Ask ten gardeners about watering and you may well get ten different answers. Some water to a timetable. Some lift the pot to judge its weight. Others simply put a finger into the growing medium and see how it feels. The truth is that there isn’t one perfect watering routine. The plant, the pot, the […]
If you have bought a houseplant, grown vegetables, lined a hanging basket or started seeds in recent years, there is a fair chance you have already encountered coir. Sometimes it is obvious: a compressed brown block waiting to be soaked in water. Sometimes it is a plant pot, a mulch mat or the fibrous covering […]
Eleven years in the UK. One specialist subject. A community that keeps growing. There are plenty of things in gardening that arrive with a burst of excitement and disappear just as quickly. A fashionable plant. A new gadget. A growing technique that seems to be everywhere for a season and is forgotten by the next. […]
For many gardeners, the first yellowing leaves of September seem to signal the end of the growing year. The tomatoes are slowing down, courgettes are becoming less enthusiastic and the evenings suddenly arrive rather earlier than one would like. It is tempting to tidy the greenhouse, put away the seed packets and declare the vegetable […]
Choosing a growing medium ought to be one of the simpler parts of gardening. Yet stand in front of several different bags and bricks all containing coir, but with different formulations and purposes and a perfectly reasonable question arises: Which one do I actually need? The answer depends less upon which product is ‘best’ and […]
Autumn has a habit of drawing our attention upwards. We notice leaves beginning to turn, flowers fading and stems dying back. Yet some of the most important preparations for winter are happening somewhere rather less visible: below the surface of the soil. Roots may be safely tucked underground, but they are still affected by falling […]
There is something rather satisfying about preparing a coir brick. What begins as a compact, remarkably solid block can, with little more than water and a few minutes of attention, become a generous quantity of loose growing medium ready for pots, containers, seedlings and general gardening. If you have never used compressed coir before, however, […]
A healthy Monstera can be wonderfully unruly. One year it sits quite politely in the corner of the room. The next, it has produced enormous leaves, sent aerial roots in several directions and appears intent upon occupying considerably more of the sitting room than originally agreed. If your Monstera is falling over, leaning heavily to […]
Walk into almost any garden centre and you will find bags of compost stacked in considerable numbers. For generations, buying a bag of compost has simply been part of gardening. Coir has changed that conversation rather considerably. Once regarded as something used mainly by commercial growers and particularly enthusiastic gardeners, coir is now finding its […]
There comes a point in the life of almost every houseplant when its once-generous pot begins to feel rather cramped. Sometimes the signs are obvious: roots escaping from the bottom, a plant becoming increasingly top-heavy or water disappearing almost as quickly as you pour it in. At other times, a plant simply seems to have […]
