Alan Titchmarsh shares his biggest gardening mishaps

My gardening passion started when I was about 8 or 9 years old. Each Saturday morning in spring I would head off to Woolworths with my one shilling pocket money to buy seeds. Oh the temptations! All those colourful packets! Which ones to choose? I could buy several for my shilling. On one particular packet the illustration showed huge heads of bloom described as ‘plentiful and fragrant’. It looked very much like the hydrangea my mother cherished and it would, said the packet, flower within a few weeks of sowing. Home I went and sowed the seeds in a sunny patch in the garden as instructed by the packet. Up they came. I watched and waited until they did, indeed, flower. But they were nothing like the hydrangea-sized plants the illustration on the packet portrayed. They were barely 3in high. The name was new to me: alyssum.

Right plant, right place

We moved house when I was sixteen. I had been at work on the local nursery for a year by then and was happy to take charge of the garden. For years I had longed for a golden weeping willow tree. Now I would have a chance to plant one. The garden was on clay, just the sort of moisture-retentive earth they loved! Ours was not a large garden but there would, I reckoned, be room for a weeping willow. That autumn, old Mr Mackenzie the local nurseryman, dug up a 6ft specimen for me and I carried it home with its roots wrapped in hessian. So proud! My first tree! I planted it. It was far enough away from the house (I knew not to plant it too close) but I had not registered the nearby drain cover. When the sewerage pipe was eventually filled with roots and the effluent decided to back up onto the garden…well, the willow’s death knell was sounded. Shame that. It would have been a lovely tree one day.

• Trees that can be planted near houses

Always ask!

Within my first few weeks at work I had accomplished all sorts of tasks. I had learned, at this time in the early 1960s, how to water properly - tapping the clay pots with a small wooden mallet to see if they were wet or dry: dry ones would ring, wet ones would give rise to a dull thud. I had learned how frequently to apply liquid feed (every Monday) and how to scrub greenhouse paths (every Friday). I thought I knew how to disbud carnations, which was what the foreman asked me to do to around fifty of those plants scheduled to provide a floral decoration in the town hall. I set to work. Half an hour later the job was completed and the foreman returned to see how I had got on. His face fell. I could not imagine why he looked so shocked. I had disbudded the carnations. I had taken all the buds off. That day I learned that disbudding involves taking off the smaller buds below the large central one and leaving that bud intact to concentrate the plant’s efforts into making one larger, more spectacular flower. Well…I know that now…

A handy wind indicator

Sophisticated gardeners have a weather vane which will tell them the direction of the wind. I had no such equipment on the nursery when it came to ventilating my greenhouses on the leeward side, but I had read that if you put talcum powder in a kind of loose bag made from your hanky (I still have a hanky in my left-hand trouser pocket to this day) and gently shake it, the powder falling through the weave of the cotton is so light that it will demonstrate to you the direction of the wind. I had my hanky at work but, unsurprisingly, no talcum powder. No problem; I would use John Innes Base Fertilizer. It was powdery. Just the job. It sort of worked, but not as well as the talc. I shook it out of my hanky and carried on working. Later that day I had cause to blow my nose. Lesson learned: John Innes Base Fertilizer wreaks havoc with your sinuses and makes your eyes water like hell.

Wildlife gardening…

When we first married, I took on an allotment down by the local church. It was an idyllic scene: serried ranks of plots replete with beans and broccoli, cabbages and cauliflowers, potatoes and parsnips. A bucolic paradise. Across the stream at the bottom of the plots was a field of cattle. Oh, it was like a Constable painting and every day after work I would cycle down there, concentrating on keeping my rake and hoe clear of the front wheel’s spokes. On one particularly blissful June evening I arrived at the allotment to discover a scene of carnage: one particularly adventurous cow had found a gap in the barbed wire fence and had forded the stream to explore my allotment. It wasn’t what it had eaten that was the problem, (or the manure it obligingly deposited) it was the havoc of its hoofprints that took some eradicating. Have you seen how deeply a fully grown cow can sink into well-cultivated and well-manured earth? It's around 45-60cm. The farmer very kindly repaired the fence.

Dainty footwork

Our first house was a tiny end-of-terrace cottage. When our first child came along I vacated the second of the two small bedrooms and made my ‘office’ in a rather neat 8ft x 4ft shed at the bottom of the garden. I am embarrassed to say that the 15ft x 40ft garden was finished before the first room had been decorated but that – I explained to the lady I could now call Mrs T – was what gardeners did. The garden had a greenhouse, the aforementioned shed, a small lawn and flower beds and a polythene-lined pond that ran the entire width of the garden. It was crossed by a narrow plank bridge. I had a ‘baby alarm intercom’ fitted in the shed on which my wife could call me in for lunch, or to answer a telephone call. It was one such call, which came at twilight on winter’s evening which led to my downfall. I missed the bridge and attempted to walk on water. I failed. I rang back the understanding caller a little later. I bought a torch.

Make do and mend…

Before I went fully organic, around 40 years ago now, I would look to alternative means of pest control which did not involve the use of noxious chemicals. To that end I had read that soapy water was good at getting rid of greenfly. Worth a try I thought. The trouble is that no indication was given as to the recommended strength of the suds. I reasoned that it would have to be pretty strong so I frothed up a mixture and gave it a go. It got rid of the greenfly. It also got rid of about fifty percent of the leaf area – each one was full of holes, as if somebody had sat beneath the tree and taken aim with a shotgun. I let the ladybirds and lacewings get on with pest control now and in extreme cases I use a sharp squirt from a hosepipe. My trees are grateful.

• Alan's guide to organic pest control

Comedy carrots

In my early days of veg growing I had the dickens of a job growing decent carrots. Every darned one of them would come out looking like the lower half of a circus clown with distorted baggy bloomers. I had not over manured the ground; what was wrong? Eventually the penny dropped. My soil was, I had to admit, rather stony. Every time the root of a carrot dived deep in search of moisture it would hit a stone – even a small one – and divide in two, or three, to pass either side of the obstacle. I found some old floorboards and made a rectangular enclosure 4in deep which I laid on top of the existing soil and filled with sieved earth. I sowed my carrots, and for the first time they turned out like…carrots! It is, as the advert says ‘simples’.

The Chelsea chop

It comes as something of a relief to describe someone else’s mishap. I found myself in the company of a friend who was giving me a guided tour of their rather grand garden during high summer. And it really was a delight. Then we came to the cutting garden, where we encountered the new head gardener standing in a bed of delphiniums – one of the owner’s favourite flowers. We asked him what he was doing. ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘At the end of May I gave these delphiniums the Chelsea chop so that they would flower later. They’re still not showing any sign of bloom.’ The owner and I looked at each other and then informed the head gardener as gently as we could that delphiniums were not, unfortunately, suitable candidates for ‘the Chelsea chop’ – regularly used on the likes of phlox, nepeta and rudbeckia to delay flowering until later in the summer. Delphiniums, you will know now if you did not know before, are unlikely to recover from such a body blow. Well, may be some time in December, but by then…

Crackpot idea

We have, in front of our house, seven very large terracotta pots – waist-high they are – in which I grow seven ‘lollipop’ yews. They have been in residence for around 20 years now. A long time, I know, but we feed them regularly and trim them once a year. I spoke to the company who sold me the pots and remarked on the fact that we loved them so much. You do take out the plants, reduce the rootballs and repot them every three years or so don’t you?’ they asked. ‘Er, no’ was my reply. Six of the pots are fine, and so are the yews. But for some inexplicable reason one of the pots has cracked. Frost? Root pressure? I priced up a new pot to replace it. I dare not tell you what it would cost. I have put a circle of stout galvanised wire around the offending container. If anyone notices it, tough. I call it character…