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: plants

Plants are my great love, they are like children to me. I sometimes indulge in sharing a bit more details about this plant or the other.

  • Peach leaf curl (Taphrina deformans)

    Another plant species that is commonly known to suffer from red, curled up leaves in the spring is peach. The curling up is caused by a fungus, Taphrina deformans. The fungus, which favours cool and wet weather, causes leaves to pucker; the blisters are often red and rather showy, just before the fungus starts producing…

  • Pear pests and diseases

    One of the joys of horticulture is the continuous learning process you go through while caring for and observing your plants through the seasons, year after year. One of the frustrations is that we seem to know rather less than we think we do about plants and the environment: it is sometimes difficult to be…

  • Blooming weeds!

    It is over a year since my last post and l’Orto di Casa Cecconi has a new home, in the Netherlands. A rather beautiful, large patch of land adjacent to a nature reserve and lake, it came with a big shed, more of a house really… The space is divided in two parts: a mature,…

  • Putting the culture back into horticulture

    As the coursework for my RHS Special Option Certificate in Fruit and Vegetable Cultivation included a dissertation, I took the opportunity to explore a topic that I had at heart: Breeding for biodiversity and sustainability with the help of the public.The case of Oxalis tuberosa. For the last year in fact I have been supporting the…

  • Plum days

    I have not written for a while, busy as I was with coursework deadlines, but in the last two days I have spent some time with plum trees, which I think is worth sharing. Yesterday I helped the Plant Health and Seeds Inspectorate (PHSI) pick leaves from the orchard to be tested for plum pox…

  • Potato day(s)

    With April I have started spending more time in the veg garden, up to 2 days a week, which is something I have worked to achieve, as I expect that veg growing will be a relevant part of my future involvement in horticulture. One of the first crops that I’ve been involved with has been…

  • The mint collection

    It was the end of February when I helped in the herb garden to remove the mint from its bed for propagation purposes. I was struck at the time that you could count be so many different scents of mint, but there was not much left in the pots that we removed from the ground…

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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