Garden Blog

Spring will not be denied. It is everywhere in the garden. The equinox was last Saturday, when night and day are equal, in the crossover as the days stretch out to summertime. This weekend we play the usual game with the clocks, and bring forward dawn by an hour so there’s an extra hour of light in the evening. We …

We don’t use herbicides or pesticides in the community garden. Diseased plants, we prune if possible and suffer a few losses. Artificial chemicals kill off more than the pests that they target, and our aim is to encourage wildlife, not destroy it. A class of pesticides frequently in the news is neonicotinoids. Neonics, the family friendly term, are used as …

When I came into the garden yesterday, the wind was blowing a gale. The plastic sheeting covering the half-completed flats next door was thrashing like a loose sail. A number of chairs had blown over, and the triangular cover of our display stand had been ripped off. Four years ago, high winds tore down part of our fence along Sprowston …

Forest Gate Community Garden is planning for when we can open for visitors. This month, volunteers will be tidying the garden, planting, and generally sprucing up for what we hope will be our April opening, as lockdown eases due to the roll out of the vaccine programme. We have all been too cut off these last months, and who can …

I took a photo of miniature daffodils last week but the picture showed flowers that didn’t look like miniatures, with nothing to judge their size by. So I had another go this week; I took a reel of cotton into the Garden and took a photo of the miniatures next to it. That didn’t work either, as the cotton reel …

It’s chilly though the sun is shining. There’s ripples across the pond to the tune of the wind. The surface vegetation has withered though the underwater oxygenators, hornwort and elodea, are green but providing little oxygen. They need more heat than this February sun is giving out. The forecast says we may get it at the weekend. There’s a blue …

It’s icy cold. Last night, the temperature dropped to -5ºC. There’s ice on the pond, and on all our water barrels. A very usual phenomenon when it’s so cold. So usual, we don’t normally think about it, too commonplace. Like why do things fall down instead of up, a silly seeming query which led Isaac Newton to come up with …

Lockdown is a good time for projects. And what better one could there be than working out how to lower our carbon footprint? You could pick one of these: home energy, travel, food, other purchases. Have a go at lowering your energy use for that sector. Go green! Last week I considered milk, and specifically the 2 ½ billion+ plastic …

Daffodils are on their way, budding here and there in the garden. We’ll have quite a few in bloom by mid February, but now there’s just a single flower by our middle stage, next to two hellebores also in bloom. We are creeping out of winter as we come to the end of this long month. Though one mustn’t be …

In the rear of the garden, there’s ivy (Hedera helix) clinging to the fence, between us and the Gateway site. Ivy is adaptable and also grows on the ground, forming dense clumps. It is frequently used as ground cover, though it is rather dull if not interspersed with more colourful plants. We see it everywhere, on the walls of old …