 Friday, September 19, 2008 by Jeremy Dore (31 comments)
Over the past two months we have been conducting a survey of the best tomato varieties that gardeners using GrowVeg.com would recommend to others. It can be tricky choosing which tomatoes to grow since most seed catalogues contain a wider variety of them than any other fruit or vegetable. It would be quite possible to spend a lifetime working through each kind to find the best and still not have tried them all. So what do real gardeners like you and I recommend as the top varieties? Read on to find out... Read more...
Categories: vegetable tomato variety |
Friday, September 12, 2008 by Jeremy Dore (4 comments)
Here at GrowVeg.com we have recently had several enquiries from people just taking on a new vegetable garden or allotment. For many of them the big question on their mind is ‘What can I sow now to still get a harvest?’ As days get shorter towards the end of the growing season many plants respond by maturing the crop and then dying down. There are only a few that will actively start growing as the nights get colder so I thought I would round up a list of the best contenders. Read more...
Categories: gardening fall autumn salad |
Friday, September 05, 2008 by Jeremy Dore (4 comments)
There are certain accepted facts in life: prices go up, people are living longer and organic food is more expensive than non-organic. Right? Well, incredible as it may sound, the Soil Association has this week published a study that challenges the last of these assumptions. According to research done by farm business consultants Andersons, the price of oil is going to dramatically change the profitability of farming systems. Read more...
Categories: organic food |
Friday, August 29, 2008 by Jeremy Dore (29 comments)
How to improve the fertility of your soil is a question that all good gardeners take seriously. One of the most under-used methods of soil improvement is the use of green manures (called ‘fall cover crops’ in America), plants grown specifically to be dug back into the soil to improve it. In principle this sounds pretty easy – just sprinkle some seed on the ground after the main crop has been harvested and then dig the plants in after a few weeks. But in practice there’s a lot more to it, so I thought I would do a little experimenting to find the perfect green manure. Read more...
Categories: gardening organic green manure soil |
Friday, August 22, 2008 by Jeremy Dore (4 comments)
I love this time of year when the harvest is rolling in, when you can wander round the garden and pick enough to make up a meal from the ingredients you have in your hand. But it also gets me reflecting on the choices I made when planning this year’s garden. Could I have squeezed in more peas? What made the peppers do so well? Did I make the right choices about what to grow in the space I have? Read more...
Categories: gardening vegetables harvest planning |
Friday, August 15, 2008 by Jeremy Dore (6 comments)
This week has been designated ‘National Allotments Week’ here in the UK and it’s also the 100th year since the 1908 ‘Small Holdings and Allotment Act’ was passed in parliament, requiring local government to provide allotments for people where there was demand. (For those readers who live elsewhere in the world, allotments are areas of land owned by the local government or parish in the UK and rented out cheaply as small plots for growing fruit and vegetables.) In recent years there has been a huge resurgence of interest in allotments and we’ve seen lots of people planning them using GrowVeg.com. The motivation for people taking up an allotment may be different from the beginning of the last century but I believe that the upsurge in interest is here to stay as more and more people want to grow their own food again. Read more...
Categories: gardening allotments |
Friday, August 08, 2008 by Jeremy Dore (0 comments)
I am a great fan of Italian cooking. I love the varied tastes, healthy ingredients and simplicity of many traditional recipes from the country. Italians are passionate about food demanding high-quality fresh produce together with a strong tradition of home-growing supplemented by a daily trip to the local market. Browsing through a good Italian cook book is a mouth-watering experience but before sampling them there is one prerequisite: fresh ingredients. Trying to cook these simple recipes with second rate vegetables or canned produce just doesn’t work. So I really love the summer when I can harvest sufficient fresh ingredients to indulge in cooking the Italian way. Read more...
Categories: cooking vegetables harvest summer |
Friday, August 01, 2008 by Jeremy Dore (10 comments)
If there’s one fruit that I always think I could do better at, it’s strawberries. The rewards of beautiful freshly picked strawberries are hard to beat, yet those rewards come at the price of some quite specialist care – different from almost any other fruit or vegetable. Last week I couldn’t resist purchasing a beautiful punnet of organic strawberries from our local supermarket. But what looked so mouth-watering turned out to be disappointing, bland-flavoured fruit over half of which were mushy, when they should be at their very best in mid-summer. So I have decided it’s time to give strawberries the attention they really deserve and plan ahead for next year... Read more...
Categories: gardening strawberries propagation |
Friday, July 25, 2008 by Jeremy Dore (5 comments)
Tomatoes have to be one of the most popular vegetables to grow – and rightly so. Not only do they produce a wonderfully bountiful harvest of ‘fruit’ from each plant but they also come in so many great varieties – all with their own distinctive taste, shape and even colour. Compared with freshly-picked tomatoes from your own garden, supermarket ones are either picked green and ripened with ethylene gas or sold for a high premium as ‘vine-ripened’ when they were still picked days ago. Either way, fresh tomatoes taste far superior and growing your own is very rewarding. But how do you ensure that you get the best crop from your tomato plants? A bit of judicious pruning can make all the difference... Read more...
Categories: vegetable gardening tomato |
Friday, July 18, 2008 by Jeremy Dore (8 comments)
It’s around this time of year that gardeners start to look forward to a bumper crop of potatoes but for those who have grown them before there is always the worry that the harvest will be spoiled by blight. Probably the most common plant disease, blight can wreck whole crops in a matter of a few weeks, as it did so devastatingly during the Irish potato famine in the 1840s where 1 million people died and a further 1 million emigrated. Although it is commonly associated with potatoes, blight also affects some other members of the solanaceae family of plants, the most common of which is tomatoes. So what causes it and what are the best ways to tackle it? Read more...
Categories: gardening disease potato tomato |