Category: Horticultural Consultancy
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Landscape Design for a New Build House
Need to landscape your new build house? As a Landscape Designer for New Builds may I urge you to read some pointers in my article here. A garden design for new build house needs to overcome many issues, but mainly that to do with poor soil conditions. Once surmounted then the garden can make an…
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Temperate House at Kew to be restored
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew has secured a Heritage Lottery Fund grant of £14.7m as part of the £34.3m restoration project of the Temperate House at Kew Gardens, which is a Grade One listed heritage building. The £34.3m restoration project will be completed in May 2018. The Temperate House is the largest surviving Victorian glasshouse structure…
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Fusarium Patch – Snow Mould
Fusarium Patch – Snow Mould Fusarium Patch was known as snow mould because it was most often associated with cold, wet weather in spring – damage would be revealed when snow cover melted. However, the fungus can damage turf whenever conditions are cold or frosty and wet. It has now become much more common in…
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Horticultural Consultant
Barry Holdsworth Horticultural Consultant with over 30 years experience List of Companies Work is undertaken for all garden and horticultural related issues. Below are some of the public and commercial organisations that Barry has worked with as a horticultural consultant: A selection of case studies below offer an insight into past work that has been…
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Sugar as a growth stimulant for trees
Poor root systems deplete storage reserves by up to a third, starving trees to death. But sugar may provide the help required to stimulate tree growth. Dr Glynn Percival from the University of Reading has spent eight years prompting root growth through agents from bio-stimulants such as compost tea and seaweed to water-holding gels.But when…
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Pumpkins and Squash
Winter squash and butternuts vary in shape, size and colour and many varieties tend to be vigorous trailing plants. Squashes flower and fruit later than summer squash should be harvested before the first heavy frost and then dried off and stored in a frost-free shed until November/December before starting to eat them when they have…
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Electrical weed control
A trial at Oxford Botanic Garden using electrical apparatus provided successful for weed control without leaving harmful residue. Engineering consultant Roger Balls and electrical engineer Dr Mike Diprose demonstrated success in initial trials on the rampant onion weed, Nothoscordum. The method is environmentally friendly and leaves no harmful residues. A method using electricity has been…
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Halloween and pumpkins
Halloween means high demand to buy pumpkins. One of the largest growers in the UK is David Bowman, with a 200ha farm growing three million pumpkins especially for this time of the year. Over 100 staff lift the massive crop into the warehouse to ripen then they are shipped out to the major supermarkets for…
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RHS to review judging system
The closed world of judging by Royal Horticultural Society is up for review and not before time some would say. To all those designers that have toiled away at the recent Chelsea Flower Show may well wonder why they got the medal they did, not matter what colour. As feedback is all but non-existent and…