How do you want your garden?

There’s no set way to gardening or planting. That lovely aspect of this area in life means we can have a great deal of fun thinking up and planning out how we want our little piece of heaven. Everything can be just how you like it, from the paths to the fences, beds to colour. It’s all in your control.

Not everyone likes to just go wild and follow their heart though (this can make our lives, as gardeners, a million times easier by the way) and instead, decide on something a bit more…predetermined in the plans they have for their garden.

Three of the more popular and most common ones are… drum roll please …

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Let’s place a bet shall we? £20 says if you looked into any of your neighbours gardens, I bet you’d spot an Apple tree in one of them. Apples are the most widely grown fruit tree of the lot, and it’s no surprise as to why, the blossom can look lovely, and people just like apples. With over 4000 cultivars to choose from, there’s sure to be one for you to eat, or to cook with.

Now when you look into getting your own tree, there’s several things to bear in mind.  Those 4000 types are split into 7 different pollinating groups, numbered 1 to 7. 1 fruits the earliest, and 7 the latest. Fan favourites Discovery and Granny Smith are group 3. The trick to getting apples to pollenate is to match them with something from the right group. Apples need a pollinator from an adjoining group in order to produce fruit, so a Group 3 apple tree would need a partner from either Groups 2, 3 or 4, a Group 5 would need a 4, 5 or 6 and so on. One from above or below the desired tree and all should be good.

Nature has cunning ways to help as always too, planting a Crab Apple (Malus ‘Golden Hornet’ to be precise and name one) covers ALL SEVEN GROUPS as it’s in flower for such a long time, so this is good if you only want one type of apple.

Now, fancy making me some Crumble, with custard please!

Written & posted by Stu

One of my bugbears: Dirty tools and poorly maintained tools. I will openly admit failing to keep my own gardening equipment clean every now and then, and I then get irritated with myself about it. Clean your edging sheers, Stuart! Keep them sharp!

Edging sheers are just one example. If you’re a regular to the website, you might have seen the “Tip of the Week” on the ticker already about sharpening tools. I mentioned mowers, hedge cutters, secateurs there, the list goes on though. EVERYTHING needs cleaning and looking after. Cutty things need to be kept sharp, diggy things need to be mud free, noisy things need to be oiled up. It’s seems like a lot when you put it all together, but the easy way to do it is to just clean/maintain things after you’ve used them.

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