Mouse & Trowel Award Nominations

Nominations for this year’s Mouse and Trowel Gardening Blog Awards is now open. It would be fantastic to see more British bloggers up for an award this year. I’ll certainly be making a few nominations this week. See you there!

White Tulips

Well you could call this the first harvest. These are my white (with a hint of yellow) tulips that I planted as cutting flowers way back in October. They have turned out very well despite being jammed into the smallest pot in the world and carted from one side of the garden to the next […]

10 Jobs for March

Here at mtp there has been a burst of energy under cover of the Potting Shed. Here’s 10 things we’ll be getting on with this month. Plant first early potatoes in mild areas where the soil is workable Spring prune fruit trees like Peaches and Nectarines Sow some Sweet Peas to grow alongside your Runner […]

How to Prune a Peach Fan

Before The Peach tree got it’s first prune today. The maiden whip that we planted a few weeks ago needed to have its formative pruning before the flowers emerged. There were plenty of branches to work with. I was looking for two strong branches on either side, at around the same height from the ground, […]

Hyacinths

I cut these gorgeous Hyacinths today. I planted the bulbs back in November when I planted the Tulips. The tulips are still green but these are ready and what a colour? The electric blue is almost too vibrant for the garden. It stands out so much against the plain backdrop (of virtually no plants) that […]

New Tags for New Garden

I created some plant tags today. I’d like to say that the idea is all my own but I shamelessly stole the design from the plant tags that I saw at The Lost Gardens of Heligan when we visited in the summer. I put two coats of heavy duty gloss paint on them to stop […]

Planting Shallots

In go the shallots for 2008. I planted the biggest specimens I could find from the batch I grew last year. I was careful to walk on a board (like Monty does) so as not to flatten my precious fluffy soil. I’ll be scattering some wood ash on there once they start growing, to give […]

Espalier Apple Tree (Queen Cox)

At last, our part-trained Apple espalier arrived. It’s in its third year and has two branches trained as espaliers already, which means that we’re off to a flying start with our fruit garden. It arrived by courier and is probably the biggest package I’ve ever received . It was so well packed, in straw and […]

Let the planting commence

Started the planting yesterday. You can see in the photo that we’ve planted Box bushes in each corner, with some, as yet tiny, Lavender bushes as company. In the bottom left-hand bed you can see a row of Raspberry canes (Autumn Bliss), a Blackcurrant bush (Ben Conan), a small patch of strawberry plants (can’t remember […]