Sally Morgan and Kim Stoddart show you how to be a climate change savvy gardener
Kim Stoddart gets up and close and personal with this important enabler of veg patch life and explains how to keep it fertile and simply fantastic all year round… It may not look very glamorous but this earthy substance is the key to the success of your food growing efforts. Treat it well and make…
Its that time of year when we are all planning what to grow on our plots. Kim Stoddart outlines her favourite produce for effective buddy planting on the veg patch… To be perfectly honest with you, my gardens are one large mix and match, biodiverse affair. What started with experimentation into companion planting many years…
Kim Stoddart explains why not meticulously tidying away every crop on your veg patch at the end of the season will reap you multiple marvellous rewards…. Traditional advice dictates that once your crop is ready, or your harvest spent, every remaining plant should be plucked immediately from the ground. It’s all part of this mindset…
Kim Stoddart explains how to save some of your own seed both now and thinking ahead for the following year Whilst I am as keen a peruser of gardening seed catalogues as the next person, there is something so very satisfying about home seed saving that money simply cannot buy. The process of sowing a…
Kim explains how getting up close and personal with nature has greatly helped her ten-year-old autistic son, Arthur get close and personal with nature If someone had said to me ten years ago that autism and the therapeutic benefits of gardening will become your life, I wouldn’t have believed them. Yes, I enjoyed growing some…
Kim Stoddart looks at some of the easiest and most rewarding ways to boost your eco-gardener credentials, whilst having fun in the process… I gardened entirely for free a few years back for my writing in the Guardian. What started out as a ‘can I really do this?’ experiment turned into one of the most…
Kim outlines some additional ingredients for the best ever all-in-one natural soil improver for the veg patch… Your soil is the key ingredient in the success of your resilient produce growing efforts so it’s essential to treat it well. Building fertility can be done in a number of ways, and once you have this there…
Kim explains how to help counter the hungry gap by expanding your salad horizons with leaves from other plants currently growing. If you looked at the average bag of unexciting supermarket salad mix, you’d be forgiven for assuming that all leaves had to look like this. Yet, you’re really missing a trick if that’s how…
How you can be in good company with a more free-spirited approach to planting on your plot… Most gardening books will tell you about the importance of crop rotation ‘blah, blah, brassicas after legumes”… “waffle, waffle, potatoes first…” It’s a planting system that is undoubtedly sensible if a) you’re a market gardener and will be growing…