The Doorstep Allotment

Whilst getting my haircut the other day (yes I still have some worthy of cutting) I got chatting with the barber (well she's a skilled hairdresser actually, it's just her skill would be wasted on my 'scratch and go' style hair cut). We were talking about growing veg in containers on the patio... so here's …

14 Creative Ways To Reuse Empty Wine Bottles

I guess it's not every day you pop up in the Huffington Post  14 Creative Ways To Reuse Empty Wine Bottles. Some nice ideas in here but really, do I need instructions on how to make a wine bottle into a rolling pin??

‘Bootifully’ Easy Boot Projects

The wet winter months usually mean a return to more sturdy footwear for gardening, and quite often a return to not-so-stylish muddy platform heels! I wouldn’t describe ourselves as being particularly house proud, in fact with the number of children, chickens and a messy collie dog, its like shovelling snow in a snowstorm trying to …

Winter pruning of blackcurrants

A well managed blackcurrant bush can provide quite a harvest in a year with more than enough to meet the need of the kitchen and very often surplus to freeze for the winter months. If left to their own devices though they get overcrowded, begin to crop poorly and become prone to viral diseases and gall mite. …

Green Roof for the Chicken Coop

Every now and then I’m given a chicken house to put through some field trials and as a consequence I can end up with quite a few ‘buildings’ covering the field. It was on one such coop I figured I try a different kind of field trial by sticking a green roof on it. Why not, …

Homemade Fertilizers – Comfrey, common nettles & chicken crap

The use of fertilizers in the garden is an essential part of having a successful productive garden. Growing crops or plants uses up minerals in the earth and over time the soil will need replenishing. This need not be via the many chemical fertilizers, but by a more natural eco-friendly approach using ingredients can either …

Fence Pole Table (to go with the Fence Pole Bench)

A bit ago on this blog I showed you how to knock together a cheap but very weather resistant garden bench using fence poles and some yorkshire board using nothing much more than a chainsaw, a hammer and some nails. Well heres another simple DIY job with more fence poles & board, again using little else then a hammer …

Apple Tree Recovery – Pruning & how to revive an old tree

When we moved here some years back we were presented with quite a wilderness. The house was just about to reach at least its second dereliction in as many decades and the garden was in need of some serious help to try and bring it back to some semblance of order. A previous owner had …

Wheelbarrow compost riddle & drying tray

With having a fairly large productive garden and more chickens than you can shake a stick at, we create quite a bit of garden waste, though far from ‘waste’ it is, as we compost just about everything we can. We do this not only to supplement the vegetable plot but also to create our own …

Build a bird box!

This is a part of an old article I wrote some years back but on the request of a twitter friend Heather Wilde of @KidsNorthWest I'm uploading it here as she's holding a bird box building party soon so hopefully she'll find this timely and useful 🙂 Birds are an integral part of any garden, be it …