Stephanie's Garden Blog

For years, the art of making compost has been shrouded in mystery. Gardeners would regularly creep down to their heap in a neglected and forgotten corner of the garden, armed with old plant material, newspapers and other seemingly useless and unwanted items before the big day, months later, when they would emerge with a steaming wheelbarrow full of wonderful compost.

Despite the harvest and growing season being still in full swing, it is time to turn our thoughts to next year's crops so this week in the Kitchen Garden we will be ordering our seed garlic and autumn planting onion sets.

This week in the Kitchen Garden, we will be digging up our main crop potatoes. We would not normally expect to be doing this for at least another month, but our crop has been struck by blight following the wet summer. It certainly wasn't a surprise that our plants were attacked by blight. With the amount of rainfall we have had, it was something that we were fully expecting.

It's been mixed fortunes over the last few weeks in the Harrod Horticultural HQ Garden, luckily the successes outweigh the failures!

The Ultimate Guide to Wildlife Gardening - a guest blog from Green Gardens about the benefits of attracting wildlife to your garden and advice on planning a wildlife friendly garden

One of Capability Brown's great skills was using structures and buildings to enhance vistas, something which is seen in many of his designs and has been continued in gardens to this day. When I am looking at working on a clients garden, there will no doubt be some sort of structure included and whilst that may be a building such as a shed or summerhouse, it can also be a beautiful pergola or arch for climbing roses and clematis or just attractive supports for growing plants in beds and borders.

The main point behind growing your own vegetables is how much better they taste fresh from the garden. The only failsafe way to guarantee harvesting vegetables at the optimal time is to taste test. However, there are some guidelines for judging when vegetables are ripe and ready for harvest. Keep in mind that great flavour isn?t always a simple matter of size or colour.

Every gardener has been there, after spending countless hours tending, watering, feeding your plants a pest invades or some extreme weather damages your plants and wipes out all your hard work...

A mini heatwave hit the Kitchen Garden this week so the focus has been on trying to keep the plants happy - especially the leafy crops which can succumb to the heat!