Tasks for May

Get the kids out in the garden for National Children’s Gardening Week next week and plant the seed of a lifelong love of the great outdoors! The initiative, now in its fourth year, is backed by the Greenfingers Charity and National Garden Gift Voucher and Gift Card Schemes. It’s an annual festival of fun for everyone, whether you garden at a [...]

It’s time to swing into action: May is when the show really starts to get on the road. Everything seems to grow at once as tulips sing from their beds of wallflowers, peonies unfurl their petals and the earliest broad beans plump up nicely. It’s a good time of year to be a gardener – so here are the [...]

Keep ripening strawberries clean with a thick layer of straw tucked under the leaves just as plants begin flowering. The straw provides a soft layer for developing fruits to sit on, keeping them off the damp ground and preventing them from rotting or getting splashed by mud. It also acts like an insulation layer, holding warmth in the upper layer [...]

Oriental poppies are the flamenco dancers in the garden lineup: huge, colourful and very, very glamorous. But despite their flamboyant good looks, they are among the easiest of plants to grow, rewarding you with a superb, eye-catching display every summer for years. Poppies like free-draining soil and a sunny spot, so if you garden on heavy clay add plenty of [...]

Watch out for the first signs of blackspot on roses as this irritating fungal disease begins to show up about now. The first thing you’ll notice are purple-black blotches on the foliage of roses, eventually spreading to join together and turn the whole leaf black. Infected leaves soon yellow and fall, so the rose may well be seriously weakened, especially [...]