Stephanie's Garden Blog

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!

One of our team is a keen gardener and we love seeing the updates from the garden - obviously a few Harrod Horticultural products dotted about the garden too!

With it set to be the hottest few days of the year so far, make sure you are doing all you can to look after your plants as they will be feeling the heat too!

Powdery Mildew has struck our courgettes in the Harrod Horticultural HQ garden...

Our blackcurrants are looking black, fat and juicy and about ready for picking. I'll choose a nice sunny morning to head off into the fruit cage armed with a trug and some snips to harvest them before heading back into the kitchen to make some jam.

Which Garden Netting do you need? Some advice on the best netting to protect your plants...

Our Top Ten Gardening Tools - like any other hobby with gardening there are endless tools and equipment you can buy if you have the money to invest however we have compiled our list of our ten favourite tools

This week in the Kitchen Garden, we will be starting to harvest our early potatoes. These were planted way back at the end of March. They have flowered and their haulms are now turning brown. There is nothing quite as good as the taste of freshly dug new potatoes - a delicious meal just by themselves.

Kept my eye on the cherries this year, again and decided to leave the sleeves off till late June as the weather has been exceptionally wet. Noticed a lot of Ant activity on the tree - bad news as they do farm cherry black fly.

Last week the laptop took priority as other work became really busy, distracting me from the garden. As we all know, at this time of year, when you are called away from your garden for even a couple of days, nature goes mad. Crops have grown beyond recognition and are looking a little wild.