Edibles Plants. The beginning of a journey.

This is the first of what hopefully will be an ongoing series of roughly monthly blog posts detailing the adventures of a gardener on the Surrey/Hampshire border. My plan is to focus on edibles and plants with interesting history or folklore attached to them, whilst giving a seasonal overview of what my job entails.

The weather may come up too, it’s after all the one variable that is hard to influence. This year for example we had a very mild wet winter, a cool spring and a good hot summer; all of which has affected gardens. For example, locally its not been a good year for apples, this could be the trees resting after a cracking year in 2013, or perhaps the cold wet spring. On the other hand, pears, meddlers and quinces have been pretty good. My poor Morrello cherries were flowering in the worst of the weather and the flowerers just rotted…. Looking to next spring and summer this is the time for us to mitigate the driest September in 50 years by giving a good drink to any plants that are forming next year’s flower buds this autumn, the obvious examples being Rhododendrons/Azaleas and Agapanthus. I have a fare few thousand daffodil bulbs to plant over the next few weeks, and then on to planning colour schemes for tulips to go in, in October and November

So, follow me on this journey, with hope that I can share a bit of my knowledge and experience about gardening.

Enzo Montella

Head Gardener and veggie lover at Graduate Landscapes