Category: Plant Care

If you’ve read our article on plants that slugs hate, you already know the first line of defence: choose the right plants. But sometimes you need to protect specific plants that slugs love — your hostas, your young vegetable seedlings, your strawberries — and you need methods that work without harming the wildlife that makes…

Every autumn, gardeners across the UK spend money buying seeds for next year — packets of tomatoes, beans, courgettes, flowers — when their own garden is sitting there producing seeds by the thousand, entirely for free. Seed saving is one of the oldest skills in human history, it costs nothing, and once you start doing…

Yellow leaves are the most common distress signal a plant can send — and the most misdiagnosed. Most beginners see yellow leaves and immediately reach for fertiliser, assuming the plant is hungry. Sometimes that’s right. But there are nine other reasons a plant’s leaves turn yellow, and feeding a plant that doesn’t need feeding can…

Here is one of the best-kept secrets in gardening: you don’t have to keep buying plants. Almost every plant you already own can be turned into more plants — for free, with no special equipment, using a technique that takes about five minutes to learn. It’s called taking cuttings, and once you know how to…

If there is one universal truth about British gardening, it is this: slugs will find your plants. It doesn’t matter if you live in Cornwall or Cumbria, if you have a neat suburban garden or an allotment. The UK’s damp climate is slug paradise — we have around 30 native species of slug and snail,…