Dandelion resources
Get growing advice, seasonal suggestions and celebrate the joys of looking after plants.
Whether you’re nurturing tatties, cultivating herbs or sowing your first seeds in some tupperware at home, our articles, videos and photo essays will include something for you. Everything you need to give it a grow!
Dishing the dirt: Part 1
Compost, soil, dirt, growing media… These are all terms you’ll hear used in gardening circles and throughout Dandelion. So, what’s the difference, and when should each be used?
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In Season: April
In Season is our new guide to what to sow, grow and harvest month by month. If you’ve ever wondered when you can safely plant seedlings outside, which vegetables to sow directly, and what exactly ‘chitting’ a potato involves, this is the place to find out. For now, we’re giving you a flavour of what we’ll be writing about, including a whistlestop tour through the growing year. Read on to discover more.
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Top Ten Plants for Small Spaces
Not everyone has an allotment or walled kitchen garden to grow fruit and vegetables in, but the good news is that you don’t need one to grow a huge variety of edible plants. The key to success is utilising available space what’s most suited to your environmental conditions. Read on to discover the top ten edible plants for small spaces, along with some helpful do’s and don’ts.
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Top Ten Plants for Windowsills
Not everyone has a walled kitchen garden to grow fruit and vegetables, and, best of all, if the only growing space you have is inside your home on a windowsill, you can still have a variety of edible plants! Get creative and recycle whatever you can for plant containers, e.g., plastic mushroom boxes, old kitchen trays, egg boxes, etc – just add a few drainage holes and you’re set to get growing!
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Top Tips for Brand New Growers
Whether we have a windowsill, balcony, small or large garden, we all have to learn the same basic concepts of growing when we get started. Hopefully these tips will encourage you to give it a go.
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Top Tips for Plant Care
Thanks for collecting your plants at our Free For All event. The good news is – plants want to live! They really want to work with you to flourish and make lots of tastiness for you to harvest. There are just a few things to consider to help them along their way, especially as they are not out in the big bad world by themselves, they’ve got you to give them some glorious TLC.
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Pests & Diseases
In this article we’ll have a quick look at some pests and diseases on common crops, including those given away at our Free for Alls, and the current thinking on solutions to deal with them.
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Video: Top Tips for Growing
Rebecca from our Growing Team gives you a overview for new growers. Going through top plants for windowsills, small spaces and tips to get you started.
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Plastics and Horticulture
Plastics. No doubt you will be aware of the strong push away from single use plastics and toward recyclable and reusable options across a variety of industries. The problem is, plastic is a durable, inexpensive and lightweight product which does its job quite well. What can we do as consumers?
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Potato Growing Guide
Mashed, boiled, baked or chipped – however you eat them, give them a grow this year.
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Dishing the Dirt: Part 2
One part of the Dandelion project is the Big Tattie Experiment where we will be giving away 250,000 potatoes of many different varieties along with growing medium to allow people to experience growing some of their own food. Bearing in mind that the term growing medium can refer to a wide variety of products, the Dandelion team asked soil scientist Dr. Audrey Litterick to create a medium unique to the festival. Dr. Litterick researched and sourced the components in consultation with Melcourt, a leading UK supplier of growing media to the amateur and professional markets.
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Growing from Seed
Thanks for collecting your seeds & plants at our Cubes Bike Tour. The good news is – plants want to live! They really want to work with you to flourish and make lots of tastiness for you to harvest. There are just a few things to consider to help them along their way, especially as they are not out in the big bad world by themselves, they’ve got you to give them some glorious TLC.
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Growing indoors in Scotland
For those of us who don’t have the luxury of South facing outdoor space filled with productive raised beds, it can take a bit more creativity to work out what we can grow.
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My Favourite Crop: Sweetcorn
Years ago, my dad went on a mission to find *proper* fresh sweetcorn; he waxed poetic about the incredible flavour difference between fresh and store bought. Did you know that the sugars in sweetcorn start breaking down into starch almost immediately? When I learned that I decided the only way I could give him the sweetcorn he was looking for, was to grow my own.
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Harvesting Tatties
So you chitted, planted, earthed up and watered your potatoes and you’re wondering when it’s time to eat them. Depending on the variety you received (first earlies, second earlies, main crop) you may have already harvested and enjoyed the fruits of your labour. However if yours are still in the ground, it’s time to prepare for harvest.
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Your tomato crop
The height of summer is behind us and if you are lucky you will already have started harvesting your tomato crop. We still have growth and ripening ahead but it’s good to start thinking about helping your plants speed this process at this time of year, to prepare for the seasons changing.
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In Season: Autumn
Autumn is traditionally known as a time of harvest and plenty. For those of us who grow even a little of our own food, we often spend this time doing a lot of baking (chocolate courgette loaf, anyone?), preserving (pickled carrots are amazing), freezing and sharing.
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You might also be interested in
Dandelion Project
With the aim of re-establishing Harvest as an event on the national calendar, Dandelion brought together community development, horticulture, live music, learning, sustainable thinking and innovative arts practice to support the people of Scotland to sow, grow and share together.
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Dandelion Events
Dandelion culminated in in over 500 events as part of the largest-ever creative celebration of Harvest staged across Scotland.
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Dandelion Results
Dandelion's Unexpected Gardens sprang up all across Scotland and continue on today event after our programme has ended.
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