A campaign to promote British grown herbs is being launched by growers
to show the benefit & easiness of a homecooked meal containing fresh
herbs. Fresh herbs are easy to use and benefit health.
Basil, parsley and coriander are the UK’s three most popular herbs. They are all easy to grow in the garden.
Freezing herbs or drying herbs are options for using any surplus herbs in the garden.
We mentioned the benefits of Crocs to the gardener in an earlier post. They now seem
to be the ultimate fashion item!
Lady gardeners are going for bright colours.
Joules have fun & funky new prints for wellies which brighten up the vegetable
garden in summer.
Every pair now sports a 12 month guarantee, so you can buy them with
confidence!
Joules-wellie
Symphony strawberries have yielded well in the TopVeg garden this year.
The Elsanta, Hapil and Honeoye have succomed to the appalling weather
conditions, rotting off and providing limited amounts of fruit.
The Symphony strawberries are producing good yields of perfect
strawberries. They are firm, sweet and gently flavoured.
ripe-strawberry-Symphony
The strawberry variety, Symphony, crops between 8 and 14 days later than
Elsanta. Symphony is a main season crop.
Symphony has similar yields to Elsanta but with a higher proportion of
Class 1 strawberries.
strawberry-symphony
Symphony plants are vigourous and strong growing. But they are often
smaller plants than Elsanta, because they produce a lot of runners.
Symphony tolerates extreme soil conditions due to its vigorous nature
and disease resistance capabilities, so it has survived the rains.
Symphony strawberries have good field resistance to Mildew.
symphony-strawberry
The fruit quality of Symphony is excellent, producing bright, glossy,
regular shaped, firm strawberries with well coloured flesh. The
strawberries have a good shelf-life.
Common Name: Wild Strawberry
Latin Name: Fragaria virginiana
Family: Rosaceae
The commercial strawberry grown in the garden is a hybrid, Fragaria ×
ananassa.
This hybrid was produced from a cross between plants of two strawberry
Fragaria species, Fragaria chiloensis and Fragaria virginiana.
Strawberries are very healthy to eat.
Strawberries are:
* rich in vitamin C
* a good source of folic acid
* high in fibre.
ripening-strawberries
Farming Friends & TopVeg have collaborated to create a *How To Grow
Beetroot* growing card. Click on the image below to enlarge the picture
of the card.
How_To_Grow_Beetroot_Sheet
The card may be downloaded, printed off and pinned to the potting shed
wall as a useful reference on *how to grow beetroot*.
beetroot-seedlings
We hope that children, as well as established vegetable gardeners, will
find this useful, as they can grow beetroot in their section of the
vegetable garden.
beetroot-growing
If you would like a pdf of the grow card for *How to Grow Beetroot, please complete the contact form asking for the grow card for beetroot and we will email it to you.
Thank you Sara at Farming Friends for designing this beetroot grow card.
Farming Friends & TopVeg have collaborated to create a How To Grow Lettuce growing card.
How2Grow_Lettuce_Card
The card may be downloaded, printed off and pinned to the potting shed wall as a useful reference on how to grow lettuce.
butterhead-lettuce
We hope that children, as well as established vegetable gardeners, will find this useful, as they can grow lettuce in pots, containers or in the vegetable garden.
If you would like a copy of the pdf of the grow card for How to Grow Lettuce card please complete the contact form asking for the lettuce card.
Thank you Sara at Farming Friends for designing this lettuce grow card.
Traditionally shallots (latin name – Allium ascalonicum) are grown from
sets, but vegetable gardeners have started to grow shallots from seed,
instead. One of the advantages of growing shallots from seed is that the
viral, bacterial and fungal diseases, that are usually carried over to
the next crop on the bulbs, cannot survive in the seed. So shallots
grown from seed should be healthier.
Shallot seed is similar to onion seed & can be grown using the same
techniques. The seed can be started off in modules in the spring &
transplanted, or sown directly into the garden.
* seed depth – 1 cm
* germination time – 21 days
* distance between rows – 20 cm
* distance within the row 1 cm
They are ready for harvesting at the same time as the onions- June to
September. Each seed produces a single shallot bulb.
shallot08
To produce the best yield of well shaped bulbs it is important to sow
seed at one cm spacing. Seed sown too thinly can result in the bulbs
becoming coarse and splitting.
Shallots are stored in the same way as onions.
Garden peas ( latin name – Pisum sativum) are in season. Peas planted in
the spring are ready for picking. Later sowings are still in flower.
pea-flower--Ambience
TV Chef, Rachel Geen, has devised numerous recipes using peas which can
be found on peas.org
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