What's new, what's growing, what we're learning. Updates, guides and stories for people who take their garden seriously.
Cirrus, halo, thunderstorm tower, falling pressure, low hunting swallows and daisies that shut at three: what genuinely holds up, and why your look at the sky beats the app over the next two hours.
Your winter prunings are fencing material: willow rods strike root and turn into a living fence, hazel poles stay dead and last 5 to 10 years as a weave, brushwood becomes a Benjes hedge. Weaving technique, cutting season CW 46 to 9, service life honestly counted, and what neighbour law has to say about it.
Root days, leaf days, waxing moon and ascending moon: what the moon-planting calendars actually say, what controlled sowing trials have found, and why the rules persist anyway.
Propagating without equipment: softwood cuttings in summer, hardwood cuttings in winter, layering on the berry bush. Where the cut goes, which species rot in a glass of water, and what rooting powder and willow water really deliver.
Fifteen kilos of carrots and one salad drawer in the fridge: how to build an earth clamp, what belongs in the sand box, and why the old natural cellar keeps root vegetables plump until March.
Carrot and onion, tomato and basil, the Three Sisters: what generations observed in the bed, how much of it is actually documented, and which neighbours you really do need to keep apart.
Four fields, a cross of paths, a roundel in the middle: the classic layout is a working order, not decoration. What the measurements actually do, what you edge with now that box has become a gamble, and how the crop rotation runs across the four fields.
The Ice Saints are ten days off, the Seven Sleepers rule hits 60 to 70 per cent of years in southern Germany, and sheep's cold has the best physics behind it yet keeps happening less often. An honest reckoning with the old weather sayings and what climate change is doing to them.
Open-pollinated instead of F1: why seed saved from a hybrid falls apart, how to get clean seed from tomato, bean, squash, cabbage and carrot, how many plants a variety really needs, and what seed law actually allows.
