Pests & Problems covers common garden issues such as insects, diseases and plant damage. Articles offer practical, UK-appropriate solutions to identify problems and deal with them safely and effectively.
Tomatoes are one of the most rewarding crops you can grow in a UK garden, but they are also one of the easiest to worry about. Leaves curl. Flowers drop. Fruits split. Growth slows for no obvious reason. One plant looks healthy while another beside it seems permanently unhappy. For beginners especially, tomato problems can … Read more
Lettuce is usually seen as one of the easiest crops to grow, which makes it especially annoying when the seedlings seem to vanish almost as soon as they appear. One day you can see a neat little row of fresh green shoots. The next day there are gaps everywhere. Sometimes the seedlings are gone completely. … Read more
Spinach is one of the most useful crops you can grow in a UK garden. It is quick, productive, and easy to pick a few leaves from at a time for salads, cooking, or mixed harvest baskets. That is exactly why it is so frustrating when it suddenly stops giving you soft leafy growth and … Read more
Cucumbers can be one of the most rewarding crops to grow, but they are also one of the easiest to lose early on. When they are happy, they grow quickly and look full of promise. When something goes wrong, the decline often starts before the plant has really had a chance to establish itself. Seeds … Read more
Courgettes are usually seen as easy, productive vegetables, but the early stage can go wrong surprisingly quickly. Seeds fail to come up, seedlings collapse, stems rot, leaves stall, or young plants simply sit there doing very little. For beginners, this is frustrating because courgettes are often described as simple to grow. That is true later … Read more
Potatoes are one of the easiest and most rewarding crops to grow in a UK garden, but their early shoots are vulnerable to frost. This catches a lot of beginners out. You plant at the right time, the first green growth appears, and then one cold night leaves the tops blackened, limp, or collapsed. It … Read more
Leggy tomato seedlings are one of the most common problems UK gardeners run into in spring. You sow seeds with good intentions, the seedlings come up quickly, and at first everything looks promising. Then the stems begin stretching, the plants lean towards the light, and instead of strong compact growth you end up with thin, … Read more
Common vegetable growing problems in UK gardens are usually much less mysterious than they first appear. When crops struggle, many gardeners assume they have done something badly wrong. They think they watered too much, not enough, fed the wrong thing, picked a poor variety, or simply are not very good at growing vegetables. But in … Read more
If you’ve ever stood in your garden wondering why a plant that looked fine last week is suddenly wilting, yellowing, or collapsing altogether, you’re not alone. One of the most searched gardening questions in the UK is a simple but frustrating one: why are my plants dying? For beginners especially, plant failure often feels personal … Read more
Slugs are one of the most common and demoralising problems gardeners face in the UK. You can prepare soil carefully, plant at the right time, water properly, and still wake up to find young plants reduced to chewed stems overnight. For many beginners, this experience is so frustrating that it puts them off gardening entirely. … Read more