Orto di Casa Cecconi

My first allotment, and then one thing leading to another…

L’orto di Casa Cecconi Plants Recipes Me & Kew One Year at Wisley

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  • What can you do with lemon balm? And other plants

    There are plants that I introduced once on the plot and now grow largely unasked. Their weedy behaviour means they multiply and tend happily to survive slug attack. They are usually loved by pollinators. It’s a pity to weed them out, given their success, so I have decided to find a use for them. I…

  • Totally undeserved yet humbly accepted Liebster Blog Award

    My lovely friend Carl Legge, truly generous as he is, did think about my ailing blog when making nominations for the Liebster Blog Award, in an attempt to encourage me to write more. Thank you Carl, I am honoured by the nomination and humbled – would love to blog more, even though at the moment…

  • Caring for the soil – part 1: crop rotation, companion planting and intercropping

    As you know, I have tried do grow organically over these four years or so. I have always believed that working with nature makes more sense than working against it: fire-fighting against pests with chemicals, for example, instead of working in a balanced ecosystem with pests and predators even themselves out – that at least…

  • Long live the chilli plants

    I am not sure what has been wrong with my technique of growing chillies in the last two years. I suspect they might have taken objection to my reluctance feeding them. Anyway, come September they were, and are  – this year even worse – just about to flower for the first time if at all.…

  • Another year of elderberries

    I have not written for a while: gardening is repetitive, so I sort of ran out of topics, and I am trying to figure out how to make my pages interesting in the little time I have. Also, I am not happy with pictures from my new camera, so my old blog format does not…

  • Dry spring, wet summer

    I have started clearing the wilderness that both my plot and hubby’s had become, the endless rainshowers having not so much made the soil muddy as workable again -especially the new bit, which was compacted and very much like concrete under the spade. I will take sone pics over the weekend, as it is starting…

  • Pigeons-ortocecconi 2-2

    This year I have lost my gooseberries to pigeons once again. It happened in the first year when I did not know what that bush was. Then I netted it the second and third years, and had bumper crops. This year, despite the netting, they were gone and I was left with only 2 punnets,…

About Me

M.Paola M.Paola, that’s me

I got my first allotment in the UK in 2007 and started gI got my first allotment in the UK in 2007 and started growing my own food. Learning as I went along was not enough, so I studied horticulture. Faced with the horticultural warfare, I became a conscientious objector: I use no chemicals and support organic principles and regulations.

Brexit gave me a new life in the Netherlands, three new plots by a nature reserve and an MSc in sustainable food systems.

I write in my personal capacity and, as a language perfectionist and a non native speaker, I keep reviewing my entries’ text for clarity.

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