News - Page 106
You can find the latest news from Birchen Grove garden centre here!
Any questions or do you want to know more? Just fill out our contact form or call 0208 905 91 89. Want to get social? Use #loveBirchenGrove.
See you soon at Birchen Grove garden centre.
It's time to make rosehip syrup – one of the most nutritious and delicious by-products from one of the most beautiful flowers in the garden.
Roses are best known for their gorgeous flowers, but their hips are pretty too - and incredibly nutritious, with each berry containing more vitamin C than oranges. You'll find plenty of varieties with particularly good hips here in our garden centre in London: favourites include the Scots rose, R...
The Malvern Autumn Show is 20 this year and it's bigger and better than ever – especially the giant vegetables!
The UK National Giant Vegetable Championship is held at the show each year and this year's display promises to be another record-breaker.
Last year saw the UK's biggest cabbage at 124.8 lbs, grown by David Thomas from Cornwall, and the world's longest beetroot at 6.67m (21.89ft) produced by Malvern regular Joe Atherton – also hold...
Extend the season with cloches and you can carry on growing veg right through till the first frosts. Stock up on your favourite type now, ready to use as soon as temperatures start to fall: whether you prefer convenient, easy-to-use polythene tunnels or rigid and sturdy long row cloches you'll find them in stock in our garden centre here in London.
Put these mobile mini-greenhouses over your plants now they'll trap the last of the sunshine, keeping the...
Gardening is good for your kids – it's official! A report from researchers in the US has confirmed the mounting evidence that schoolchildren who learn gardening as part of their day-to-day studies eat more healthily and do better in their studies. They found students who get their fingers dirty on a regular basis behave better, too.
As if that wasn't enough, Spanish scientists have also shown that green spaces in city schools improve mental development...
The plant of the month for September is the Japanese anemone, your go-to plant for late summer colour.that lasts well into autumn and beyond. Its season of interest extends well beyond its beautifully simple, saucer-shaped flowers, too: the petals unfurl from silky buds which are just as pretty, and once the flowers have faded they leave a quirky little golden-green bobble dancing on wiry stems above the foliage lasting well into the colder months of the year. Even...
Read more...
As the autumn colours deepen into a fiery glow, the garden is ablaze with colour in a grand finale to the year. Winter is just around the corner now – so get the garden ready with our jobs to do this month.
General tasks:
- Clear dead plant material including fallen leaves, dead stems and spent flowers to prevent disease
- Sow or turf new lawns on well-prepared, raked and trodden soil that's completely level for a perf...
Dry and store onions now that their top growth has browned and begun to droop: this is a sign that they've drawn all the energy in their leaves deep down into the roots and are going dormant, ready to store.
Drying your onions hardens the skins and preserves the inner core, keeping it fresh and ready for you to use later in the year. Don't hurry the drying process: you'll need at least a couple of weeks. The idea is to keep the skins baking steadily whi...
The RHS needs your help! If you, like us, adore the African lily, agapanthus, you'll be dismayed to hear that there's a new pest on the block – so recently arrived it hasn't even got a proper name.
The midge has been reported attacking agapanthus flower heads, causing deformity and discolouration. Sometimes the flower bud fails to open and in bad cases, the whole flowerhead can collapse.
The tiny pest was first spotted last year and is stil...
Sow a bed of winter salads to keep you in deliciously fresh leafy greens right through the colder months of the year. This is a great technique for putting your greenhouse borders to good use once the summer crops are cleared – and it'll also work under a generous-sized cloche in the open garden.
All you need is a raised veg bed - around 1.2m x 3m will produce salad and to spare for a family of four all winter. If you have fewer to feed, it works just a...
The nation's flowerbeds have been judged and now the dedicated army of green-fingered volunteers behind the spectacular displays that make Britain in Bloom the country's best-loved gardening competition can only sit and wait until the verdict is in.
The team of RHS judges have toured over 5,000 acres of public green space in 70 locations selected from nearly 1000 original entries for the UK finals of Britain in Bloom, Europe's biggest c...
Bees love school gardens the best according to results from this year's Great British Bee Count, in which the public recorded sightings of over 100,000 individual bees during May.
Most bees were spotted in school gardens, with woodlands the next most populous habitat. Overall, gardens provided the greatest variety of bees with almost a quarter of survey participants recording more than four kinds of bees in their back yard. Next most popular with our fu...
Lift maincrop potatoes now they're fully mature and get them into store ready for winter.
Early maincrops like Maris Piper and Desiree are ready for lifting now, with late maincrops following in the next couple of weeks. Don't leave it till September, as blight is an ever-present worry at this time of year: it's wise to lift the crop a little early rather than lose your harvest.
Choose a dry, sunny day and use a flat-tined potato fork if po...