I first started gardening as a research student working on how plants grow. Then we bought a small holding in Shropshire for a while before we discovered computers and marketing. 20 years later we started selling plants on-line.
Expansion meant we needed premises - so we acquired a nursery with 2 acres of glasshouse and started growing organic vegetables again. By September 2008 we had our soil association certification and had started selling biological controls online.
Talking to people on farmer's markets I sense a real hunger for people to garden and produce their own food. And a real interest in local and pesticide free produce.
So we created the Intelligent Garden ito help you get the most from your garden by offering the knowledge, products and advice you need to work effectively with nature to release the intelligence in your garden.
Company Registration 5003969
Vat Registration: 826 8892 74
Reg Office The Glasshouses, Fletching Common, BN84JJ
If you want to grow better vegetables, enjoy a natural environment or understand better how to work with nature in a practical way – then you’ve come home to the right place.
You can find a lot about how plants grow, what they need and how to get the best out of your garden.
And you can access the tools you need to assess how things are going and the support that the plants need to give you the vibrant outdoor space you want
After all there’s more to gardening than just chucking on some compost and hoping for the best. You can draw upon our knowledge as commercial organic growers to get the best out of your garden and have access to some products like horticultural soft soap, mycorrhiza and plant feeds and the biological controls that we use ourselves.
Thanks to those wonderful people at paper.li we have our own daily newspaper.
What this brilliant little tool does is take a list of people that are being followed on twitter (I exist there as @intelligarden for this purpose as well as my main @alanrae handle) and turns whatever links they tweet into a daily newspaper. Since I’ve spent a bit of time following Organic and Permaculture organisations, the usual suspects from Gardener’s World plus the NFU and Horticultural Week there should be a good and interesting mix of stuff to read.
The widget is here for now but I’ve embedded it at the top right of the site’s front page as well – so all you’ll have to do is just bookmark the site and check it out everyday. As a service to the readers I think it’s pretty good.
Let me know what you think – and anyone that you think should be followed.
This is perhaps slightly off topic but this has been a really strange year down here in Sussex. We had no rain for nearly three months and it was noticeable that the behaviour of the wild life really was pushed to the edge of it’s envelope with squadrons of magpies and woodpeckers pecking nine bells out of the lawn.
Once it started raining of course, three to four weeks on the grass is as lush as ever while we’ve having bumper crops of plums and apples.
But the amazing think is how the drought plus rain formula has brought up the mushrooms. I’ve never seen so many different varieties all bursting out of the ground. Here’s a picture of some parasol mushrooms taken in the field next door. They’re quite big – a good 9 inches across and about the same in height These are supposed to be edible – I had some with bacon for breakfast this morning so I’ll let you know if I survive!
Despite people being off on holidays we’ve been out and about supporting the Air show in Eastbourne and the new weekly farmer’s market in Lewes.
The airshow meant we did 4 days on the seafront promoting Plants4Presents and watching the Red Arrows and the Battle of Britain flight – neither of which I’d seen before and both of which were really worth seeing – the Red Arrows really are amazing. Here’s a pic of part of the stand.
Plants 4 Presents at the airshow
The other main outings we’ve made are to the new weekly farmer’s market in Lewes. This has been organised by the local Transition Town group and has become really well supported.
As well as the usual artisan bread, organic cheese and meat and home cooking there are no less than 3 vegetable stalls.
The one we’re involved in is a collaboration between ourselves and two other local organic growers, Ashurst Organics who run a Box Scheme of their own that we supply with produce and Noannah who’s also – like Ashurst – based in Plumpton. We work with Noannah at the Hassocks market also which is the 4th Saturday of the Month.
We found that works well to collaborate like this as we only have to run the market every third week. We did last week and we’re on again on the 10th September.
The other advantage of collaboration like this is that we can provide a much wider range of produce than any of us would be able to do on our own. Here are a couple of pics of the market and our stall. Hope to see you out and about – next solo market for us is Uckfield on 4th September.
Red Spider Mite and Chafer Bugs are this month’s threat to your garden.
Stock up with friendly predators to get them before they eat your plants and lawn! You can get them via our sister site www.ladybirdplantcare.co.uk.
Spider Mite is rife this year
Spider Mite Damage
Spider mites cause havoc in hot weather. Recognise the cream marbling on the leaves which leads to dieback of your shrubs.. Our predator pack contains Phytoseilus persimilis, – tiny creatures almost invisible to the naked eye. They hunt out the spider mites and continue to eat them up all summer long. more about controlling spider mite
Chafer Bugs kill your lawn
Chafer Bug Larva
Chafer bugs attack in August and September, particularly in a dry summer like this one. They leave ugly brown patches in your lawn where they’ve eaten the roots.. The birds and animals they attract dig holes in your lawn trying to get at them and cause even more damage. Our predators will help save your lawn,
We tackle these pests with specific nematodes or eel worms that attack and poison the bugs. We supply it as a paste which you simply water onto the affected areas.
This was created by artist Angela Palmer who incredibly got permission to export 9 bases of giant rainforest trees and mount them as an exhibition to demonstrate what destroying the rain forests means. They were secured from a sustainable forest in Ghana and the exhibition was originally staged after enormous logistical problems in Trafalgar Square and then at the Copenhagen climate change conference.
I wanted to see it in London but missed it. However, I had the great good fortune to be in Oxford last weekend and discovered that the whole thing had rocked up outside the Pitt Rivers Museum, just by the University Science Labs.
Here are just a few pictures to give you the flavour.
It’s on until the end of the month. If you get the chance go and see it!.
Here at the nursery we grow organically – we have a wide range of produce that changes with the seasons and that grow in the ground. We are growing 3 types of tomatoes – our favourite is Maskotva which has a good flavour, is a low spreading bush that just sits on top of the Mipex and best of all is a super early cherry tomato that gets in well before the blight – we’re surrounded by Common Land here and prone to all kinds of fun fungal infections.
Last night by contrast, thanks to my involvement in the Horticultural Workforce project I got to go round the Tomato greenhouse at Thanet Earth.
This is 11 Hectares of tomatoes under 1 massive venlo glass structure.
The tomatoes are grown in rockwool (hydroponically) and they grow alternate blocks on inner wires and outer wires. They grow about 11 varieties specified by the supermarkets and each plant consists of 2 vines grafted onto a rootstock. The vines are draped around and then go up the wires reaching a length of about 15 meters. The stems are defoliated as the fruit is removed. As the outer vines reach the end of their lives the inner ones are started off – the defoliation allows enough light to make it work – the glass is optimised to allow maximum light – no frames etc. This means they’re able to crop every week throughout the year providing heat and power from an onsite CHP system which also produces CO2.
The site uses 50 hives of bumble bees a week (we’ve used 1 this year!) and uses Macrolophus as a predator to deal with tomato leaf miner, white fly and red spider mite. Macrolophus is not part of our standard range but we did try them a couple of years ago and they did spectacularly clobber the flea beetle that were munching our rocket.
It’s always a delight to see what other people have done. Hydroponics is not what we’re into here but the engineer in me thought it was fantastic – a really clever way of boosting tomato production.
One of our sister sites is LadybirdPlantCare which specialises in biological controls – or “integrated controls” as our non organic buddies call them.
Plug into your computer and go!
This basically sells bugs to eat other bugs – nematodes to eat slugs, lacewings and ladybird larvae to eat aphids, and a whole host of others to attack vine weevils, leather jackets and thrips, sciarid and whitefly, mealybug and scale insects. If you would like to know more about these then ask via the enquiries form and I’ll send you our little booklet on the subject. Ask the Intelligent Garden here.
One of the things it says is that at this time of year, you might be wanting to damp down the greenhouse so that its humid to help the beneficial insects. Topping up the numbers of predators to deal with aphids and red sspider mite might also be worthwhile. Next month you will need to be applying the chafer and vine weevil controls.
So what do they look like – here are a couple of vids taken courtesy of our Gardener’s Microscopes. These handy little beasts plug into your computer via a USB cable and enable you to see what’s going on – you can save little movies like these. You can buy our Gardener’s Microscope from our Amazon Site for £45.
Down here where we are in Sussex, it’s getting pretty parched – it’s not so bad for us in the glasshouses because we have all the irrigation on hand to keep the soil in good shape, but some of our neighbours are really suffering from having a wet spring followed by now about 6 weeks without rain. Even our trusty mulberry looks as if it’s taking the strain a bit.
HOzelok's wonderful gadget
The misery has been compounded because needless to say it was this summer we chose to remove the swimming pool and replace it with a nice dished lawn area. This means that we have about 100 square meters of bare earth to cover – all at the mercy of pigeons and baby rabbits. So in order to get it going I’ve been using this amazing little gadget from Hozelok. Since we don’t sell these I don’t have to put up a shameless plug alert – I can just tell you about it. It was around a tenner (which means I don’t remember whether it was £8.95 or £12.95) and it just clicks onto the end of the hose in the usual way.
But it has 8 heads – you can do full or half circles – either as sheets or as sprinkles of water, – a square, a jet and my favourite which creates a mist over a 2 x 5 m area.
I have to say its brilliant and well worthy of induction into the Intelligent Garden hall of fame. I expect they’re pretty widely available – I blush to admit I bought mine in HomeBase.
Today we’re visiting the Garden of Mr and Mrs King which is notable for having a complete food production ecosystem in the middle of one of the most unspoilt villages around and just a stones throw from the famous Griffin Inn which has arguably the best pub garden in the Universe.
Their garden has plenty of tranquillity near the house but as you get down the deep end there are pigs, chickens and some highly productive veg. They even have one of the intelligent seats from the last post – so it’s not all digging and delving. They’re not alone of course – several of the other gardens ran to hens and there were plenty of raised beds and potagers about.
It’s really interesting to see how different the gardens are – one even has its own observatory while Clinton Lodge which we’ll have a look at soon has many different garden”rooms” and can be visited via the NGS scheme.
But if you want to see the Good Life in action you’ll have to wait till the next Garden Trail next June – in the meantime here are some photies to be going on with.
Next Post we’ll cover something about how plants grow.
One of the things that really struck me when we went round the Fletching Gardens was how many different types of seating had been constructed – some used a grass bank, others had frameworks of willows around them. Here are some of the ones I particularly liked.
Mr Burchall's Hammock and Woodstore
Willow Bower in production
Peace in the Orchard
A secluded Nook
Turf Bench Clinton Lodge
Shady Bower - Clinton Lodge
I hope you find some of these interesting and inspiring. I’m going to have a crack with doing something intelligent with Willows next winter – we’ve got a whole lot growing up that are masking the woodshed which I think I may be able to use.
Plenty more from Fletching to show. Next Weekend its our home village open garden day at Newick on the 27th. We shall be there on the village green with a Plants4Presents stall. If you’re in Sussex on Sunday come and see us.
We’ll have plants and vegetables for sale and we’ll be able to chat to you about any gardening issues you may have
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