While an all-year-round opening is neither practical or desirable for smaller garden owners, the long running National Garden Scheme allows many proud gardeners the opportunity to show off their skills for a couple of days each year – and all for good causes.

The ‘Yellow Book’ Scheme, as it is known, was established in 1927 and so has a long history of people opening their gardens to the public. The scheme supports a variety of charities including Macmillan cancer care, Marie Curie nursing service and Perennial – the Gardeners’ Royal Benevolent Society.

We will have plants, dahias and seeds for sale.  Plus, of course, a range of delicious homemade cakes and refreshments!

Opening times: 1pm to 5pm. Come with a friend! You can also find out about the many workshops and courses that are on offer at The Garden House as well as meeting our hens and seeing the progress that we have made in the garden over the past year!

Location: The Garden House, 5 Warleigh Road, Brighton BN1 4NT

• Plant dahlia tubers (or cuttings) in March or early April, in a generous pot.  Plant the tuber stem upwards, 5cm deep, in a light, frost-free place.
• Alternatively, plant out tubers in the ground after mid-April 5cm below soil level, when danger of frost has passed.
• Plant dahlias in a free-draining, open, sunny site, avoiding overhanging trees.
• Add plenty of organic matter and apply bonemeal to the top 5cm
• Use good quality stakes – one per plant – canes are too weak.  Tie in plants loosely as they grow.
• Watch out for slugs, snails, aphids and earwigs.  Upturned flower pots , filled with straw and placed on top of the stake will attract earwigs.  Empty out every few days away from the plants.
• Remove dead flowers to encourage further flowering and mulch around the plant (spent flower buds are pointed, new flower buds are rounded).
• Lift tubers at the end of the season when frost has blackened the foliage.
• Store in a frost-free environment in sand or dry compost.
• By late February remove from storage and pot off to start into growth for cuttings.

On Friday 18 March, we’re opening The Garden House garden for the afternoon. Drop by for seasonal advice, buy plants and seeds – and we’ll have useful handouts to take away with you.

At 3.30pm we’ll be holding a FREE workshop on dahlias and how to look after them.

Also selling the following fabulous varieties:

• Rip City
• Karma Noir
• Bishop of Lancaster
• Chat Noir
• Klondyke
• Downham Royal
• Red Cap
• Nuit d’Ete
• Café au Lait
• Arabian Night

Bring a friend and enjoy tea or coffee and homemade cake.  The open afternoon starts at 3pm and finishes at approx. 6pm.  We look forward to meeting you!

Or indeed, you rear a batch of chicks in your urban garden expecting hens – and what do you get, a flashy, noisy gorgeous cockerel! We all love him, but sadly the neighbours feel less enamoured.

Although The Garden House garden is large, it is nonetheless in central Brighton surrounded by neighbours and friends who understandably need their beauty sleep and like to enjoy peaceful afternoons in their gardens.  So he had to go!

Here he is saying goodbye to Bridgette’s dad.  We think they look fine together.  You’ll be happy to know our fine cockerel is now happily ensconced in more rural surroundings joining the hens owned by local hen keeper Kerry Chilcot.

On Saturday 12 March at The Garden House we’ll be exploring the possibility of hen keeping in smaller urban gardens. Kerry will be leading our one-day theory and hands-on workshop – and discussing suitable breeds, housing and how to keep foxes and other pests at bay. There are so many benefits to be had – hen keeping can reduce your waste, provide rich manure for the garden, give great pleasure and a huge amount of fun – and of course, provide eggs for friends and family!

Well if Brazil can do it, so can Brighton (and Hove, or wherever)!  Join our Seed Bomb Workshop – on Saturday 26 March – and make seed bombs and seed smudges with Josie Jeffery, followed by a local mapped distribution walk.

Josie runs ‘seed freedom’ – www.seedfreedom.net - she recently published a book Seedbombs: Going Wild with Flowers (recently recommended by Alys Fowler in Gardens Illustrated magazine!) – and we love her enthusiasm for spreading the ecological word!

Take a wildflower seed mixture, glued together with a special mud mix, pressed and made into a ball ready to throw into a neglected area of your garden, allotment or urban corner.  There’s no need to even dig a hole – with very little effort you can beautify almost any abandoned or seemingly inhospitable site.

Flowers grown from germinated seed bombs also encourage bees into these areas, and by encouraging more bees to our urban streets and gardens they will also be available to pollinate our food crops.

Join us, it’ll be a lot of fun – and you’ll be enhancing your environment at the same time! Check DIARY on this website for more info.

There is, thank goodness, a public demand for these skills, yet the actual demonstration of them (in contrast to books about them, which are never so immediate), and the opportunity to try them out for oneself, is increasingly rare.

…when meeting examples of the new generation, I am sometimes enormously encouraged.  Genius and inspiration are inevitably in short supply, but those who have it keep coming along.  Some are passionate about plants from the start.

…but there are others, scarcely less valuable, who, having started off in the wrong direction and decided that the rat race is not for them, switch careers (at considerable material deprivation to themselves) and become passionate gardeners and careerists in gardening, when verging on middle age.  They bring to gardening an unstoppable dense of direction, intelligently applied.  And they keep coming along.

But the hands-on skills still need cherishing, their value recognised and rewarded as they deserve.” Taken from Christopher Lloyd’s book Cuttings (a wonderful book – a favourite of ours – full of musings, knowledge and marvellous insights into gardening at Great Dixter).

We at The Garden House wholeheartedly agree with Christopher Lloyd’s thinking – and will be running several courses in 2011 that teach practical gardening – fun, inspiring, hands-on and rich in horticultural knowledge!

• Second Time Gardener 8-week course; starts 2 February
• Garden DIY Workshop; 5 February
• Garden Design with Peter Thurman; starts 7 February
• First Time Gardener 10-week course; starts 21 March
• Growing Vegetables 6-week course; starts 30 March

And there will be more hands-on courses and workshops throughout the year -  check in DIARY for more details!

Garden House courses and workshops make the best gifts – consider buying a full course, or a voucher which your friend or partner can put towards any Garden House event.

We have a very exciting and varied programme for 2011, including:

• First Time Gardener course (starts 17 January)
• Learn to Knit workshop (22 January)
• Make your own Marmalade workshop (29 January)
• Garden DIY workshop (5 February)
• Visit to the Winter Garden at Anglesey Abbey (12 February)
• And many more – mosaics, hen keeping, creative plant staking, stone carving, pen and ink drawing, and how to grow vegetables…

Our 2010 course Garden Design with Peter Thurman was very successful, so successful in fact that we’re running it again (starting 7 February)!

We were delighted to receive great feedback: “Peter Thurman was excellent.  The group size was just right, not too big. Loved the day at Wisley, it was good to put the theory of the first week into a real situation and have someone explain the different planting styles to you. I think Wisley and the day on hard landscaping helped add variety to the course so each week wasn’t too similar”

So if you want to give a loved one (or yourself!) something they can enjoy in the weeks and months to come – do consider a Garden House gift…

Check the DIARY of this website for more details, and contact us at any time if you have questions – and have a Happy Christmas!

Applications for jam-making courses have soared. Preserving is a skill we’ve lost since the war as a result of having fridges and freezers. Before that preserving the bounties of our fruitful summer and autumn was a necessity. It was essential to stock up the larder for the leaner months when fresh food was scarce.

Today preserves may not be essential, but people are realising the satisfaction both in making them and in seeing them on the shelf.  We think jam-making works like a sort of safety valve – putting us back in touch with the seasons and satisfying our ‘hunter gatherer’ instincts.

Scour the hedgerows in the lanes for berries, hips, haws and crab apples to make Hedgerow Jam. The hedgerows are abundant at the moment and it is a joy to collect berries for preserving.

This weekend we held our Preserves Workshop – below is one of the recipes we made.  It is borrowed from Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall’s book of preserves…

Hedgerow jelly (makes 7-8 x 225g jars)

Ingredients:

• 1kg crab apples (or cooking apples)
• 1kg mixed hedgerow berries (see above)
• Around 900g granulated sugar

Method:

1. Pick over your fruit, removing stalks and rinsing if necessary. Don’t peel or core the apples as the peel and core are an excellent source of the naturally occurring gelling agent pectin. Just chop them roughly.

2. Place all the prepared fruit in a saucepan with 1.2 litres water. Bring gently to simmering point and simmer until the fruit is soft and pulpy.

3. Remove from the heat. Have ready a jelly bag or muslin cloth and turn the contents of the pan into it. Leave to drip overnight.

4. The next day, measure the juice – you will probably have about 1.2 litres (though this will depend on the berries used). For every 600ml juice, allow 450g sugar. Put the juice into a large pan and bring slowly to the boil. Add the sugar as it just comes to the boil and keep stirring until the sugar has dissolved. Boil rapidly, without stirring, for 9–10 mins until setting point is reached. Test this by dropping a little jam onto a cold saucer. Allow to cool for a minute then push gently with your fingertip. If it has formed a skin and crinkles a little, it’s set.

5. Skim the jelly, pot and seal as quickly as possible.

Berries that can be eaten and were included in our hedgerow jelly include: sloes (Prunus spinosa), crab apples (Malus sp), hawthorn (Crateageous mongyna), rowan berries, medlars and quinces.  Also the gorgeous orange berries of the sea buckthorn can be cooked and eaten.

Other autumn berries – not be eaten but which look fabulous in a vase – include Euonymus europaeus (common spindle), Ligustrum ovalifolium (Privet) with black berries, and Viburnum opulus (Guelder Rose)…

We hope to run another preserves course early next year – we’ll let you know when!

On Friday 29 October Henry Butler will be here to guide us ’round the world’ with eight different wines to taste from various parts of the world.  This will include fizzy, whites and reds, as well as something sweet or fortified.

Henry will guide us through different grapes, countries, styles and prices. He has a fantastic range of wines in his cellar: he is a great character and passionate about his subject so this should prove to be a fun evening!

The Butlers Wine Cellar – www.butlers-winecellar.co.uk – is a family run, independent wine shop that was established in 1979. Henry Butler and his mother, Gillian, aim to provide knowledgeable, personal service and stock a wide range of interesting, affordable wines as well as wines for special occasions.

”We try to break down the stereotypical snobbish attitude that is often associated with wine by making our service informative and fun. Wines are stocked from most countries; we tend to focus on wines made by smaller producers as opposed to large brands – wines that excite us or have a story to tell.”

The cost is £20 pp, with the tasting session starting at 7pm until 9pm.   Spaces are limited, so get into practice for Christmas and book early!

To get us all into the autumn mood, we’ve decided to open The Garden House for FREE on the afternoon of Friday 22 October.

We’ll also have a variety of bulbs for sale, also tea or coffee and homemade cake for sale (£4.50 pp). Do come along with a friend – the open afternoon starts at 3pm and finishes at approx. 6pm.

The same day, local artist Jo Sweeting will lead our evening workshop, showing us how to create a unique and personal pumpkin carving – and what could be more evocative of autumn than a carved Halloween pumpkin?

Jo typically carves stone but her pumpkins are a sight to behold!  Think of making a carved pumpkin ‘soup bowl’, a richly carved table centerpiece – or a pumpkin, beautifully carved and lit from within!

Do book now, as the course is almost full – cost: £42 (or £40 each for two people booking together) – to include a pumpkin (of course!), and a delicious light supper and a glass of wine.  The Pumpkin Carving workshop starts at 6.30pm and finishes at approx. 9.15pm.

Location: The Garden House, 5 Warleigh Road, Brighton BN1 4NT

Autumn smells different, it looks stunning (I’m thinking the drama of leaf colour change), and it’s time for wrapping up warm and putting the garden to bed.  But of course, nothing stops, we’re also thinking ahead – forcing bulbs to flower at Christmas, propagating our favourite plants, sowing hardy annuals, and planting bulbs and new plants whilst the soil is still warm.

At The Garden House we have some great autumn workshops and visits coming up.

On Wednesday 20 October, a visit by coach to Sheffield Park and Garden to savor the stunning colour change as the many rare trees and shrubs turn yellow, gold and red…(10am to 3pm / £25 pp for National Trust members and £34 pp for non-NT members).

Then on Friday 22 October we have two events:

• Firstly, The Garden House will be open from 3pm to 6pm. Do come along with a friend – we’re offering FREE demonstrations on seasonal tasks like propagation and bulb-planting, with useful hand-outs to take away with you – and we’ll have a variety of bulbs for sale, also tea or coffee and homemade cake for sale (£4.50 pp).

• Following that, in the evening, one of our favourite local artists, Jo Sweeting, is holding a pumpkin carving workshop (6.30pm-9.15pm / £42 pp, or £40 each for two people booking together – supper and wine included).  This will be a brilliant evening – Jo is an amazing sculptor, working more typically in stone – and her carved pumpkins are just so different and inspiring!

All the details of these and other great autumn/winter workshops and courses are in our DIARY…check it out!