Stephanie's Garden Blog

Growing Organic Seed Potatoes Planting organic seed potatoes and harvesting armfuls of delicious fresh tubers is often the route into gardening and home vegetable growing in particular for many novice gardeners – and although we’ve got a bit more experience than that, we still enjoy the anticipation of digging up a real bumper yield of spuds!

Often regarded as the ornamental flower garden, kitchen garden or vegetable patch nerve centre, the greenhouse can easily get cluttered, disorganised and generally become a mess without the provision of greenhouse staging – and that kind of chaos is bad news for gardeners but good news for pests!

You can't over-estimate what a major garden problem slugs are and for years, gardeners have tried all sorts of tricks, traps and techniques to protect their plants from these premier league pests and now, in the shape of Nemaslug Slug Killer, they may have found the answer.

Hot on the heels of our announcement that pest control guru Julian Ives has joined the Harrod Horticultural team is the publication of a little book which is sure to get plenty of use in the kitchen garden, down at the allotment and in the vegetable patch this season – our Little Book of Pests.

One of the challenges of kitchen garden, allotment and vegetable plot growing is to overcome the army of garden pests with designs on your crops.

The popularity of growing your own vegetables is soaring, with waiting lists as long as your arm for allotments and community groups establishing new vegetable plots asnd gardens all over the country.

Obtaining heirloom vegetable seed varieties is much easier now thanks to Garden Organic's Heritage Seed Library and if you're really into growing veg and have an interest in preserving the seed types of yesteryear, you'll jump at the chance of being a Seed Guardian!

It seems that the biggest pest in the garden at this time of year are ants; that's if the letters, e-mails and phone calls pouring into Harrod Horticultural HQ are an accurate indicator! Martin Fiddes finds out more...

It's the horticultural event of the year - and next week sees the gates of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea swing open once again as the 87th RHS Chelsea Flower Show takes place. Martin Fiddes sets the scene...