Garden Clinic Blog

Mulberries flooding in to the kitchen? Here are some quick and tasty ways to use them.

No summer goes by in the Ross family household without mulberry jam, mulberry pie, and swirled mulberry icecream. Fancy the menu? Take Linda’s tips on growing the hero ingredient.

This classic pudding is a simply delicious taste of summer. This is the kind of recipe that reminds us how inventive the cooks of previous generations were in turning leftovers into dinner or dessert, especially bread.

A few years ago we wanted to get our gardening family together to talk about what we're growing, share secrets and exchange some of our favourite treasures from the garden. It's turned into one of our most popular events, and it's free!

Linda caught up with some school students using the power of the worm to decrease their waste, increase their vegetable harvest and raise money for their school. Here she shares some tips on worm farming.

This home-grown fertiliser contains more potash, and more nitrogen, than commercial feeds, and costs only the price of a bucket and its water. Your vegetables will love it, especially your tomatoes.

These fragrant fish parcels are tasty, healthy and quick. And as a bonus, there’s no washing up!

Flowering shrubs are the backbone of the garden. Get familiar with these beauties to add some spring bling to your garden.

Out, damn’d spot! The dark side to growing roses is fungal disease. Knowing your enemy is the first step in ridding yourself of this problem for good.

Seduced by the colour, forms and perfumes of roses, Ali Mentesh has already collected some 200 to adorn the garden rooms at Red Cow Farm. Can he choose a favourite?

Spring brings a new bunch of roses to nurseries. These new introductions are the latest in a long history of rose evolution.

Some of the best performing roses for warm climates are old favourites -and we mean old. Search out these hardy centurions for fragrance, generosity and trouble-free beauty

Years ago, on one of our early Jacaranda Cruises, a woman presented me with a cardboard toilet roll. I was a bit surprised until I saw the round pink bud inside. It was a single long stem of the‘Sarah Bernhardt’ peony. Over the next two weeks I was captivated as the bud gradually opened to a multitude of pink petals and a boss of golden stamens. I’ve been mad for peonies ever since and have admired them in peak perfection in gardens in England, Canada, USA and France, as well as in cool climate gardens in Australia.

African violets are treasured, long-lived indoor plants. Make them shine with these tips.

The key to a thriving herb garden is to give each plant the conditions it needs to prosper. The result is easy gardening, and delicious pickings. Here Linda Ross shows you her favourites and the conditions they need to thrive in spring.

For the last two years Dave Gray has been head gardener at Everglades, a National Trust property in Leura, designed and built through the 1930s by Paul Sorensen.

Here’s our pick of the best places in the world to be thrilled by the fragrance, form and sheer delight of wisteria.

Here Linda gives us her advice and plans for the flower garden this Spring. Spring is a great time for choosing shubs, admiring ceanothus and Cherokee Rose, feeding orchids, and of course picking armfulls of Spring flowers.

Here's what's new in the garden this spring.

There’s inspiration here to help expand your vegetable repertoire- in the garden and on the plate.

Perfect for spring’s changeable weather, this soup is delicious eaten piping hot and comforting on cold days, or refreshingly chilled when the sun is shining and the garden is calling.

The difference in flavour between supermarket and homegrown is most pronounced in the humblest of vegetables- potatoes, onions and carrots. Trust us, homegrown carrots are a revelation: sweet, spicy or earthy depending on the cultivar, but never bland.

The gardens at Vaucluse House are one of Sydney’s historic horticultural treasures. Anita Rayner fell in love with them at first sight; now she runs them.

Tahnee Carroll has never seen a room that can’t be made more appealing with a plant or two, as she explains in this extract from a new book on indoor plants, ‘Leaf Supply’.

Peter is presently President of the Clivia Society of New South Wales, helping to organise the upcoming Spring Show Sept 14-15. You can also find him and his amazing clivias at The Plant Lovers Fair and Collectors’ Plant Fair each year with his specialist nursery Cliveas and Rare Things.

Many ferns have a soft feathery quality that makes a great contrast with other plants - in the garden or indoors.

Rick Shepherd, head gardener at Bowral’s grand Retford Park, dishes the dirt on what goes on in the garden in spring.

Dame Elisabeth Murdoch’s much-loved garden is on the brink of its big show as spring begins.Head gardener Mitch Burns takes us behind the scenes.

When I was a child all our neighbours and friends had a large tub - generally an old enamel washing machine tub - buried close to the vegetable garden. This was the ‘brew’ tub. Ingredients for the brew - compost, manures and seaweed - were widely discussed and benefits widely acclaimed. And it turns out these gardeners were onto something!

Growing plants beneath established trees can be challenging. There’s no direct light, roots take up space and water, the soil becomes dry and compacted, and to compound the problem, the tree roots sucks up the available nutrition, leaving precious little behind.