We are getting a few enquiries about box blight from customers (and non-customers) who are worried that their box hedging might have contracted the dread disease.

When we are sent samples only about a quarter prove to be suffering from box blight which probably means that it is not as serious as people think – more “scare” than “there”. Where it is box blight, almost invariably the gardener concerned followed the old saw about never clipping your box hedge before Derby Day.

We get hundreds of enquiries a year about growing fruit trees at altitude and our andwers usually start off with something like:

“Unfortunately your location sounds beautiful but (from the perspective of fruit trees) terrible. You site is high up and almost certainly windy given that you are south facing and prevailing winds are south-westerly….”

Because we are nice friendly people, we try to explain why this is a problem:

Tags: apple trees, Fruit trees

So the long hot english summer is at an end. Politely waiting for the longest (and most boring?) Wimbledon men’s final of recent times before breaking, the weather is now distinctly “showery”.

Tags: Watering

Over the years, we have often heard a story very similar to this one: a first time fruit tree owner was delighted at the sight of their trees coming into maturity, flowering beautifully and being courted by all manner of bees and butterflies before becoming weighed down with piles of slowly but surely swelling fruit.

Tags: Fruit trees