Tag: pest
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Hygiene (Week 14, Wednesday)
Quite a few plants grow in a restricted space in greenhouses, so hygiene is particularly important to prevent and control the spread of pests and diseases. In terms of prevention, clean tools and surfaces are very important. So pots are dipped into a sterilising solution and tools are cleaned with Hortisept, a persistent germicide active…
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Sowing and potting on
Like a good girl, I am weeding, sowing and potting on, as I have decided that if I wanted to meet my target of being self-sufficient in chillies I have to do things by the book and I have put to good use all the little plastic pots that I collected over the years. Also started the…
About Me
M.Paola Andreoni
I got the first allotment in 2007 (in the UK) and started growing my own food for the first time. Learning as I went along was not enough, so I studied some horticulture. I am striving to abide by organic principles. Brexit gave me a new life in the Netherlands, and two new plots by a nature reserve.
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