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

Tag: pests

  • A day in the veg garden

    Spring is coming so it looks like I might be spending more time in the veg garden. Today we did some clearing of spent crops (chicory and chard), covering beds so the soil warms up and new crop can be grown earlier and tidying up leeks. Chicory ‘Charlotte’ The bed after clearing The reason for…

  • Big buds and short stumps

    Cecidophyopsis ribis, also know as big bud mite, sapsucker. A tiny (at < 1 mm) but nasty one, as it helps transmit what is known as reversion disease, a viral infection. Fascinating life forms, viruses: DNA/RNA sequences coated in protein, that are dormant at maturity and so can survive for hundred of years only to…

  • The forage garden

    Behind the Model Fruit Garden and on one’s way to the orchard, there’s an area that’s left wilder, with some tall trees and some brash, whose redevelopment has been undergoing for the last few years into a forage garden. Some edibles I find rather intriguing already grow in there: Arbutus unedo, Hyppophae rhamnoides, Lonicera caerulea,…

  • Crop of the week: grapes

    As part of our coursework our teams ask us trainees to study specific crops in more details, so that we learn: some general information about the plant and how it is grown; available and recommended cultivars, including any with an Award of Garden Merit (AGM); common pest and diseases and how to deal with them. As the…

  • Trained apples and pears

    This has been an unusual summer, dry and warm and apples and pears have not started growing until very recently, that is why summer pruning had not been done before in the fruit garden. But as it’s now October, and the new shoots have stiffened at their tips (previously sappy growth), it was finally time to…

  • Pruning cordons

    Pink currants (Ribes rubrum cultivars) Soft fruit shrubs tend put up a lot of growth over the summer, and the last of summer pruning needed doing to keep the trained forms in check and tidy, so I was asked to start working on currants and gooseberries, cutting new growth back to 1-3 buds. Currants before…

  • Grape stars

    When my team leader gave us trainees an introduction to the Fruit Department, he showed us some dessert grapes grown in a small greenhouse by the orchard, remarking that they were high maintenance, requiring: an intensive regime of pruning and trimming, fruit thinning and stripping of the bark from the stems to expose pests before…

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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