Lia Leendertz Organic Gardening

After a particularly long and cold winter of convincing ourselves that root vegetables make delicious salads, and that a daily baked potato makes a perfectly healthy one of your five a day, I finally have something fresh and new and … [ Read More ]

I’ve started liking fennel. Really liking fennel. It’s not that I ever actively disliked it, but I was fairly indifferent. I certainly never craved it, never pounced upon each occasional bulb that lucked up in the vegetable box, never searched … [ Read More ]

I wish I could get excited about seed sowing, like you do. When all the proper gardeners start leaping around like little spring lambs, I turn sulky and reluctant. Maybe I’ve been secretly enjoying this long, cold winter because it … [ Read More ]

I first noticed it about two weeks ago. Those dead-looking stems that had been sitting brownly on my potted nectarines suddenly looked – almost imperceptibly – alive. There were no leaves or flowers, no bells and whistles, but something had … [ Read More ]

In the deep midwinter…you can still sow broad beans and peas. The great thing about the greenhouse is that it provides an opportunity for the most out-of-season seed sowing. It isn’t actually out of season, it just severely feels it. … [ Read More ]

Now that I am the proud owner of not one but two greenhouses – the ultra gorgeous and swish mini one and the ancient, tumble down, normal-sized one at the end of the garden – I suppose it was inevitable … [ Read More ]

I have been given a single plant of strawberry ‘Mieze Schindler’ – a strawberry in the woodland-berry vein of ‘Mara des Bois’, and with a hint of raspberry about its delicate flesh – and have been in the process of … [ Read More ]