Arthur’s Gardening Blog

At last the garden is waking up after the gruelling winter weather.  The grass is recovering its colour and the first shoots are coming through.  You need to get ready for the growth that will surely follow.  Think about fitting trellis to walls as climbing frames or use it to divide your garden into ‘rooms’. 

Trellis is really useful in the garden and there are many types of trellis on the market.  You can also buy many shapes and sizes.  We prefer the Elite Lattice Trellis - it is a sturdy trellis made in FSC pressure treated timber for a longer life.  The Elite Lattice Trellis can also be stand alone as a fence or screen - ours is up against a wall.   Click4Garden has a wide choice of trellis - you need to have a look as there is something for every garden and every use in the garden - roses, clemetis, honeysuckle or other climbing plants. What about using trellis as a screen for your compost area, your oil tank or rubbish bins.

It has been a long time since we wrote the click4garden.co.uk blog but the freezing grips of this winter have not allowed for any gardening thoughts and even a little bit of garden tidying up here at the click4garden.co.uk garden was out of the question.  Our time was spent digging snow and gritting pathways.   However, it did look beautiful during the freeze up.  All the standing grasses held on to the frost and were stunning to look at, particularly when the sun shone.  The cobwebs and seed heads swayed gently in the wind and it really was a frozen white wonderland. 

Our big pond here at the click4garden.co.uk offices froze solid and we were able to walk the whole way across - if we had had skates we could have skated and, what with the surrounding white countryside,  it would have looked like one of those oldly worldy Christmas card scenes.   The water comes into the pond off the fields and the water coming out of the pipe froze into an icy waterfall.  The fish were fine - way down below the ice.  However, the poor ducks suffered and although we feed them they decided to go to our neighbours.  The neighbour’s pond is sheltered by trees and a small amount of it remained unfrozen.  We are now trying to entice the ducks back but so far no success! 

The lawn on the click4garden.co.uk garden froze as well - it is a wet lawn at the best of times and now is completely saturated.  We will have to drain it at some point but in the meantime everyone is forbidden from walking over it.  However, that doesn’t prevent the birds and our garden seems to have become a haven for game birds.  We regularly have pheasants and partridge on the walls and strutting around the garden after the hens.  Our hens have started laying!  Only yesterday we found two clutches of eggs; they are tiny white bantam eggs from our trio, plus one, of little brown bantams.  They are completely free range and fly in and out of their house every night;  we do live in fear that the fox will get them but they have very happy lives doing their own thing around the farm, the click4garden.co.uk garden and click4garden.co.uk offices.  

Our snowdrops are out at the click4garden.co.uk offices! We noticed them yesterday - they haven’t opened yet but there they are ….little white spears peeping out of the ground. 

Click4Garden.co.uk has a new range of garden products, garden ideas, metpost, new garden arbours and raised flower beds.  Now is the time to be considering garden edging.  Surf the net and have a look.  Good prices and all home delivered.

Apples - some have already been picked, some will be ready to eat this month.  Pick fruits in their prime, before they fall and bruise, and you should be able to store them for some months.  Keep them in a cool place and be careful not to store any damaged or diseased fruit as, before you know it, the whole lot will turn rotten! If you can’t store the apples for whatever reason then cook cook cook - stewed apple for crumble, apple sauce for your winter roast pork and apple chutney to go with your ham and cheese - bon appetit :)   

Figs - the figs in our garden have ripened over a four or five week period.  We have never had so many! The warm months of August and September must have suited the tree which, frankly is a little out of control and has had to be propped up by a post or two.  This tree seems to have contradicted the rule that restricting growth of a fig tree encourages abundance of fruit! However, we will be following the recommended guidelines: prune hard in the winter and nip out the tips of new shoots when they reach 40cm long and stop sideshoots after two leaves.  As the tree will be slowed up we should (allegedly) see more fruit (this will be interesting).

My beautiful hostas have been attacked by slugs and snails; they are looking very sorry for themselves. But my friend’s are looking amazing…what is his secret to keeping the pesky things away? Well, he tells me that you need to strike early in the growing season - keep the slug and snail control up all the time; don’t rest and particularly keep an eye out when the evenings are warm after some rain.  Anyway, he does resort to chemical slug control but also recommends this new idea that alot of people are talking about.

Apparently if you have your hostas in a pot (and a few of mine are) then you put a copper ring around the pot the pesky little things won’t cross it to get up to the leaves of the hosta!  You can also buy copper tape which you can stick to your pot.  But what happens when the hostas are in the ground? It seems that you can put the copper rings on the soil around the plants and the slugs and snails will not come near!

I am going to give this idea a try but some of my hostas are looking so poor that I am not sure the slugs and snails would be interested!  If any of you have tried this and it works….please send in a comment.

What amazing weather we have had this March.  Our garden is suddenly coming to life.  The daffodils have all come out, the pink magnolia flowers are hanging off the bushes (they are south facing and out of the wind which helps) and our Forsythia is stunning this year.  Forsythias are hardy shrubs which stand near total neglect and fit into large or small gardens.  They are a delight at this time of year when hardly anything is flowering in your garden sp why not plant some up against some trellis in preparation for this time next year?

Trellis is really useful in the garden and there are many types of trellis on the market.  You can also buy many shapes and sizes.  We prefer the Elite Lattice Trellis - it is a sturdy trellis made in FSC pressure treated timber for a longer life.  The Elite Lattice Trellis can also be stand alone as a fence or screen - ours is up against a wall.   Click4Garden has a wide choice of trellis - you need to have a look as there is something for every garden and every use in the garden - roses, clemetis, honeysuckle or other climbing plants.

We have to mow the lawns this weekend - the main lawn has now dried out enough so the lawnmower shouldn’t sink into it!  The first cut always instantly transforms the garden from winter into spring.

 Fingers crossed for good weather - check it out on the click4garden weather page.  Bye !

I read a really good article the other day, in one of the sunday papers, about edging around the garden.  It was called ‘cutting edge’ - good title huh? well, it was all about types of edging you can use around your beds and your paths so that it looks neater and cuts the workload.  Apparently there are used railway sleepers (bet those are heavy!), sawn sleepers, slab sleepers, wooden posts, log edging, log edging board and new railway sleepers.  the pictures of the log edging looked really good and simple to use.  Click4garden has loads of edging stuff on offer and best of all they home deliver in mainland uk.  I’m going to get some garden sleepers and build a raised flower bed for my vegetables.

hi again, remember me?  I am the one with the smallish garden.  Wondered if you would like to know how to quickly build a cold frame?  Use treated timber to  make a box with legs that can be pushed into the ground for stability.  For thelid, use plastic stapled onto a surround.  Fix the lid so it can slide back and forth to let the air in and also so it can be removed to access the inside.  Make sure the lid doesn’t fly away in the wind by adding straps which can be fastened to the sides and hook over the lid.  So, there you go and you can plant and extend your growing season.  Happy gardening.

It has been a long time since we wrote the blog - sorry - the festive season was really busy and there wasn’t any time to get into the garden.  The weather wasn’t exactly conducive to any form of gardening, even a little bit of tidying up was out of the question.  However, it did look beautiful during the freeze up.  All the standing grasses held on to the frost and were stunning to look at, particularly when the sun shone.  The cobwebs and seed heads swayed gently in the wind and it really was a frozen white wonderland. 

Our big pond froze solid and we were able to walk the whole way across - if we had had skates we could have skated and, what with the surrounding white countryside,  it would have looked like one of those oldly worldy Christmas card scenes.   The water comes into the pond off the fields and the water coming out of the pipe froze into an icy waterfall.  The fish were fine - way down below the ice.  However, the poor ducks suffered and although we feed them they decided to go to our neighbours.  The neighbour’s pond is sheltered by trees and a small amount of it remained unfrozen.  We are now trying to entice the ducks back but so far no success! 

The lawn froze as well - it is a very wet lawn at the best of times and now, following the thaw, is completely saturated.  We will have to drain it at some point but in the meantime everyone is forbidden from walking over it.  However, that doesn’t prevent the birds and our garden seems to have become a haven for game birds.  We regularly have pheasants and partridge on the walls and strutting around the garden after the hens.  Our dear hens have started laying!  Only yesterday we found two clutches of eggs; they are tiny white bantam eggs from our trio, plus one, of little brown bantams.  They are completely free range and fly in and out of their house every night;  we do live in fear that the fox will get them but they have very happy lives doing their own thing around the farm and garden. 

Our snowdrops are out! We noticed them yesterday - they haven’t opened yet but there they are ….little white spears peeping out of the ground.  More ice last night and no doubt more to come.. can’t complain though, it is better than rain!

Hi there, our blog is taking shape and it is great to see a few people writing to us.  Hasn’t the recent weather been just awful?  Doesn’t everything take just so much longer.  We have a little farm here as well as a lovely garden and keeping the animals watered has been a hard task, every morning we have to crack the water buckets and hope the taps aren’t frozen!  On the up side though, the frost looks so beautiful on the grasses that we have left standing in the garden.  The ponds are frozen but we have taken the precaution of floating something in them to stop them completely freezing over as we don’t want to lose our goldfish and our frogs.  We have a big pond at the bottom of the fields and recently we have been seeing alot of ducks come in to feed - they look fantastic as they come into land…they circle like planes and then drop their landing gear (legs!) and drop onto the water.  It’s a wonderful sight.

Welcome to our new blog ! We are here to discuss all things about gardens, things in gardens and of course things to do in gardens. Every month we can plan ahead as we have our weather forecast and our gardening tips. It is great to be able to plan what to do in the garden (although sometimes the awful weather gets in the way!).

Late autumn is now with us and even though the weather has turned cold and we have had such a lot of rain, the autumn colours on the trees are quite something. The wind has been westerly the last few days and has whipped a great deal of the leaves off the trees.  The soggy mass of leaves is a job I hate dealing with but I have put a couple of compost bins in the back garden and I am going to try really hard to compost this year – there are some good composting tips on wwwclick4garden.co.uk this month.