The Genus Garden

It’s March tomorrow and it's getting busy out there in the garden. As you can see, Joff has been pruning the roses in the Genus garden.  Here are our top 10...

The milder weather we’ve been having over the last few days has enabled us to get on with the work that was postponed by the previous week's deep freeze.  With...

What a week!  Freezing cold temperatures, ground frozen, and scatterings of snow.  Plans that were previously made to sow seeds suddenly seemed laughable and a quick mental pivot was required...

Mulching.  We’re at it again! It was only just before Christmas that we were talking about spreading compost on the flower borders.  It’s something we’re passionate about.  A decade of...

When we first moved into the cottage at Genus HQ it had a functional but extremely ugly concrete garage.  It’s the first thing we see on our return home and...

Every six months we renovate our mulched tree circles in the orchard at Genus HQ.  Weeds are removed, the edges clipped with our trusty French Bahco shears, and a top...

A day in the fruit cage beckoned this week.  The blackcurrants  have responded well to a complete cut back and renovation that we gave them in late 2019.  A wealth...

With the Genus borders planted up with tulips and wallflowers we were finally able to get on with mulching. This has been an annual operation  since we moved here over ten years...

Good weather last week enabled us to get several hundred tulips planted in the borders at Genus HQ.  This week we overplanted the tulips with the wallflowers that were sown...

It’s getting colder, the leaves are falling fast and it’s time to tidy up dead and tatty growth and prepare for winter. Protect slightly tender herbaceous plants like penstemon or Verbena bonariensis...

Ordering  spring bulbs is an exciting job.  An evening in with the fire lit, a cat on your lap, and bulb catalogues spread all around.  Perfect!!  But it’s not until...

New french doors at Genus HQ have replaced a window and necessitated the removal of a grape vine that was originally trained over it.  Groundworks had disturbed the roots, grapes...

Autumn is the time to clear up the garden and begin soil preparation and bulb planting for next spring. Tall shrubs like buddleia which will be pruned hard in spring,...

You may remember our disappointment a few weeks ago when we wrote of the sorry state of the garden at Genus HQ after the winds and rain had battered the...

Forward notes are a wonderful thing.  There’s always so much to do in the garden that without some planning important jobs would be missed.  And so it was this week...

We mentioned late season colour last time and we also mentioned that our focus was on our spring borders which have been lacklustre for the last few years. Consequently the...

We’ve been honing the late season colour palette of the garden at Genus HQ over the last few years, going from ‘not a lot’ to ‘more than enough’.  Each year...

Scion, cleft, four flap, and whip are some of the terms we’re getting acquainted with over the next few weeks; words we haven’t used since our college days! Last week...

2020 must surely go down as the gardeners’ ‘year of the cherry’.  We’ve waited years for our trees to produce a respectable crop and this year they excelled, benefiting from...

We’ve talked about the climbing plants at Genus HQ before and we’ve probably mentioned the philadelphus on the north side of the cottage.  Planted in the border some years ago...

No not the latest football scores!  We’ve already mentioned how organised we’ve been this year with our mulching and timely staking.  Another job we carried out was the much vaunted...