Horticultural

Gardeners' World gets a new home

Berryfields is no more.

No, I don't mean it's been smashed to smithereens by a meteorite, just that Gardeners' World won't be filmed there any more. This comes as no surprise, really - each new lead presenter likes to make their mark on the show, and so it is with Toby Buckland. The new territory will be a chance for him to stamp his identity on a new arena. The BBC press release says:

In the new series, starting in April, new presenter Toby Buckland and his team will face the challenge of transforming a muddy grassy playing field into the nation's new back garden, and viewers will be able to follow its progress across the coming year. Toby's ambitious plans for the site include creating a huge and colourful "urban meadow" sown from hardy garden annuals and featuring a stunning range of sunflowers and dahlias. This will be a haven for city insects and especially for the declining bee population. His new city vegetable garden will give inspiration to the many trying to grow their own in their own back yards. The garden location will also feature a row of front and back gardens, reflecting the very small urban and suburban spaces that many of us have to garden in.

Sounds as if this new garden "in the heart of Birmingham" won't have the feel of "country estate garden" that Berryfields has always carried. And that's got to be a good thing, right? I mean, who on earth has room for a pond that size? I likek the sound of the city veg garden, being that way inclined, but wonder what the front and back gardens will be like. It's really hard for these kind of supposedly "real" TV gardens to feel genuine because, well, unlike most of our gardens they'll be preened for TV. No cat poo on the lawn, no faded plastic children's wheelbarrow half-slung into the flower bed, no compost heap with the lid half off and and adorned with a fetching old pink sheet - or is that just my garden?

Interestingly, the presser also says that viewers will be invited into the "new GW potting shed at the end of the show, to discuss pictures and messages and decide "what's hot and what's not" in the gardening world each week". Can't figure out of this is going to be cool or deadly or just boring. Guess it depends on what viewers they pick.

 

Why all allotmenteers-in-waiting are not "almost-old people"

A Zoe Williams comment piece in Saturday's Guardian seems to have got allotmenteers' backs up - just to give you a taster, Allotmentality calls the piece a "sneering bilgefest". The paragraph that really lit the blue touch paper was this one:

I was amazed to discover that there are 100,000 people on the allotment waiting list. I've ummed and aahed for ages thinking of a way to say this, but there's only one: it must be all almost-old people. Mate, I am as soul sick as you are of people surveying their own generation via dinner parties, but I have canvassed all my friends and all my sister's friends which - I can verify with the aid of Facebook - verify is nearly 300 people (some of whom are the same), and the closest we have to an allotment is the following: one couple has a wormery; one has a field attached to her house in the country, but she is so unusual she has already been in Sainsbury's magazine. "She had her kids at 24," my sister said, as though the interjection of this knowledge said it all.

I've heard this argument before - "well I don't know anyone who grows veg/has an allotment". It usually comes from someone who lives in London and whose circle of friends is in London. Despite working in the capital for nearly 10 years I've never lived there, and among my circle of friends - both offline and online - I know quite a few people my age with allotments, or a veg patch in their garden, or a tomato plant or two on their balcony. So in my experience - which clearly differs from Zoe's - I'd suspect that the people waiting for allotments include a fair number of younger people and families. This was clear during my days on an allotment sit - every newly vacant plot was taken not by a retiree growing the holy trinity of leeks, onions and cabbages but mum, dad and the kids, a twentysomething woman, a father and son team - you get the picture./

A couple of the readers who commented on the piece* pointed out that newbies to allotments can be taken aback by the work involved in bringing an overgrown plot up to scratch - a fair point, and one I made repeatedly in my book. It also contributed to my reasons for giving up my allotment. I do worry that people think they can buy a few seeds and a fork and turn a brambly plot into a productive paradise with a couple of hours' work - anyone who's had an allotment knows that's madness. The answer - and this is particularly relvant if you are one of those 100,000 on the waiting list - is to start small and get growing in small spaces while you wai for an allotment to come up. It could be a few trailing tomatoes in a hanging basket, or a row of radishes in a windowbox, but it'll get you acquainted with the basic growing skills before you're let loose on your five or ten poles.

*Also loo out for commenter englishhermit's hilarious diatribe on slugs

New shoots: the Guardian gardening blog is live

Time, at last, to reveal something new that's been taking up a fair chunk of my time of late: the Guardian's gardening blog. It's a team effort, with posts from the lovely Lia Leendertz and Dominic Murphy, and some burblings from me. (Don't worry, I'll keep blogging here too.)

There are lots of goodies on offer, from archive posts from the late, great Vita Sackville-West (who wrote columns for the Observer - to come shortly, once I've typed it in) and Christopher Lloyd, to a guest post from the garden blogger par excellence, the anonymous Garden Monkey*. Plus our Q&A feature is going interactive, so you can add your wisdom to the mix and help solve other gardeners' dilemmas and problems.

Would love to know what you think of it - please do go and comment, or drop me an email. Proving popular so far is a post about composting tea bags.

* It has occurred to me that there's something about me and anonymous bloggers - I've had email exchanges with Belle de Jour (or someone claiming to be her, anyway) when I edited the very first Guardian weblog back in the day; I've met Salam Pax (who's in the paper today explaining why he's back in Baghdad), and now the Garden Monkey. And no, I still don't know who Belle or GM are. Useless, aren't I?

New year's resolution 2009 ...

...Turn this lethal combo of badly installed and maintained decking and a tumbledown shed with an asbestos roof into a delightful garden office and potting shed alongisde a beautiful seating area replete with timber raised beds.

The New Yorker this ain't, but we do have a caption contest

What better way to start 2009 than with a caption competition?

What is the slug saying to the snail, or vice versa, in the pic below?* Keep it clean, or at least legal, please. Writer of the best (as judged by me) caption posted in the next seven days gets whatever flotsam and jetsam is lying around my desk at work right now - probably a book on giant marrows, or somesuch.

UPDATE: I've decided the winner has to be Emma of the Alternative Kitchen Garden podcast. Some garden books will be winging their way to her.

*Footnote on the picture: this was taken on the lawn at my old place not long before we scarpered. Just shows how skilled I am at lawncare - and indeed pest control, as there's a lot more slime in this shot than blades of grass.

The Alwych: the garden writer's notebook of choice?

My sister always has a laugh at my expense at my obsesssion with notebooks, which dates back to childhood. But now - ha! - notebooks are deeply cool, and fellow notebook obsessives blog about the best pads and pens they've tried.

I am never short of notebooks for different purposes, but a notebook for taking along on garden visits has been a bit of a dilemma over the years. I've rather fallen out of love with Moleskine after my address book fell apart after light use - no good for something that needs to be toted around in all weathers, and probably dropped in the mud. And I have a lovely purple leather Aspinall notebook for my desk, but it is too chunky for the pocket, and looks rather like a teenager's confessional secret diary when carried under the arm.

So my heart leapt when I read an old Christopher Lloyd column that recommended the Alwych notebook (A38/90 feint) with its all-weather cover. Perhaps I am way behind the curve and all the cool gardening journalists already use these, but I'd never heard of this brand before.

Anyone else got a suggestion before I splash the cash on an Alwych?

Composting, credit-crunch style

The Garden Monkey recently pointed the finger at me for having more money than sense for including a bronze hherb sickle costing £55 in Weekend's Christmas gift guide.

No offence taken, of course: I've got a well-documented love of Implementations' bronze tools. I agree it's a big outlay for a little tool, it carries a lifetime guarantee, and should last a lifetime too. And who wants top open something desperately practical on December 25? It just reminds one of jobs yet to be done ("a Karcher pressure washer? Thanks so much, I'll go and rinse down the decking right now!")

Most of my tools have been much-treasured gifts, and I intend to be using them into retirement: my Felco secateurs from my sister, various trowels and a spade from my partner, and rakes and a huge pickaxe secondhand from my dad, which I haven't had cause to use but am eyeing up a concrete path in my garden that needs breaking up. I'd much rather buy one pricey but very well constructed tool than a succession of cheapo ones. It is easy to spend a lot of money on our gardens and even "being green", though.

For instance I often encourage people to buy worm composters but I always balk when it comes to the price: most models cost at least £80 and up, which is a lot of cash for a glorified dustbin, some coir bedding and a few accessories. A few councils now offer deals on wormeries, as they do on compost bins, so that's worth looking into: the Wrap site can help. And of course you can make a wormery out of a set of drawers, as Alys Fowler does in her excellent Thrifty Gardening book, and just buy in the worms. But for most of us don't want to "make it at home with a small aubergine".

A Bokashi bucket is a chunky investment too: I want to try it but can't quite bring myself to spend the requisite £70 or so (although Tesco do a good deal on two buckets for £42 I just noticed), not to mention the continuing cost of the bran containing "effective microorganisms" that ferments the food. But I do need to find some way of speeding up the decomposition process.

This is something I have been thinking about of late because, despite my slow progress on the garden front, the one thing I have managed to keep up with is composting. When I moved house in August it was from an area with a food waste collection to one without, and I cringe every time I have to put some meat scraps or some other non-compostible foodstuff in the waste bin. And the compost heap is bursting full and I am putting in far too much citrus, which turns the heap too acidic.

The wormery is going strong: I've moved it into the garage for the winter. Worms, like us, dislike being too Thecold and tend to go on strike, so this will help to keep them moving, although they won't be able to handle as much food as in the summer. I'm also hoping to secure an old woollen blanket at the local junk shop to wrap around it and increase the insulation while still letting in air, which will help too. I need to empty out the bottom tray but it's a messy job that can't really be done in the dark - which seems to be half the day at the moment.

So what to do? Thankfully my perspicacious colleague the lovely Lia Leendertz reminded me of the totally free and easy solution to my kitchen waste overload: trench composting, which I used to do a lot of at the allotment in wintertime when heaps tend to get overfull (yes I do miss it, and walk past the little plots down my road with great envy). You can trench compost any bare area of soil, but it's most useful under beans and squash. Full instructions here if you're not acquainted with its charms. The other solution to the citrus issue - and a great one for all anyone feeling the credit crunch - is compost heap jelly.

Lav break loser: Horticultural shortlisted for GMG blog award

Without wishing to turn my life – and indeed this blog - into a poor, unfunny approximation of Seinfeld, I have to share what happened at the Garden Media Guild awards last week.

Now, I’d entered this blog for the digital media award, and I am not quite so sieve-headed as to have forgotten that fact. But the GMG had cunningly divided the award into two categories: one for websites and one for blogs, unbeknownst to me or the person who printed the programme. So once I saw I hadn’t won, I nipped out to the lav, only to come back and see James Alexander-Sinclair onstage receiving his (much-deserved) award for best blog.

“You were shortlisted!”, my fellow diners at the Marshalls table informed me. So my comfort break denied me the chance to witness my micromoment in the spotlight. No one’s been bold enough to tell me but I think the judges said something about Horticultural needing to be updated, which is a fair point. But anyway, I was delighted to be “mentioned in dispatches”. Meantime I managed to miss most of the people I wanted to chat to and didn’t feel up to quaffing any of the wine on offer. What a poor imitation of a hack I am.

The slow gardening movement

I can't remember who it was I spoke to (by which I probably mean "had an email exchange with") recently about "slow gardening"  - maybe it was fellow blogger Allan Shepherd - but it's something I am dwelling on at the moment.

Since moving into the new house in late August, I have managed to plant up a few containers, repot a Japanese maple, plant about half my spring bulbs, fill a compost bin and pick a lot of plums and pears. Oh, and apply grease bands. And keep my wormery happy. And sow some salads, foxgloves and herbs.

Wow, it sounds like a lot more than it looks when I write it all down, but when I look outside all I can see are the numerous tasks that I can't get around to yet - either lack of time to plan (replacing decking, getting garden office rebuilt) or time to get stuck into big jobs (ripping out garden path and increasing size of borders) or just a lack of five minutes to spae (removing mummified fruit from plum tree, collecting leaves for leaf mould) are to blame. (Not to mention the piffling matter of money for such serious hard landscaping ...)

So I have to remember that gardening is meant to be about enjoying the outdoors, not ticking a list of jobs to be completed and getting stressed when I don't meet my expectations. And that, like the bulk of people who read this blog and the gardens features in Weekend, which I edit, are in the same boat: not so much Ground Force as Ground to a Complete Stop at this time of year.

I am trying to stop mentally beating myslf up that my garden won't win a Chelsea medal for the forseeable future and start setting myself more realistic targets. This month's target is to get the rest of my bulbs planted,  and put a couple of thyme plants alongside the Erigeron karvinskianus in the front garden. December targets (yes, I do plan ahead!) are putting a new tap on the wormery and sorting out a leaking water butt. Yes, I do love to live the high life ...

Coke, flames and big fat toads

In her Thrifty Gardener book, Alys Fowler recommends using Coca-Cola for killing off weeds in pavement cracks. Now, I have a particularly evil dandelion nestled in a crack outside my front door, so I bought some cola and applied it liberally.

Nothing. Nada. Dandelion thriving, growing even.

Damn you, Fowler!

Now here's the question - is it something specifically in Coke that kills weeds as opposed to the cheapo 39p Tesco own brand bottle I bought? Or is it one of those old wives tales that persists despite being useless, like knotting daffodil leaves after flowering? What about Diet Coke? My colleague Lia Leendertz tells me Coke is also supposed to remove limescale from toilets too but that didn't work for her either - just made the bowl brown.

Maybe it's all part of some cunning marketing ploy by Coke PR people looking to expand their market into new terrain, ie people with weed and/or limescale issues.

Anyway, I now have half a bottle of flat cheap cola sitting in my porch and I am going to be getting out my weed wand for a bit of late night flame throwing. This method definitely does work, although with something as pernicious as dandelions you need to keep at it for several weeks in a row. At least it puts the fear of god into any local ne'er-do-wells who happen to wander past after dark and see me laughing maniacally while prancing around crispy dandelion leaves and cackling "die, you bastards, die!"

Speaking of pernicious weeds, there are plans afoot to release a new biological control to deal with Japanese knotweed. This stuff is evil incarnate so I can see the attraction, but I'd urge caution: remember Toadzilla, folks...