, perhaps its position in the middle of the garden is a favourable to the unseen incoming adults? Luckily, they readily show themselves (as shown above) when I do a...

It's been great to have some quality time on the patio this week culminating in yesterday's partial eclipse. With the live stream to hand, we had fun with our hastily made pinhole projector (a piece of card pierced with a paper clip), playing with the image on our hands, then NAH decided to carefully take a direct photo of the sun. 'That won't work', I said, and I was right... and wrong, with the sun behind its mackerel sky veil blazing forth as usual, but the camera lens flare revealing a perfect image of the sun bitten by the moon. * = I've had Midnight Oil's Earth and Sun and Moon on the brain all week; especially appropriate for yesterday's celestial event.

Regular readers know I do love a good citizen science project and I'm happy to announce the latest one is launched by The RHS/Bumblebee Conservation Trust today. What can be better than watching bumblebees bothering our flowers on a sunny day and help science to boot? From today until 31st May we're asked to submit our sightings from our gardens and parks around the UK. Why is this important? Well, bumblebees are a vital pollinator for our garden flowers plus crops such as apples, tomatoes and peas. When the weather starts to warm - even on the odd warm late winter's day - queen bumblebees emerge from hibernation to find nectar to help fuel themselves and gather pollen to feed the hungry larvae of worker bees back in the nest. Finding out the exact situation in springtime is particularly important as habitat loss/climate change may be affecting the availability of springtime flowers, which in turn will affect the successful establishment of bee colonies at the start of the ...

I have two huge pots either side of the central steps leading down off our patio which I decided a few weeks ago should be graced with Echinacea this year. This is a relatively short lived perennial* which sadly decided to leave my garden a few years ago, and it's lovely to welcome it back along with attendant butterflies, hoverflies and other insects in abundance. What I didn't expect was some rocket plants** to decide to join it to make a quite unusual planting combination. What do you think? I have no idea where the rocket has come from, though I'm pleased to add its leaves to my salads and sandwiches on a regular basis. I especially like how the yellow flowers echo the pollen rings that have appeared on the Echinacea's central cones. Sometimes it's good to go with the garden's flow and enjoy the unexpected items that appear in the gardening area 😊 Which combinations - planned or otherwise - do you enjoy in your garden? * = though Echinacea purpurea such as...

Last year the crocuses I'd planted in the patio planter in direct view from the kitchen disappeared and I missed them. It's always good to have a cheerful sight at this time of the year as I always find February hard to deal with. This year, the mystery of where they've gone is solved. I spotted a patch of purple winking at me from our bedroom window recently and sure enough, a closer inspection showed we now have crocuses in our lawn. It's not just the patch in the photo, there's the odd one or two scattered in at least four locations close by. I detect the hand - paw really - of the local squirrel population, who've been cheekily active all round VP Gardens . Special snowdrops are missing from their pots this year. I wonder where they'll pop up next? I think I'll leave the crocus where they are as they're in the shadiest part of the lawn which struggles to look good at the best of times. I think I can persuade NAH not to mow until the corms are wel...

I bought this Camassia leichtlinii 'Sacajawea' five years ago at the Malvern Spring Show. How do I know that? It's because so far, the number of blooms I've had each year has followed the Fibonacci sequence i.e. 0 (when I didn't have it), 1 in year 1 when I bought it, then 1 in year 2, 2 in year 3, 3 in year 4, and as you can see 5 blooms this year. So what should I get in year 6? The answer is 8 (i.e. 3+5 from the 2 previous years), so we shall see... I've often seen the more common blue Camassias in lots of gardens I've visited in late spring, and very fine they are too...but plumped instead for its white cousin with variegated leaves for the top terrace bed here at VP Gardens . It's fully repaid my decision despite the slow increase in blooms as the leaves lengthen the season of interest and the rocket-like flowers really light up this part of the garden towards dusk. The garden's flowering much later this year, owing to one of the coolest and...

Over the past couple of years it's interesting to see what has chosen to appear in the gravel path in the back garden. Some are plants which have hopped over from the borders where I planted them and others have reappeared many years after I last had them here at VP Gardens . I think most of them are from my own activities rather than blow-ins or bird distribution from elsewhere. They give me a neat dilemma: do I treat them like weeds and get rid, or should I do something with them? Luckily most of the plants that have appeared so far are either low growing, or not enough to prevent our use of the path for what it was designed for. They could stay put if I so desired. The warmer weather over the past week or so has signalled it's time - at last - to clear away the over wintering stems and the rest of the debris I left in the garden to shelter overwintering insects and to feed the birds. It's also decision time on what to do with those self-sown plants. I've decided to m...

It's time for the annual flower census, where I pay particular attention to what's in bloom at VP Gardens in the new year. It's the only time I do this; my reasoning is there's plenty of interest at other times of the year, and if January has something, then I must be doing something right. As a result it's the only time I can do an exact comparison between the years and it's good to have that. Of course, the weather has a major role to play in what's actually there. There are always some surprises. The main one this year was daffodils in bloom before Christmas. Even more surprising is they've continued to bloom, despite almost two whole weeks of below average temperatures laced with ice and hoar frost. They actually flowered a few days ahead of the snowdrops and I'm pleased to find the snowdrops are now restoring order to the seasonal world with their delightful display both in the garden and on the public land next door. Here's this year's...

Helianthus 'Lemon Queen' is a late summer stalwart on my patio. I have a longish narrow bed in the corner, dominated by a fig tree and with a couple of winter flowering clematis growing up our neighbour's garage wall. This is a perennial sunflower, which grows to 5 or 6 feet tall, with lighter yellow flowers than most of its perennial and annual cousins. Personally, I think the lighter lemon suits the softer rays of autumn's sunshine. This area doesn't have a decent depth of soil, which is fine for the fig, but at the height of summer my sunflowers suffer a little. As a consequence this is the only garden bed which gets an additional watering, usually the waste water from our kitchen. I now have a couple of options to consider: either to build up the soil depth with a thick mulch so my sunflowers fare better, or to replace them with something else. Earlier in the year I was all for replacing them with raspberries as part of my Allotment at Home endeavours as th...

"It's National Bulb Planting Week," announced cheerful BBC weather forecaster Sarah Lucas at Wisley this morning. I haven't managed to find out more about it since I came online, but I'm glad to add my own contribution today courtesy of Taylors bulbs and the HTA 's #MillionPlantingMoments campaign. Here I am this morning deciding where to plant my allium bulbs. This variety and colour's new to me and I hope it'll do as well for me as its purple cousins have served so reliably - you may remember I showed you my terrace bed stuffed with spring blooms in last month's Blooms Day . I've cleared out most of the bottom border and I'm slowly replanting this area as and when final bramble culling allows (it's proving to be persistent). I've decided to plant my bulbs amongst the pictured clump of Persicaria to provide some spring interest to this area. The other alliums have taught me they need to be placed amongst robust and/or later emer...

In some ways flowers blooming out of season aren't that surprising here at VP Gardens , but I don't think I've found them in midsummer before. This week, I was surprised to find not one, but two instances on my daily walk around the garden. Here we have a few damp apple blossoms shining out in the rain; even more surprising seeing the tree is already bearing a goodly crop of maturing fruit. If spring to summer blooms isn't that much of a stretch of the imagination, then winter/spring to summer might just do it in the shape of this hellebore. It's so comfortable in what it's doing, it's put out another bud since I first spotted it in flower. This is one of a new batch I planted out last year, which were just small plugs when I got them. A few flowered at their allotted time in January, but many more didn't, which I put down to them not being mature enough. Perhaps it's showing it's all grown up now? I've been pondering the reason(s) why these ...

It's currently a real pleasure to walk on my lawn, not just because of the delicious feel of the cool grass on my toes, but also for this year's visual delights. There's an explosion of colour, and a new flower for my lawn compared to those I found for last year's #nomowmay survey  in the form of the pictured purple common self-heal . I didn't know much about this plant before it appeared in my garden, but having looked it up, it's an interesting addition. Its common name alludes to its use in herbal medicine, particularly to treat sore throats and halitosis and it's used regularly in Chinese medicine. It's also edible, so I have another potential salad ingredient at my feet in the shape of its stems and leaves. The bees love it too and it turns out it's an important plant for them as Jean Vernon told me on Twitter: "...it really helps as there is a huge June gap in terms of food plants for pollinators. So good you are seeing more bees."  Y...

After a warm, dry spring and almost a hundred percent pollination I guess it was almost inevitable June's apple cull would be brutal. This 'June Drop' is nature's way of ensuring the tree can support its crop of apples. Many of the fruiting spurs have five or more apples - eight in quite a few instances - which isn't sustainable. As you can see in the photo above there simply isn't enough room for all of the apples to grow to maturity, so some of them must go. Quite often there are some slow developers like the one you can just see in the middle and these are usually amongst the first to drop, followed by any damaged and deformed fruit. I've already seen some early signs codling moth have come a-calling judging by some of the frass they've left behind. There are some signs of bird damage too: two months of dry weather has left the ground rather hard and I suspect there's been slim pickings for feeding a growing family, so the birds have turned their...

Like many of us under lockdown the past couple of weeks, I've had a bit of a spring clean, both in the home and the garden. Yesterday I turned my attention to a huge bag of garden stuff  accumulated over the years from various events and realised here was an opportunity to inject some fun into the garden. Our gardens are fast becoming our sanctuaries and a healing space for our times, but oh yes, some fun is needed now more than ever. I felt a little down on Friday and a cheerful task in the fresh air was just what I needed. Half an hour or so's work and my little flowerpot man now greets me as I step into the garden as do my welcome flowers. I rescued the arch from the bottom of the garden last year and decided it was crying out for the string of solar lights I'd found in my bag. Childlike I couldn't wait for it to get dark yesterday evening so I could admire my handiwork and was delighted the moon joined me for the photo session. Skipper and Spot are always ent...

I've made a guest appearance this week on the Thompson & Morgan (T&M) blog with some of my top tips for allotment growing alongside regular Veg Plotting commenter Sue (yay!), plus a whole host of experienced allotmenteers. Those of you who read my National Gardening Week post last May may be a little surprised as I confessed then I no longer have an allotment. My response to T&M's questions apply to what I've been doing here at VP Gardens and show grow your own is feasible whether you have just a windowsill right through to a full-blown allotment. My update on progress since then is long overdue. In a nutshell I produced more in 2019 than many an allotment year despite the more restricted space. It's not been a perfect time owing to family circumstances, so I look forward to 2020's growing season confident even more progress can be made. Two of my key projects last year were to improve soil health and to increase my growing space with some ...

Sometimes a plant gets under your skin; one to be pursued no matter how hard the chase might be. Hesperaloe parviflora  - aka Red Yucca - proved to be such a plant for my garden. I first came across it in Austin at the Garden Bloggers Fling last year . It's a native plant to Texas and was found pretty much in everyone's garden; also at the gorgeous organic nursery we visited in the rain; and thanks to the legacy of Lady Bird Johnson and the wonderful work of the Wildflower Center which bears her name, it's seen along all the roads and freeways around the city. Of course it's a key plant for xeriscaping , its tough agave-like rosette leaves - without the skin piercing spikes and with intriguing 'stringy bits' (my technical term) - are ideally adapted for the harsh Texan conditions and whilst I'd mentally named it my plant of the Fling, with a sigh of regret I'd also consigned it to the 'not suitable for my garden' pile of potential pla...

I cut a small posy of flowers for our kitchen on Sunday courtesy of the back lawn and keeping NAH away from it so we could have a #NoMowMay. I've talked about my Wild and Woolly Lawn before, and since then it's gone from strength to strength. I've enjoyed watching the large numbers of insects zooming around our garden this year* which I'm sure is the result of my relaxed attitude to the need for lawn perfection. As well as the flowers on the windowsill, there are plenty more where they came from outside, and so I took part in Plantlife's Every Flower Counts lawn survey yesterday. With the decrease in wildlife habitats, there is an increasing recognition our gardens can provide much needed havens for wild flowers, which in turn support a wide variety of insects and other fauna. Plantlife's survey aims to put a baseline figure on one aspect of this concept, by estimating how much our lawns can support honey bees when the grass is left to grow longer and t...

I planted Photinia 'Red Robin' when I created VP Gardens  nearly 20 years ago. I chose it for its shiny evergreen foliage and new-growth red leaves to brighten one of the darker corners away from the house. Sadly I've allowed it to grow unchecked until recently and now it is far too dominant for its position. The same applies to most of the border in which it resides and I've started on a slow revamp. Slow because the soil needs feeding (a combination of my neglect and a neighbour's towering conifer hedge sucking everything dry); I want to ensure I've removed every scrap of bramble and ivy that's hopped over the fence from the public land next door; and that area is currently a major flight path for nesting birds so I'll leave them in peace whilst they nurture their broods. I was going to remove the Photinia completely until I saw how huge its trunk and roots are. It is really is more like a small garden tree rather than a shrub and is currentl...