Own Grown Gardening

It is mid-March here in Devon, England, and my two little honeyberry ( Lonicera caerulea ) bushes are just coming into bloom, the perfect time to give them a mention.    They are known for producing some of the earliest fruit of the season. I harvested my first berries from the young bushes last year, just a tiny handful. Judging from the number of flowers both bushes have this year, I'm looking forward to a much bigger bounty. I own two bushes of different varieties. One of them is the variety 'kamtschatica duet' while the other is an unknown variety. They each have distinctively different leaf shapes and growth habits though. Duet has much rounder leaves and slighly sturdier stems.  When buying them, I searched and searched for two different varieties to maximise cross-pollination between the two. Like so many plants, they produce much better harvests when self-pollination is avoided. I should mention, the handful of purple fruit last year were delicious just straight off

A couple years ago, I wanted to give away seedlings without breaking the bank giving away their pots too. I searched online for a cheap container solution, and thought I'd struck gold finding biodegradable non-woven grow bags. You can buy loads of these for next-to-nothing on eBay. They claim to be biodegradable, so healthy for the environment. Excellent, or so I thought. Sigh... They are anything but... I decided to do a bit of an experiment with them the same way this guy did on YouTube. I filled them with potting soil, and planted some cherry tomato seeds in them. The seedlings germinated nicely. When their roots began growing through the bottoms of the bags, I thought this is great. I planted them directly into their final 30 litre pots for the greenhouse conveniently leaving them in the grow bags. No need to risk sending the seedlings into shock through transplanting. I assumed the biodegradable bags would simply decompose amongst the roots as the plants grew. This assumption

I'm thinking, why not carry on the same general theme from my last post and continue discussing wonderous mulch. I've got to be honest, when I'm gardening, the mantra that plays through my head on repeat is, "Protect the Soil! Protect the Soil!" This year, to achieve this, I'm experimenting with a new living mulch, bird's-foot trefoil ( Lotus corniculatus ). I already have little seedlings coming up between my broad beans. They are growing nicely under a glass garden cloche, which is also something I'm trying for the first time this year. I'm very impressed so far. Considering we are only just into March, look how well both the beans and trefoil are doing. It'll be interesting to see how they progress. Why did I choose bird's-foot trefoil? There are several reasons. Like clover, trefoils are nitrogen fixers . By the way, broad beans fix nitrogen too, so this little patch of ground will be lushiously fertile after this crop. Additionally, b