Diary of a Rocket Gardener

I don’t think my leeks know if they are coming or going this autumn. One minute it has turned cold, wet and windy, then next it seems that summer is…

I’m not quite ready for autumn planting yet as I’ve still got plenty of crops growing in the beds that I want to use over the winter months. I reckon…

I tend not to go away much in July and August, and that is partly because I don’t like leaving my previous veg plants to fend for themselves. This year,…

I’m sure my tomatoes would normally be ripening by now. I planted them in mid-May, some in the greenhouse and some outdoors, and all the plants are bearing lovely green…

I’ve been growing padron peppers religiously since I first took on my veg patch seven years ago. My love for this variety grew when I lived in Spain, near San…

Something that I’ve learnt over the past few years, is that the creature you find residing in a damaged potato or root veggie is not always the main culprit. The…

Over the past seven years (ish), I have come to know the joys and annoyances of self-seeding plants in the veg patch. For me, the joys are found when new…

I planted up a whole load of pots with lovely flowering plants from a local nursery – they have all since died… I think they just got a bit too…

In my garden, I have often had problems with blackfly on globe artichokes and on broad bean plants, but never on chard. I was very surprised, therefore, to see that…

I think it is fair to say that last year I let my garden go a little wild. Perhaps in that post-pandemic kind of haze, I just didn’t keep on…

Okay, I totally brought this on myself. I let one of my raised beds get overtaken by red campions and I can’t bring myself to cut them back or pull…

I have a very small greenhouse, pictured above when I first built it a few years ago, in 2019 I think. It probably measures 1.5m x 1.5m (that’s a guess,…