All posts by Mark Abbott-Compton

Annual flowers, Bees, Growing Flowers from seed, How to grow flowers from seed, scented plants, Sweet Peas

Sowing Sweet Peas

When it comes to sweet peas it really is all about the scent after all the only way we get to smell them is to grow them as they have no essential oil so the scent can not be extracted and use in perfume.

Over the years I’ve grow numerous varieties and my favorites would be

Albutt Blue        Elegant and unusual pale-lavender-blue flowers on a white background, very strong scent Raised by Harvey Albutt
Jilly                         The perfect creamy white Sweet Pea with good scent Large frilly cream flowers raised by  F.C. Harris
Painted   Lady   Bi-coloured pink and white blooms. Very old fashioned glorious scent  but shorter stems
Just Jenny          A dark blue nice perfume  but not as strong as some  raised by Eagle Sweet Peas
Charlies Angel     An outstanding pale blue  sweet pea with good scent raised by Charlie Hamner.
The other option is to sow a collection of scented sweet peas
the older fashioned ones tend to have better scent
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Potatoes

Question: What is chitting potatoes

I get a lot of questions here at Learn How To Garden from subscribers and viewers. I had an interesting one recently from Claire that’s very timely

“I keep reading about chitting potatoes, what does it mean and how would I chit potatoes”

chittingQuit simply chitting is the process whereby we get the seed potato tubers to produce shoots before planting then into the ground or container.

This means the potatoes have “eyes’ small, nodes on them  where the new shoots emerge and this happens quite naturally as the temperature rises in Spring .

The interesting thing is that this process is recommended in most books but has been shown in fact to have very little, if any, affect on the earliness or weight of the potato harvest

The one exception to this is with First early salad potatoes  normally referred to as ‘New Potatoes’ as these are harvested as soon as they are of a viable size to eat and as we want them as early in the Summer as possible, letting the seed potatoes develop some shoots then planting into a bag or raised bed with warmer compost, can bring this forward so we can crop them in as little as 70 days from planting.

Conversely main crop and late main crop potatoes can take up to 140 days to mature and they are allowed to grow as large as possible and are left in the ground until the foliage wilts.  In their case there is little point in chitting as its makes no difference to yields.

To chit your seed potatoes, simply place your potatoes into a open egg box and keep them in a cool light room from February, planting out when the soil is warmer.   Remember that any foliage that is produced is susceptible to late frost and this would cause more setbacks than starting later and this is why I grow all my early potatoes in either bags or containers  as it allows me to keep them in a frost free cool greenhouse if frost is predicted.

 

Heres how  to grow potatoes in a bag

 

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Bees, Herbs, Winter Savory

Winter Savory

How to grow Winter Savory                                                                                  (Satureja montana)

There are two main types of Savory which can be grown in Gardens – Summer Savory which is an annual – and Winter Savory which is a perennial and we can grow both of these herbs quite happily in our gardens.  Winter savory can be grown even if we get quite a lot of frost and snow so making it a really useful herb.

 

satureja-montana-flowerIf you want to grow Savory the best way to think about it is if you grow Rosemary then Winter Savory will grow just as easily.

 

Growing conditions

Savory needs Continue reading Winter Savory →

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