Growing Fruit & Veg

As you may have gathered, I'm sort of semi-retired; have been for around two years. Retirement leaves you with a certain amount of time on your hands. As my wife still works, my time is to a certain extent taken up with housework. I do the washing up, vacuuming, ironing and so on although I draw the line at cooking, basically because you probably wouldn't want to eat anything I've cooked, which is ironic considering the topic. Other than that, when the weather is nice, my time is spent in the garden. I've spent a lot of time in the garden over the last two years and it's certainly looking better for it. The rear garden faces just east of south and so ...  Read the complete review

Growing your own fruit and veg can be a really good idea, especially in the current economic climate; where every penny counts. Different plants do well in different places, so it helps to know what you can and cannot grow, which is why this year I am trying loads of different things. I've never really been one for gardening, but with the birth of my lovely boys I decided to give it a go, as I wanted to know my boys were getting the best. I decided to start quite big and throw myself in at the deep end, so my veg patch is huge! This year I have the following growing:- Courgettes - 2 plants hopefully should be enough for my little ...  Read the complete review

In these times when money is tight and the price of food keeps going up, what better way to get some healthly fruit and veg than to grow your own? Ok - so the "start up" costs may add up, for example I bought a greenhouse at the cost of £50, and some pots/troughs/dirt, but now once I have paid out for these the only thing I need to buy is each year is seeds (and that's assuming that I've used up all the ones from last year). You can of course minimise costs by using sites such as Freecycle and Ebay for pots, seeds etc, and you can grow stuff in almost anything such as buckets, old biscuit tubs, and its even been suggested to grow potatoes in a stack of old car ...  Read the complete review

I have never had green fingers and tend to drive most of my houseplants to an early death so I don't really know why I decided to start a vegetable patch in the back garden.... I had been growing things like salad leaves and tomatoes in pots before but that was relatively easy - buy the plant, put it in a bigger pot, water it, take off fruit to eat. I think my main reason for starting it was the challenge of what I might achieve and I had no real expectations. My plan was to have a go at everything (within reason - I only picked plants we liked eating) from seed and see how things went. That way next year I could plan better and decide what was ...  Read the complete review

I am happy to say that, since my eldest son and his family moved into a house with a very big garden, they have all gone gardening mad and have the most fantastic vegetable garden and fruit trees. The garden was very rough and mostly laid to lawn when they first moved in, and it was also on a slope. My son has since altered the slope so that he has three levels; the one nearest the house and the one at the very bottom end are both flat, the middle one still has a slope but he has compensated for that by making three raised vegetable beds which he has staggered - they look very effective and are extremely productive. He gardens completely organically ...  Read the complete review