Category: How to
Whilst Winters are always busy, they are a good time to be catching up with learning so I finally managed to get a place on the Coppicing Course at Harcourt Arboretum and it was well worth the wait and in this article I share the things I learned on the day.
Deadheading is removing flowers that have finished or almost finished their cycle of life with aim of encouraging more flowers or keeping the prolific self-seeders in check. This short guide explains how to deadhead many of the flowering plants commonly found in a garden, which bits are which when it comes to deadheading and various other bits of useful info.
I have lost count of the number of times I have encountered the remains of a small tree/shrub where the top is long gone, but the stump remains. Why? Well, usually the answer is that removing even a small stump can appear to be difficult job so why not let it just rot away. Unfortunately, that may not work as quite a few stumps can regrow. So, removal is the way to go here I will show you how I remove a small stump without too much effort.
Left to its own devices a Pampas Grass can soon get out of control and dominate smaller gardens. There are various ways of cutting it down (best done in late winter) however having done this a few times with various large grasses now I have a quick and easy way to cut them back without creating a massive cleaning up headache. In this post I will show you step by step how to cut back an overgrown Pampas Grass the easy way.
When a perennial is starting to outgrow its spot and is muscling others out of the way it is time to divide it. The most common approach requires two garden forks to prize the lifted plant apart but what if you don’t happen to have enough forks to hand? Well there is a simple way to split your these plants as I will show you.
Yes, you did read that correctly – I use an eraser to help keep my secateurs clean. OK, this isn’t something I fished out from the bottom of my school pencil case – this eraser, by garden tools specialist Niwaki, has been created specifically to clean garden tools and it works a treat as I will quickly demonstrate.