Now is also a really good time to start your next year’s sweet peas, so here is our growing guide:

• you could sow your seeds next March, however we prefer to sow anytime from October until Christmas, (growing sweet peas over winter will produce stronger, more robust plants)
• sow two seeds to a pot – we usually use card toilet-roll tubes or long thin pots as sweet-peas really like a long, cool root run (as do all plants in the Leguminaceae family)
• push seeds in to about 1” below the surface of multi-purpose compost and water in well
• you can cover them with newspaper to keep the light out – if you have a heated propagator this can speed up germination but we don’t usually bother – they always germinate really well with a bit of warmth, fingers crossed, from the sun at this time of year!
• mice love the seed and could easily eat your whole crop overnight (!), so if you’re troubled by mice we suggest you soak the seeds in liquid paraffin, or for a more organic solution use seaweed fertilizer or lay holly leaves on top of the pots
• check for germination every day.  Once the seedlings appear, keep them cool at about 5 degrees centigrade – this promotes root and not stem growth. A cold greenhouse, or cold frame is ideal, but your plants will be fine in a light potting shed
• when there are three or four pairs of leaves, pinch out the leader (the growing tip) using your finger and thumb.  This will reduce the height of the plant and encourage side shoots making the plant bushier.
• try not to molly-coddle your plants too much – growing them on ’hard’ will help them to be much tougher plants and will also be less susceptible to slug damage.  Keep them in a cold frame, greenhouse or sheltered spot until next March when they can be planted out

We have some fantastic cultivars of sweet pea available at The Garden House, including L. Mattucana, the original sweet pea and quite special.  Come along on Friday between 3pm and 6pm and we can show you how we grow ours.

Our sweet peas are £2.00 for 15 seeds.  We also have the following varieties for sale:

Angela Ann – attractive almond pink sweet pea on a white back ground – it won the National Sweet Pea Societies Clay Cup in 1993.

Beaujolais – truly beautiful lightly scented flower with large rich deep burgundy maroon colour

Elizabeth Taylor – large, clear mauve flowers with wavy petals, heavily scented

Charlie’s Angel – outstanding blue overlaid lavender and very good for cutting.  Large blooms and classic sweet-pea fragrance

Geranium Pink – slightly scented salmon pink blooms

Claire Elizabeth – relatively large, scented white flowers, slightly ruffed with pink edge picotee.  Flowers age to darker shades.

Cupani - sometimes known as the original sweet pea, the oldest known sweet pea and is thought to have been sent to England in 1699 by Sicilian monk Francisco Cupani. Cupani still bears it’s original characteristics of delicate bicolour blooms and intense perfume

Diamond Jubilee –pure white flowers grown in celebration of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

Come over to The Garden House on Friday, 3-6pm, and find out more!

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

The benefit of sowing in autumn, and not spring, is that you’ll have a much earlier flowering display.  At The Garden House we sow ours over the next couple of weeks in cell trays and leave them in the greenhouse until they have germinated.  When they are big enough, about 5cm, transfer them to individual pots such as 7cm square pots and then leave them outside all winter – if really bad weather is forecast we put them in a cold frame or back in the greenhouse.

This way you get really hardy plants that flower for months on end.  We plant them out in March.  Ten plants in each variety you choose is enough for most gardens, but sow fifteen of each in case you lose any over winter!

We’re selling hardy annual seeds at The Garden House – do come along any Friday afternoon to buy seeds or plants or for advice about growing hardy annuals.  Spend time looking at our books for inspiration, and enjoy a cup of tea and some homemade cake!

To Autumn by John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Common name: Cranesbill ‘Orion’

Family: Geraniaceae

Cranesbills, Geranium, comprise a genus of around 300 species of annuals, biennials and herbaceous, semi-evergreen, sometimes tuberous perennials. They are sometimes confused with the genus Pelargonium, commonly, though mistakenly, known as geranium.

Herbaceous perennial: Fully hardy, it is in the Pratense group of hardy geraniums.

This stunning cultivar has attractive, highly dissected leaves (medium green, slightly hairy with paler more hairy reverse) that almost disappear from sight when the plant is in full bloom.

It bears large violet-blue flowers up to 5cm (2in) across, with fine dark red veins with white at the centre. It starts flowering in May and can go on until the autumn.

Height & spread: 80cm (31in) high x 170cm (67in)

Soil: Fertile, well-drained to moist

Aspect: Full sun or partial shade.  Cranesbills are found in all except very wet habitats in temperate regions. They are generally easy to grow. Compact perennials, to about 15cm tall, are good for a rock garden; trailing, spreading or mat-forming plants are effective as ground cover in a woodland or wild garden. Taller, clump-forming species and hybrids are suitable for a border or among shrubs.

Cultivation:

• Perfect for underplanting roses or filling the front of a border, coping well in full sun or partial shade.
• Water freely in the growing season. This plant is fast-growing and will benefit from a late summer chop to tidy up its habit and encourage production of fresh foliage and extended flowering.
• Plants may be damaged by vine weevil and sawfly larvae, slugs and snails. In dry conditions powdery mildew may be a problem.

Propagation:

• By seed – sow in containers outdoors as soon as ripe or in spring.
• Lift and divide large colonies in spring.

It has deservedly received the Award of Garden Merit (AGM).

After flowers have finished, cut off the spent flower stems but do not cut back the foliage. Ideally leave in the ground for 2-3 weeks as the period of time after blooming is when tulips use energy to build strong bulbs for next year’s blooms. If you cut off the leaves before they died down naturally, the bulb will not have the reserves to grow and flower the following season. Tulips, unlike daffodils, do not require foliar feed in order to build up the bulb.

With a garden fork carefully prise them from the soil. All physically damaged bulbs should be discarded.

Wash any remaining soil off the bulb and then place as a single layer in a basket or tray that has enough air move through it. The bulbs can also be stored in a paper bag. Carefully label each bag or tray especially if you have different varieties.

Store in a dark, cool and dry place that is well ventilated. Make sure that the temperature is constant. Check regularly and remove any bulbs showing signs of mildew or rotting. Shaking the bulbs in a plastic sack with a little fungicide is a good measure of prevention.

Store until autumn when you can begin to divide the bulbs and replant. The best way to nourish your tulips is to lay down a top dressing of bone meal in the autumn to enrich the soil.

• 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!

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.

Seeds are provided by the people who have grown them – volunteers and other gardeners donate saved seeds which are bagged up before the event – the seeds come in all shapes and sizes, often with stories attached!

Open-pollinated, ‘heritage’ varieties are often no longer commercially available, but are naturally well adapted to local growing conditions – as well as being tasty and colourful. At the seed swap, experienced local growers are on hand to advise on the practicalities of seed saving and growing from seed, and there are films, displays and talks to inspire you to go home and get growing.

Also on offer – seed potatoes to info on recycling and wildlife, plants and bulbs – make this an ideal kick-start to spring!

And The Garden House will be there too, with seeds, bulbs and some wonderful dahlia varieties!

For more information on the Seedy Sunday campaign, go to www.seedysunday.org

Venue: Hove Centre, Hove Town Hall, Norton Road, Hove, E. Sussex / 10am-4.30pm / £2 entrance

The name Galanthus is derived from the Greek words gala, meaning milk, and anthos, meaning flower, in allusion to the colour of the flowers. The plants are more commonly known as ‘snowdrops’, from the German Schneetropfen – this common name refers to a style of earring popular in the 16th and 17th centuries in Germany.

One of the best and boldest of the snowdrops, with rounded bell-shaped scented flowers, is variety ‘S.Arnott’ – a favourite of ours!

• Family: Amaryllidaceae
• Height & spread: 15cm (6in) x 8cm (3in)
• Form: Bulbous perennial
• Soil: Moist but well-drained, moderately fertile
• Aspect: Cool shade
• Hardiness: Fully hardy

This snowdrop is vigorous, with narrow, grey-green leaves 7-16cm (3-6in) long. It has large white flowers, which have an inverted V-shaped green mark at the tip of each inner tepal. They are 2.5-3.5cm (1-1.5in) long, strongly honey-scented and are produced in winter and early spring. They look wonderful planted with dark-leaved plants, like Ophiopogon planiscapus ‘Nigrescens’ or with bright yellow winter aconites, or carpeting the woodland floor under a flowering witch hazel.

Cultivation: Snowdrops grow well in cool shade in any humus-rich, moist but well-drained soil that does not dry out in summer.

They are prone to narcissus bulb fly, which will tunnel into the bulbs and destroy them, and also grey mould (botrytis), which will appear on the leaves but then rot the bulbs.

Propagation: Sow seed as soon as ripe in containers in an open frame, though as Galanthus species readily hybridise the seed may not come true.

Propagate by twin scaling in summer. With this technique a bulb is cut into pairs of scales, each of which produces bulblets.

Lift and divide clumps of Galanthus “in the green”, as soon as the leaves begin to die back after flowering. Replant each bulb individually, at the same level as before, in holes sufficiently wide to spread out the roots.

When all else is bare, it lifts the spirits when you spot patches of snowdrops appearing under shrubs and trees…

If you want to see many, many varieties of Galanthus growing wild (including many rare varieties) – join us on 12 February for an early spring visit to the stunning gardens of Anglesey Abbey. Truly a garden for all seasons – but particularly beautiful in February when it is at it’s most spectacular, and drifts of white snowdrops and yellow aconites add colour to the frosty landscape (details in the DIARY on this website)…

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!

A great choice is Cornus sanguinea ‘Midwinter Fire’ which has rich orange, red and yellow stems and forms a thick, suckering shrub. This cultivar looks really vibrant wonderful on a clear sunny day.

• Common name: Common dogwood, common cornel
• Family: Cornaceae
• Height & spread: Up to 1.5m x 0.8m
• Form: Upright deciduous shrub
• Soil: Tolerates a wide range of soils and locations, but prefers moist soil
• Aspect: Full sun for best winter stem colour
• Hardiness: Fully hardy to -15˚C (5F)

The original plant of this selection of Cornus sanguinea was discovered in a German garden by H. Venhorst in about 1980, but wasn’t named ‘Midwinter Fire’ until 1990.

It is a very robust shrub that spreads by suckering to fill spaces. Its winter colour is shown to greatest effect when grown in front of a dark background, also when grown with other colourful dogwoods with contrasting stem colours.

The young stems are a brilliant orange-yellow from autumn through to spring, with red tints on the sunnier sides of the stems. As the new leaves appear, the stems turn a yellow-green, bearing bright green leaves that can turn a brilliant yellow in autumn. White flowers, borne in dense flat cymes, are produced in summer followed by dull blue-black fruit.

Cultivation: Will grow in a wide range of soils and locations, but will give the best winter stem colour if grown in full sun. It is ideal for growing alongside a pond or stream as it prefers moister soils.

To maintain good winter stem colour, Cornus sanguinea ‘Midwinter Fire’ should be pruned down to 2-3 buds above the base in spring. To maintain a good framework only a third of the stems should be pruned each year, and these should be the oldest stems each time.

Propagation: Cornus sanguinea ‘Midwinter Fire’ is ideal for taking hardwood cuttings from in autumn.

To see this amazing plant in all its glory join us for our visit to Anglesey Abbey in February – see DIARY on this website for more info.