Garden Advice

Gardeners are a patient group. After sowing seeds, you need to wait and let Mother Nature take over. Constantly tapping your toes, staring longingly at those seed trays for signs of life waiting for seed germination. For some annuals, it’s relatively fast, maybe a week, yet for other herbaceous beauties, they make you wait even […]

I’m the kind of chap who likes to think of myself as part of the solution, not the problem, which is why I took to Garden Without Plastic for an entire year alongside its champion, garden writer Sally Nex. Sally has been taking to the press columns, and I shall be taking to both my […]

I get a lot of emails and comments from new gardeners who really want to garden but have no clue where to start. They don’t know what they’re doing and panic that they will mess it up! This is known as the fear of failure in gardening. So, I thought it was about time we […]

When I started this gardening blog, I was on a simple mission: to help inspire, educate and encourage all gardeners to succeed in their green spaces. One of the most exciting groups of gardeners I help is beginners or new gardeners. However, there are several common mistakes that all new gardeners make unless they have […]

As small garden trees and fruit trees grow each year, the risk of lower branches becoming too heavy to support the fruit is a real concern. If you leave these lower branches to continue to grow and bear fruit, the likelihood is they will start to droop to the flower and could tear themselves off […]

Now that your seeds have germinated, you may suddenly struggle to work out what to do next. Well, the next stage in growing your own plants is known in the gardening world as ‘pricking out‘, where we take seedlings and separate them into their own pots. If we don’t prick them out, they get congested, […]

Pruning is one of the key parts of creating and maintaining a gorgeous garden. However, many gardeners avoid pruning due to a lack of confidence or a lack of understanding of how to prune. This guide explains why you need to prune in the garden and how to prune plants perfectly! With a sharp pair […]

June is the month in the garden where nearly everything is looking its best. Roses should now be in full bloom (especially if you’ve followed my rose pruning guide in the winter), ornamental grasses will be swaying in the breeze and your herbaceous perennials will all be bursting into flower. It’s typically a month where […]

I’m a glass half full kinda guy. I try to refuse, where possible, to let myself end up in negative cycles. The media, in particular, like to theme January as the month of personal debasement. To try and amplify the parts of your life you’re not happy with. So much so there’s now a Blue […]

We seem to have a bit of an issue with pruning as gardeners. I remember when I first started gardening, the thought of cutting off parts of the plants I’d spent ages nurturing felt horrific. I let them grow however and wherever they wanted. Just grateful they were growing. However, this laissez-faire approach always ends […]