Reader’s Top Tips

Go Gardening is all about sharing the love of gardening! Here are some of the best gardening tips from our readers who entered our recent Facebook competition.

OTHER TOP TIPS:

Insert a 10cm piece of copper wire through the main stem of your tomato plants about 10cm above the ground to prevent fungal disease. Befriend your local cycle shop. Old cycle inner tubes are great to cut up and use for securing climbing plants. Way less severe than string. Always carry a potato in the boot of your car. When you take a plant cutting dig it into the potato. The starch in the potato acts like a rooting hormone and the moisture keeps the cutting moist. Plant your plant and put a brick on the top of the soil for one month. The plant keeps moist, and grows every time. Flatten a banana peel and bury it under one inch of soil at the base of a rosebush. The peel’s potassium feeds the plant and helps it resist disease... works for tomato plants too. If you’re buying for a whole new garden, take a photo of it so when you’re in the store you can refer back to it for inspiration, and so you don’t forget anything! After I’ve finished weeding around established plants, I layer some very wet newspaper over the cleared soil and pile the weeds back on top - this stops more weeds growing in the short term and after a while turns into delicious compost. Grow potatoes in tyres filled with moss or straw. As the plant grows add another tyre. When time to harvest remove tyres one at a time. Nice clean potatoes and great for small sections too!