cucumbers Archives - The 3 Growbags

What to grow in a glasshouse

4 July 2020July 4, 2020the3growbagsLeave a comment

Caroline split up with her boyfriend when she was 20 and petulantly moved from Sussex to the Scottish Highlands. ‘She’ll be back’ we thought but no, over four decades later she’s asking for our advice on what to grow in the glasshouse attached to her new home north of Inverness (our feature pic). Luckily for her this is my specialist subject, so she’s in safe hands here. Any sort of protection which increases the warmth and lessens the depth of frost in winter whether this be greenhouse, conservatory, sunny porch or polytunnel opens up new possibilities for the botanically...

Dressing salad, cucumber soup and blackbirds

26 June 2020June 26, 2020the3growbagsLeave a comment

Hurrah! we can invite friends and family around to the garden to have a barbecue and if you’ve been attentively caring your veg plot all over lockdown, or, as Elaine has been doing, growing salad crops in pots on the terrace, now is your chance to really show off. One of the joys of growing your own is that your side salad can be picked straight from the garden, rinsed, trimmed and served in under half an hour, making you the freshest, crunchiest salad on the block. A quick forage in your plot can yield plenty of ingredients (see...

It’s all growing on! #DigYourOwnaForCorona

15 April 2020May 16, 2020the3growbags2 Comments

Most of us have been forced to slow up so let’s make the most of it what ‘lockdown’ can offer. If you’re growing veg (maybe you’ve been following our #DigYourOwnaForCorona campaign), let’s have a look at how that’s going. And what about cooking home produce? Nigel shares a fantastic parsnip and spinach recipe here, and on our daily walk we’re spotting spring butterflies and clues that hedgerows and woods have ancient origins. Veg first then. Cucurbit is the general name for courgettes, squashes, melons and cucumbers. Coming from the same family they share characters like preferring warm weather and...

Free seeds anyone? Grow-How Tips for August

10 August 2019August 16, 2019the3growbags2 Comments

‘Summertime and the livin’ is easy’, so my tasks for you this time are of the more relaxed kind – a little gentle seed-collection, pruning the rambler roses, some feedback from earlier topics…. Nothing too demanding, I trust – you’ll have time to relax and enjoy these all-too-fleeting days of high summer… SEEDS FOR SAVING Lots of plants will be going to seed now, and it feels almost criminal not to be collecting this marvellous free harvest. I’m thinking of things like foxgloves (Digitalis), love-in-a-mist (Nigella), sunflowers (Helianthus), Cosmos, Allium, honesty (Lunaria), Aquilegia, Verbena bonariensis, poppies (Papaver), Primula.etc. Seeds from ‘species’ plants...