I’m A Beginner Gardener – Here’s Exactly What I’m Planting This Spring
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I’m A Beginner Gardener – Here’s Exactly What I’m Planting This Spring


This summer will be my fifth summer in this house and that means it’s also my fifth summer of enjoying my garden, reading on the grass outside with my cat on lunch breaks and trying to be something of a successful gardener.

Like all creative pursuits, gardening comes with the acceptance that failure is essential to growth but nevertheless, I’ll be planting salad leaves, potatoes, cornflowers and dahlias just to name a few this spring.

I know that I should have done some planting in the winter so that I’d see my garden blooming in the coming spring days but I’ll be honest, the chill of Scottish winters don’t exactly motivate me to kneel on frosty grass.

What I’ll be planting to make my small garden bloom

Another thing worth noting is that my garden is tiny. I live in a cottage flat, which is a popular type of housing in the west of Scotland. Basically, it’s a two-storey block containing four separate flats. It’s like a house split into four and our back garden is split with the upstairs neighbours.

So when it comes to gardening, I’m working with limited space and can’t risk taking over their space.

Vegetables I’ll be planting in March

Ideal for beginners, salad leaves can be planted in spring for summer harvesting and make for delicious, fresh summer lunches. For me, I’ll be going for just standard loose-leaf lettuce but other options include spinach, chard and rocket, according to the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS).

Have you ever tasted homegrown tomatoes? Honestly, once you have, you’ll struggle to tolerate supermarket ones ever again. I’ll be growing some Cordon tomatoes and BBC Gardener’s World advises: “Cordon tomatoes grow to a height of 1.5-2m and need some form of support, such as stout string secured under the plants’ roots and tied to an overhead frame or wire, and proprietary grow frame supports.

“You can also train cordon tomatoes on sturdy bamboo canes, trellis or to wires on a fence.”

I’ve grown potatoes before and it is an incredibly rewarding process but you are kept in the dark (pun intended) on their process for a long time so you kind of have to hope for the best until it’s time to harvest.

Potatoes can be grown directly in soil (which isn’t possible with my garden, unfortunately), in grow bags or in containers. I’ll be growing some main-crop potatoes which can be harvested after around 15-20 weeks.

Flowers I’ll be planting in March

Cornflowers are bold, blue flowers that perfectly punctuate gardens but more than that, they’re SO easy to grow. The RHS even recommends them as beginner flowers for kids to grow. Sowing them in March will bring some colour to your garden from around July-September. Lovely.

As I’m in Scotland, I’ll have to wait until frost has definitely gone before planting Zinnia as they’re very sensitive to chilly temperatures but once the warm days are definitely here, I’ll be planting them in a container, stored in a sunny part of my garden.

Dahlias are hardy flowers which is essential for our climate According to the National Dahlia Society: “Dahlias can be grown in an herbaceous border, in mixed beds, or as a dedicated dahlia display.”

I will be opting for a dedicated display in some pots with great drainage.

Are you going to be tackling the garden this spring?




From Leaf Images to Genomes: Deep Learning Reshapes Pest-Resistant Breeding | Newswise
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From Leaf Images to Genomes: Deep Learning Reshapes Pest-Resistant Breeding | Newswise


Newswise — Agricultural pest management has traditionally relied on chemical insecticides, but their overuse has led to environmental contamination, health risks, and rapidly evolving pesticide resistance. Meanwhile, natural variation in pest resistance exists within crops and their wild relatives, offering valuable resources for breeding. However, resistance traits are difficult to measure accurately, as they are often scored visually using coarse categories that fail to capture continuous variation. This limits the effectiveness of genome-wide association studies and genomic selection. Advances in deep learning provide new opportunities to extract detailed phenotypic information directly from images, overcoming subjectivity and labor constraints. Based on these challenges, there is a pressing need to conduct in-depth research on AI-enabled phenotyping and genomic breeding for pest resistance.

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and collaborating institutions report (DOI: 10.1093/hr/uhaf128) on 7 May 2025 in Horticulture Research that deep learning can substantially improve genomic selection for pest-resistant grapevine. The team developed convolutional neural networks to automatically assess insect damage on grape leaves and combined these data with genome resequencing, genome-wide association studies, and transcriptomic analyses. By linking AI-derived phenotypes with genetic markers, the study identifies key resistance genes and demonstrates highly accurate machine-learning-based prediction of pest resistance, offering a new framework for precision breeding.

The study analyzed 231 grapevine accessions subjected to natural infestations of the tobacco cutworm, a major leaf-feeding pest. Deep convolutional neural networks were trained to classify pest damage as mild or severe, achieving over 95% accuracy, while a custom regression model generated continuous damage scores strongly correlated with human assessments. These AI-derived phenotypes enabled more precise genetic analyses than traditional categorical scoring. Genome-wide association studies identified 69 quantitative trait loci and 139 candidate genes linked to pest resistance, many involved in jasmonic acid, salicylic acid, ethylene, and calcium-mediated signaling pathways. By integrating transcriptomic data, the researchers pinpointed key defense genes, including calcium-transporting ATPase ACA12 and the protein kinase CRK3, both strongly induced during herbivore attack. Machine-learning-based genomic selection models further demonstrated high predictive power, reaching 95.7% accuracy for binary traits and strong correlations for continuous traits. Together, these results show that combining deep learning phenotyping with genomics reveals subtle resistance mechanisms and enables reliable prediction of complex, polygenic pest-resistance traits.

“This work highlights how artificial intelligence can fundamentally change plant breeding,” said the study’s senior authors. “By replacing subjective visual scoring with fast, objective deep-learning-based phenotyping, we can capture continuous variation in pest damage that was previously overlooked. When these high-quality phenotypes are integrated with genomics and transcriptomics, they reveal the true polygenic architecture of pest resistance. This approach not only improves prediction accuracy, but also allows breeders to make informed selections much earlier in the breeding cycle.”

The findings have broad implications for sustainable agriculture and crop improvement. AI-driven phenomics enables rapid, large-scale assessment of pest resistance without increasing labor costs, making it suitable for breeding programs worldwide. By identifying resistance genes and accurately predicting pest tolerance, breeders can reduce reliance on chemical pesticides while improving crop resilience. The framework established in grapevine can be readily adapted to other crops and stress traits, supporting the development of automated, data-driven breeding platforms. Ultimately, integrating deep learning, genomics, and machine learning could accelerate the creation of pest-resistant varieties essential for food security under increasing environmental pressure.

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References

DOI

10.1093/hr/uhaf128

Original Source URL

https://doi.org/10.1093/hr/uhaf128

Funding information

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2023YFD2200702), the project of National Key Laboratory for Tropical Crop Breeding (No. NKLTCB202325), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 32372662), and the Science Fund Program for Distinguished Young Scholars of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Overseas) to Yongfeng Zhou.

About Horticulture Research

Horticulture Research is an open access journal of Nanjing Agricultural University and ranked number one in the Horticulture category of the Journal Citation Reports ™ from Clarivate, 2023. The journal is committed to publishing original research articles, reviews, perspectives, comments, correspondence articles and letters to the editor related to all major horticultural plants and disciplines, including biotechnology, breeding, cellular and molecular biology, evolution, genetics, inter-species interactions, physiology, and the origination and domestication of crops.