Seed Sowing

**Head Gardener Claire Greenslade shares her step-by-step guide on how to sow seeds, from preparing seed trays to hardening off**: **Why sow seed?**: Sowing seed is one of the most easy, satisfying and cheap ways to get growing. March is the perfect time of year to start the majority of seed sowing. Some people start early in autumn, some start seeds off in...

Lets face it, we all do it every year. We sow the whole packet of seeds 'just in case' and then end up with far to many seedlings that we don't know what to do with. Normally with me it's tomto plants. At home I really only have room for 2 or 3 plants but I still think I'd better sow the whole lot! And if you are careful and only sow what you need then you...

meaning that we can overwinter more plants. It is exciting times for us, so to get us fired up and to refresh our memories about glasshouse work, we arranged for a one day course, just for us, at Bicton college. We spent the day in the glasshouse with Janice Hindley, who took us through several propagation techniques, seed sowing, and glasshouse pest and...

**Today was the first of the Confident Gardener workshops at Hestercombe and we mastered apple pruning. Although very cold, we had dry weather and met a lovely bunch of people who had come to learn how to prune their trees at home. As with anything I am involved with, this also included a great deal of tea drinking and lots of general chat - about gardening...

A bunch of homegrown flowers is hard to beat **In the run up to our new event: Spring bouquet workshop (24 April), local grower and florist, JW Blooms, gives some top tips on growing your own...** With spring in the air, now is the perfect time to think about growing some flowers for the house. It doesn’t matter if you have enough space for a dedicated...

Readers, I am after your ideas and thoughts. As you may know we run several half day courses through the year - apple pruning/rose pruning/ seed sowing/cuttings/dry stone walling and charcoal burning etc. What I would like to know from you is, are we missing anything? Is there something horticultural that you wish we could explain to you? Would you like...

Hestercombe’s Wildflower meadow - showing evidence of the hot early summer (image: Ben Knight) - By Claire Greenslade_ “It has been such an extraordinary year in so many ways, even weather wise - spring was so hot that half the plants in the Wildflower Meadow germinated quickly, flowered and went to seed in a flash, and the whole site looked a bit burnt...

**Have you ever been scared to start a project in the garden because of the enormity of it? It happens to all of us, especially when deciding on the size of the flower beds.**: - By _Claire Greenslade_, Head Gardener_ "Have you ever been scared to start a project in the garden because of the enormity of it? It happens to all of us, especially when deciding...

It has taken hours of hard work but finally we have managed to start work in our glasshouse. We were recently given the opportunity to have two big Victorian glasshouses. Previously we had worked from a small domestic one and a poly tunnel. A lady from a neighboring village needed to sell up and was worried that her glasshouses would just end up being...

There’s little better than a butterfly fluttering past, a bee buzzing by or a dragonfly darting through when you’re pottering in the garden. You can make those chance encounters more likely by embracing wildlife gardening. Luckily, finding the balance between a wildlife garden and beautiful planting is easier than you might think. Here, we suggest five...