Category Archives: Spring

Making living salads from the supermarket last longer

Spring

The variety of living lettuce salads you can buy are lovely in both colour and taste. If you trim off the leaves carefully, but not snipping to close to the top of the stem, you can use the plants as a cut and come again plant. It won’t work if you keep them in the little trays that they are packaged in, instead you should plant them out into pots, troughs or your veg garden area. To help them establish and get over the shock of living outside, we have mixed a little of the ecofective® Rootplus within the planting hole. Also, the slugs and snails will be attracted to them but a barrier of the ecofective® Slug Defence granules will keep them safe.

Boosting and Protecting Young Plants

Spring

This month of May has flown by, and with fine weather too. At the end of April everything in the garden was way behind due to the unusually cold spring, but over the past three weeks plants, blossoms and flowers have erupted into a colour palette of greens, pinks, blues and creams. With the danger of frost now past (fingers crossed!) we can plant out bedding plants and vegetable seedlings.

You can see here pansies that are perfect for baskets and tubs. They also suit flower bed edges, near to the path or lawn. As they get established I’m going to add ecofective® Wonder Feed to my watering can and give them a feed once a week to ensure vigorous growth. The bio-stimulants within the feed encourage nutrient uptake and enhance plant development so I’m expecting to see abundant, vibrant flowers. The formula is organic and safe to use around children, pets and beneficial insects too. I’ll keep you posted on how they progress.

I’ve also been busy planting out these little seedlings. These ones look a little straggly, but I’m determined to give them a fighting chance.

At this stage of growth, they are really vulnerable to slug attack, but if I protect them with a barrier of ecofective® Slug Defence granules then they’ll have a much better start. The granules work as a deterrent as the slugs and snails do not like moving over them, thus protecting the plants. Again I’ll keep you posted on how the seedlings get on.

Spring is here? Not quite

Spring

Spring has sprung and with it comes the new Greener Gardening blog. I love gardening and sharing my ventures with fellow green fingers. But the recent wet and cold weather has made it tricky to get out planting. The ground has been left waterlogged and so cold that planting seeds or seedlings would have resulted in nothing at all growing. Listening to Radio 4 the other day (yes, this green gardener is of a certain age but young at heart) apparently gardeners’ have been despairing of ever getting out into the garden. BUT the weather has now changed…hooray! We’ve had glorious sunshine this week and it looks like the cold weather is well and truly behind us. If the weather remains dry this weekend I am going to seize the moment. I want to get on with clearing some areas of the garden of weeds. Time is precious, for all of us when the weekend comes, so I am going to spray with ecofective Weed + Moss Killer. This product has been formulated with the environment in mind. It uses acetic acid, a component of vinegar, as a natural and effective ingredient, making it less harsh than conventional chemical based products.

You can see from my photos that these weeds would be tricky to remove by hand/trowel so the handy 1L spray is perfect for the job. You can also see that it has been raining so I won’t be applying the spray until that dry weekend day.