I learned my fruit-growing skills while manuring strawberries with my Dad in the autumn. It was not the perfume most girls dream of, but it certainly taught me the value of collecting cow poo for fruit crops. Planning a family garden is not only about providing your children with a safe, quiet space to relax outdoors, but also about teaching them a valuable life skill. It can help them forget any bad moments at school, alleviate exam pressure, or simply enjoy being outdoors instead of staring at a screen.

If you are relatively new to gardening, you may have a windowsill full of plants now waiting to go into the soil outside after the last frost. If you can plant hardy seeds directly into soil outdoors, these seeds get a head start before all your baby seedlings go in. You may have heard of succession planting as a way to keep harvesting crops because you do not plant them all at the same time. Let’s examine what succession planting is and which seeds succession planting is useful for.

In the world of vegetable gardening, water plays a vital role in ensuring the health and productivity of your plants. Providing the appropriate amount of water can be a challenging task for gardeners, as both under-watering and over-watering can have detrimental effects. In this comprehensive guide, we will delve into the water requirements of different vegetables, exploring key factors such as soil type, climate, growth stage, and practical watering tips to help you achieve a thriving vegetable garden.

Teaching children how to grow plants and food is an important skill to help them in their future lives. You can introduce local wildlife, discuss how food is grown, examine soil types, teach the importance of composting waste, and observe the weather all just by being outside. If you are a teacher, teaching assistant, or parent with an interest, this article is for you. Let’s discuss some easy ideas to get that garden growing.

Spring is well and truly here so this week, let’s look at companion planting. This is a natural method of planting certain plants, herbs and flowers together that either helps one plant’s growth or attracts pests to them as an alternative offering, instead of the crop you want to look after. A typical example is growing clover as a mat around Brassica (cabbage family) plants so that pests find the clover first. Smell also plays its part, with the companion plant scent distracting the pests from smelling the crop you want to save. Read on for what to plant next to which crop and there is a handy chart at the end detailing what goes well together and what to avoid.