Gardening 2025

Have been enjoying the garden, helped by the [feels extravagant] purchase of a Niwaki hori-hori, which has made weeding slightly less onerous. I'm genuinely pleased with it (though need to have a "no drunk gardening" rule with it.)

Not having loads of success getting things growing this year - I wonder if I've bought shit compost (I definitely bought one bag from a supermarket).

Really enjoyed visiting a nursery in St David's, Wales, where it felt like most things had been grown in-house and were a bit behind what you'd find in many garden centres and all the better for it.

Yeah, I recognise that sense of buying stuff grown in greenhouses and it reacting badly to being left/planted out. I guess that's experience?

I've never wanted anything so instantly as that hori-hori! (I'd not heard of it before.)

I welcome this thread. I have recently acquired a garden for the first time in my life including a lawn, a shed, a lawnmower and actual plants. I’ve also learnt the lesson that supermarket compost is substandard (this one has petrol odour). I’ve also decided I like visiting garden centres, but only really if they have a cafe. My main challenge has been foxes defecating on the lawn.

I am a major crank about yard and garden stuff; I foster gently guided chaos and keep it very close to natural/organic.

I go through spurts of wanting to grow foodstuffs, with a functioning herb garden some years and occasionally a vegetable or two. This year we are working on a no-till lasagna bed, with a focus on native pollinator-attracting and bug-repelling plants.

I resist buying bags of soil, mulch, bark, compost. To the extent possible all the yard waste stays where it is (insert cranky old-man-yells rant here about the model where you pay people to take your leaves away and then pay people to bring you chopped up leaves. Nature did fine with recycling in place for millennia before gardeners, hmph.)

Anyway current stuff includes blueberries, blackberries, rosemary, basil, parsley, oregano, sage, mint.

I've always tended to focus on salad veg but have tried to grow flowers in the (neglected) front garden which has involved digging out lots of blackthorn and lots of hacking up roots.

Rudbeckia are looking decent. Echinops took a hammering from aphids before the ladybirds did their thing (planted is a bit distorted). Have planted quite a few fennel plants (generally green but some bronze) and have been enjoying how they are all a bit different (the neatest being one growing by accident in a crack in the path). Phlomis feel slow to grow but perhaps just what they do? Achillea and helenium seedlings have stayed dinky. It's been a good year for various salad leaves. French beans are looking promising. Runner beans, too.

For many years, I had several of this plant with lovely yellow flowers that flowered all year (if you deadheaded them) known commonly as "Giant Sea Dahlias". Unfortunately, they all died: Some of them got trampled maybe from passerbyers. Some of them maybe succumbed to too much dog urine (which I've tried to mitigate).

But I can't find them anywhere: the plant store that I originally got them at doesn't have any right now. They're apparently native to the Catalina Islands near LA (I live in San Francisco), but it doesn't seem like they're commonly sold.

I found someone selling seeds, so have started growing some from seeds. I have about 6 sprouted, but months on they've stayed dinky too...just barely grown an inch even though I have kept them moist and given them filtered sun. I wonder what's stalling them out.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/28/man-allotment-gardening-tools-arrest-armed-police-manchester

Really enjoyed a visit to Great Dixter but differently than I expected. Was expecting to be amazed by particular plant combinations and think "I need to go home and do that". More, the whole place just felt bountiful and abundant and it was the mass of planting that brought joy - it was differently skilled than I was expecting, maybe? Loved the giant fennel obviously but also enjoyed the seemingly "rogue" plants that popped up over the place. Enjoyed one of the compost heaps that had been planted with squash and nasturtiums (the heap itself was bigger than my own garden). Seemed to be lots of joy/contentment in the staff and volunteers, too. Also, they sold French workwear, which is always going to get bonus points.

Should I buy some tulip bulbs ... or should I spend my money on something else?

I have never seen so many acorns. We don't have a big garden, but there are oak trees planted all along the alleyway/rat run that runs along the back of our property. This year, maybe because of the hot summer and wet and windy September, they have produced and dropped an unholy amount of acorns. I spent all morning raking them up and physically digging them out of the lawn, and filled the council garden bin 3/4 of the way up. Insane. There are still a shitload left, too - on the lawn and in the trees.

Mast years are nature’s clever way of ensuring the next generation of trees. Producing fruits and nuts takes a lot of energy, so trees can’t do it every year. Instead, they build up resources and release them all at once.

The strategy is known as predator satiation. In normal years, squirrels, mice, and other seed-eating animals consume most of the crop. But in a mast year, there’s so much food that the animals can’t possibly eat it all, so some seeds inevitably escape and grow into new saplings.

https://ribbletrust.org.uk/what-is-a-mast-year/

It''s been a bumper crop for loads of things, I picked 2 kilos of sloes from bushes that were empty last year - and our (very small) apple tree fell over and died from the weight of apples!

xp the explanation I heard was the dry weather stressed all the trees and shrubs and made them fruit (and nut) like crazy in case they died.

Well, there it is. Makes total sense.

There have definitely seemed to be more apples than anyone can make use of this year - more boxes of them left at the end of peoples' driveways than usual. (Oxfordshire, UK).

I have 2 1 metre by 1 metre raised beds which I've tended to grow veg/salad in. Crop has been so rubbish this year that I'm contemplating sacrificing one of them for just growing flowers next year. It wasn't just the quantity but some of the things like squash just weren't particularly nice.

Does anyone have rec's for what to do with slugs that've drowned in beer? Like...*a lot* of slugs across a bunch of traps. Or other ways of controlling these things? Nasty.

I guess once they're drowned they probably decompose harmlessly?

This might be of interest?

https://www.rhs.org.uk/biodiversity/slugs-and-snails

Hugely irritating woman on Gardeners World this week - the "I'm not horticulturally trained but I volunteered at Great Dixter". She couldn't countenance yellow flowers in the garden - a thing that I've heard people say before. Aside from preference, is there any good reason for this?

Anyway, had got so into gardening after work that am finding the darkness weird and a bit challenging.

Would RHS Wakehurst and, perhaps, Knepp be worth a visit in January?

I've got a mate who works at Knepp. It's great. It's not spectacular to look at necessarily, but what they're doing there is pretty astonishing. I'd get a guide if you can manage it - to get a proper sense of the history and what's happening where.

You could watch the Wilding film. It's a bit of a hagiography, but it gives you a good sense of what's happening.

https://player.bfi.org.uk/subscription/film/watch-wilding-2024-online

Thanks Chinaski.