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Sally Nex

Tag Archives: Garden Press Day

So… what’s new?

03 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by sallynex in exotic edibles, new plants, news, shows

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

charles dowding, Garden Press Day, grow lights, mulberries, propagation, tiger nuts, Vitopod

large_6a017d41d9ea05970c01a5116c8aa0970c-piA quick whizz round the Garden Press Event up in London the other week – and I do mean quick, as I didn’t arrive till lunchtime having flown in from Bordeaux in France that morning, fingernails still muddy from clearing the garden in the little house my family has bought there.

It’s tempting at this point to get diverted into a little rhapsody about the delights of sitting outside eating a lunch of ham-stuffed baguettes baked that morning, sun shining and temperature a balmy 19 degrees (in February!), back aching pleasantly from raking leaves, loading bonfires, dismantling rotten-roofed sheds and climbing a lot of old trees to pull out ivy.

But I will resist the temptation (until later, anyway) and instead talk about the many little things I came across at the show which caught my eye. The Press Event has become one of those must-attend punctuations to the gardening year: it sort of kicks things off as everyone lines up to show you what the horticultural talking points are likely to be this year.

There’s quite a lot of toot there too, of course, but I tend to avert my eyes tactfully from the stuff that I can’t see the point of or of which I frankly disapprove (one year I listened open-mouthed as an earnest lawn company representative described how their new product would efficiently murder every earthworm in your garden. Not that she put it in quite those words, but I politely refused the free sample she offered: quickest way I know to kill a lawn stone dead).

So here is a little distillation of the good stuff: the half-dozen bits of kit, new plants and innovations which I hope will find their way onto my plot too before too many seasons have passed by.

100w-deluxe-double-height-vitopod-heated-propagator-with-lights-support-kit-1

Grow lights you can use: Oh I know I’ve been banging on about my Vitopod lately but it does have quite a major role in my life just at the moment. So it’s not that surprising that these natty grow lights caught my attention. The only grow lights I’ve come across have been offered me from slightly dodgy sources and are enormous industrial-scale things with questionable electrics. These on the other hand are dainty little things that just clip over your Vitopod lid and extend the day length to up to 12 hours. Daylight being just as important as warmth when starting early seedlings, this could be the missing piece of my jigsaw puzzle.

img_4312

Tiger nuts: So excited by these. They look a bit like chickpeas, but they’re actually the tubers of an unremarkable sedge, Cyperus esculentus, a close relation to papyrus (the kind you grow in your pond) only not quite as pretty. It’s quite prolific – an average clump yields about 1lb of dried tubers: the texture and taste is similar to coconut, with a little hint of almond, and they’re packed with nutrients. You can dry them for storing over winter, then rehydrate them overnight to eat raw or in cakes and bakes. On coming home to do a bit more research, though, they do seem to be a bit on the tender side. I’m making them this year’s experiment, anyway, to see how they do.

poppy

Ornaments that double up as bird feeders: I did think this was pretty, and useful too. I found it on the Crocus stand: you fill the central bowl with seeds, or cheese, or whatever you happen to be feeding the birds at the moment, and they can perch on the ledge to feast. Much prettier than your average wire-and-plastic peanut job.

untitled

Charles Dowding’s new book: Charles was there with his partner Steph – also a very talented kitchen gardener and writer – and a lot of copies of his latest publication, Charles Dowding’s Vegetable Garden Diary. a wire-bound allotment notebook-cum-diary interwoven with pages of Charles’s no nonsense advice based on sound practical experience. I have long admired Charles’s quiet ability to plough his own furrow: he draws his own conclusions, he only ever follows what other people say if he’s already proved it to himself, and as a result he is a true pioneer. And Steph gave me some parched peas, too (thanks Steph!)

mulberry

Dwarf mulberries: Alongside the tiger nuts on the Suttons stand was this little cutie: the first proper mulberry bush. By which I mean one bred to grow just 1.5m tall – or the size of a large-ish shrub, unlike the conventional mulberry bush which is actually a small tree (does anyone know why mulberry trees are called mulberry bushes in the song? The best I can find is this blog post which says it was originally a song about blackberry bushes, or possibly juniper bushes, though it all seems rather vague.) It goes by the pretty name of ‘Charlotte Russe’ and it’s got proper mulberries and everything (and within a year rather than the usual eight or so).

rudeveg

A rude veg competition: Ah yes: rude veg. We all love a bit of double-entendre when harvesting the carrots. Anyway: Van Meuwen enjoyed its Vulgar Veg competition so much last year that it’s doing the same again. There’s £500 of vouchers on offer: the winner last year was a positively pornographic carrot from Weston-super-Mare. What with wonky veg in the news (when you can find any veg at all in the shops, that is) there’s no better time to expose your oddities to a wider audience (double entendre entirely intended): just go to http://www.vanmeuwen.com/competitions and enjoy.

Gardening trends for 2012

06 Monday Feb 2012

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Garden Press Day, gardening trends, hammocks, meadows, online garden design, peat, renewables, solar power, swing seats, Victorian vegetables, wind power

Far be it for me to set myself up as a gardening soothsayer: about all you can say about the coming year with any sort of certainty, let’s face it, is that the weather will be occasionally surprising and not at all ‘normal’, someone somewhere will be killing a slug, and Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen will be at Press Day at Chelsea.

But since I’m not one to shy away from sticking my head above the parapet, quite frequently getting it rapped sharply by assorted arrows in the process, I thought I’d make a few predictions.

Fresh from the Garden Press Event last week, in which all things new in the world of horticulture were dangled enticingly before the garden press to distract them away from their coffee and the fencing (and I don’t mean the garden variety: it’s a long story) in order to convince them that this – yes, this – is the next Big Thing.

Of course only a few will fulfil such promise, and part of the fun is trying to spot which those might be. Here are the top trends I think we’ll be hearing more of over the next year.

Gardening gone digital: The power of the web is being harnessed in ever-more-sophisticated ways: definitely a trend on the up.

Garden design tools, for example, are moving steadily from the clunky to the cool: Plantify is the new kid on the block with its new online design tool launching at the end of March.

It’s the latest in a long line of increasingly good online design tools accessible to ordinary gardeners, yet offering a satisfyingly high standard of graphics and at the same time being properly useful. A personal favourite is the ever-wonderful GrowVeg.com, which helps me work out what I’m growing in my veg patch each year.

There’s one innovation Plantify has which raises it above the mildly irritating and increasingly old-fashioned offering from the BBC (not enough plants, not enough detail, not enough anything, really) and the product-centred Garden Visualiser from Marshalls.

And that’s the frankly inspirational idea that you can use Google Earth to produce a to-scale outline of your garden. I have been, I’ll confess, terrified to the point of paralysis about trying to measure my former quarry with its near-vertical banks and countryside-wonky edges. But Plantify did it within minutes (including the position of a couple of established trees).

There’s more: the intention is that once you’ve decided what you want to plant, it’ll be automatically costed using current nursery price lists, and then if you want to go ahead and buy, however many nurseries your purchases are scattered across, Plantify gathers them all in one place and delivers the plants to your front door. Now – if it works – that’s impressive: and surely a sign of things to come.

The return of ‘new’ old veg varieties: Eat your heart out, heritage varieties and exotica: nostalgia veg are the next big thing. Spotted on my rounds (and in some cases, snapped up for growing chez moi): samphire, asparagus pea, and Scorzonera ‘Duplex’.

All vegetables grown hundreds of years ago (or in the case of samphire, gathered from the seashores as a delicacy to use with fish): and now, after a spell in the doldrums, being rediscovered. Others to return to favour lately include cardoons, seakale, strawberry spinach, and salsify.

Renewables-powered gardening: there are wind-powered and solar-powered garden lighting systems already on the market. Solar also powers fountains (if somewhat erratically, I’m told, from those who have them); and an innovative company in Cambridge has even invented a greenhouse with solar glass which generates enough power to heat itself and to spare.

And now there’s solar-powered irrigation, here to solve that ages-old problem of lugging watering cans back and forth when you don’t have any mains water available. The only potential drawback I can see with Irrigatia’s new system is that you’d have to keep your water butt topped up somehow: but as long as you can get around that, your allotment watering is sorted.

Meadows: I am stewing up a little bloglette on the wider subject of meadows, so I’ll restrict myself to saying that this a Jolly Interesting Subject which I suspect may well be one of the debating topics of the gardening year this year.

So more of this later: but I just wanted to point out that you can now buy meadows on a mat. Discuss.

Peat-free innovations: Spurred on by the government’s impending (though voluntary) phase-out of peat in gardening composts by 2020, peat producers are – at last – expanding their range of peat-free growing media.

It’s long been a bugbear of mine that I can’t get hold of a good peat-free seed compost. I am very nearly entirely peat-free, and have pretty much always been (one of the few areas in which I turned out to be an early adopter – but I won’t bore you with all that). But the very nearly comes in because I use John Innes seed compost, which is soil-based but also peat-based.

That’s mainly because I haven’t been able to find anything better. I’ve been thinking about sieving my New Horizon but can’t quite bring myself to risk a trial sowing.

Now I discover Sinclair’s, who extract vast amounts of peat but are also in a Jekyll and Hyde sort of way the country’s leading producer of peat-free and manufacture New Horizon, do a peat-free sowing compost.

I had a long conversation with the nice lady on their stand and even she admitted that it’s in its early stages; knowing how long it took them to get peat-free reliably right, I suspect we may have a little way to go before it’s threatening my consumption of John Innes.

But I plan to hunt some down (it’s not available in any of my local garden centres – another area where there might be some room for improvement): perhaps I’ll even be brave and do some trialling with some sacrificial seedlings. I will be reporting back.

The hammock is dead. Long live the swing seat: not exactly new, but more of a growing trend emerging from the last few years and showing no signs of going away.

The swoon-inducingly gorgeous hanging seats designed by Stephen Myburgh have led the way in what amounts to the usurping of the hammock by nest-like cocoons hanging from free-standing frames (or occasionally from the ceiling or a handy – though presumably sturdy – pergola).

There’s now a cheaper and more hammock-like version too; the Cacoon, inspired by and I think made out of sails. Even John Lewis have ‘pod chairs’, for goodness’ sake. Roll over, hammocks: your days are done.

So, what’s new?

04 Friday Feb 2011

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

cloches, fire pits, Garden Press Day, vertical walls

Off to the big smoke yesterday for the first major garden press event of the year, The Garden Press Event 2011. It’s a chance to waft around the rather grand Horticultural Halls in Westminster meeting friends (including at least three bloggers – honorary mentions go to Nigel, VP and Kevin) and cadging more glasses of fizzy cocktails than are strictly allowed from the nice people at Hillier’s, who were celebrating the 21st anniversary of their Gardening Club (yes, I’m a member; no, I can’t do that horticultural crossword either). And you also get a sneak peek at what’s new in the gardening world this year.

There were dozens of exhibitors showing off their latest ideas: plus a few, like Hatfield House, who just wanted to build on the huge success they’ve been having following their honourable mention on Alan Titchmarsh’s recent series.

So I thought just for a change, I’d let the day job intervene for a bit: here, with apologies for my lousy photos, are the ones which caught my eye.

Metal bell cloches: Crocus
Ah… I want. I really, really want. Crocus are branching out (if you’ll excuse the pun) into making their own garden products now: and they’re applying their usual sure touch and good taste to all those things you use to protect crops, hold things up and generally primp your plants with.

Normally they look dead ugly but not these: actually I fell in love with these Victorian-style cloches at first sight. You can just see them in that glossy gardening magazine photo, can’t you? I’d probably better mention that I do work for them a bit, and they’re really lovely people. Really, really lovely people. Super, actually. No – really….

Fire pits, Fire Pits UK
Forget the barbecue: soooo 2010. Or not, if you work at the Met Office. This year it’s all about fire pits.

I once went to a party at a South African friend’s house (in Surrey) in January. When he mentioned it was a braai – Afrikaans barbecue – I laughed like a drain. I assumed it must be one of the many eccentricities to which our South African friends are prone due to a terminal state of disbelief about the state of British weather, and we’d end up eating inside like normal people.

But no: he had a fire pit. We basked in the warmth of this wonderful invention into the wee small hours, while behind us the garden turned white with frost.

These ones were particularly wonderful; hand-made, big, beautiful. Roast your chilly English backsides and dream of the Cape.

Inflatable greenhouse, Harrods Horticultural
This was just hilarious. I couldn’t help thinking it was a seriously good idea: if you’re the type who uses a greenhouse to raise your seeds in but then runs out of room in the garden when you go to plant them out, this is perfect: just take it down and stash it under the potting shed bench.

But how long, I ask, could you resist the overwhelming temptation to fill it with large multicoloured plastic balls and jump in?

Garden on a Roll
This got my prize for wackiest idea of the day. I mean, what do you make of a garden that arrives drawn on a bit of paper you attach to the ground?

I really didn’t know quite what to think at first, until I realised I was absolutely not its target audience. They state openly that this is for ‘those with no gardening or plant knowledge, and no desire or time for gardening’.

It’s gardening by numbers: you ring them up, say ‘I’ve got this three-metre border in my garden’, and they send you a big box of plants with a large sheet of paper, marked out with exactly where your plants should be planted. You spread the paper on the ground, plant the plants where you’re told to plant them, water it all in and cover with a mulch: hey-presto, instant garden.

Of course I don’t like it: it takes all the romance, creativity and love out of gardening. But – remember – this is for people who do not understand that there is romance, creativity or indeed love involved in gardening; so what you’re really doing is sneaking it all in through the back door, packaged as an off-the-shelf solution to the weedy mess in the back garden.

And however you do it, at the end of the day you’ve still improved an outdoor space, spread a little plant-driven happiness and – who knows – converted someone who would otherwise remain unenlightened. When you look at it like that, it’s not such a bad thing.

Easiwall System, Treebox
I never realised so many different kinds of vertical planting systems existed in the world.

Nearly every exhibitor seemed to have one. There were bags and boxes, plastic gizmos with pockets and metal sheets with holes in them. Growing up is catching on: but I am more than a little sceptical about the cheap(er) systems you can buy for home gardening.

If you don’t have automatic watering systems, the pockets are often so small you wonder how you can keep them moist enough for the plants to be happy: after all, they’re a quarter the size of hanging baskets and we all know how much of a faff they are.

And if you do have automatic watering systems, the top plants drain all the water out within an hour and the bottom plants are flooded. Besides, they look so ugly: the plastic or metal pockets always show through and I’ve never seen one yet which didn’t have big gaps showing between the plants. Not very wall-like, really, unless you’re into green plastic.

But: while I retain my scepticism, this system looked as good as any. It’s like one of those bookshelves you get in libraries with the leaflets in: a series of long shelves angled outwards (in fact, linked troughs) hooks on to the wall and holds the plants. You’ve still got the watering problem: but at least the roots can spread out sideways and you might – just – have a chance of your plants knitting together and forming something that resembled a wall.

I’ll stop there before I go on and on: though I haven’t mentioned Vitax’s handy little gizmos which fit on your water bottle in summer to trap wasps, or the new blue verbascum from Thompson & Morgan, or the Mr Digwell range of veg seeds just brought out by Kings which have a detachable recipe on the back (why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?). But no doubt the bits I’ve missed out will crop up elsewhere: look out for them coming soon in a gardening magazine near you.

Little rays of sunshine

09 Monday Feb 2009

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

daffodils, Garden Press Day, Taylor's Bulbs

Amid all the misery of slush and cold, and now torrential rain and flooding, this is what’s keeping me going.

I was given these lovely things at the Garden Press Day in London last week by those nice people at Taylor’s Bulbs. They started opening the very next day and are now flooding my dining room with perfume. The variety is ‘Jack the Lad’ – and they’re cheering me up no end.

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