Stephanie's Garden Blog

Some great crafty ideas to get the family involved in the garden, growing your own and helping the birds

September is the ideal month to prune evergreen hedges and get them neat and tidy before the winter. Hedges trimmed now are unlikely to put on any significant growth before the cold weather hits us, so they will stay looking crisp for the months ahead.

There are a number of Do's & Don'ts when it comes to composting - so to make it easier we have created a simple check list along with some common problems.

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

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.