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It's Gardeners' World 'Grow Your Own' Week and I really am trying to grow my own, honest. Up at the allotment, everything's looking a bit bedraggled after the rain. The onions and garlics are looking just about OK; I'm hoping the strawberries

suffered from moisture and mould during the winter or their newly-founded embryo nests have fallen foul of bad weather at the key stage of development in April and May.There are definitely more wasps about this year so it was no surprise when an allotment

Three out of the 16 raised beds up at the allotment are now looking a bit neater, thanks to the surplus pallet timber supplied by our neighbours. The beds were certainly due for an overhaul. The lower parts of the previous planks had turned to dark

for jumping or burrowing like similarly endowed insects, nor does it seem to use them in any peculiar mating ritual. And, as my finder asked, if only the males have fat legs what do we call the females?On the allotment, spring has arrived in the form of a

I admit that we don't get up to the allotment as often as we should, but does that mean someone else can harvest the strawberries in our absence? I think not. Apart from the rhubarb, and the perennial potatoes that keep appearing, the strawberries

The first bumblebee of the year flies past like an animated boot brush. It's a huge queen of the buff-tailed bumblebee, Bombus terrestris, looking as big as a mouse as it drones about the allotment. It comes and goes several times as we're digging

It was blisteringly cold on Sunday, and the water butts were frozen over, but it was not a deep frost. So repairing and replacing the raised beds up at the allotment was relatively easy. The old scaffold planks we put in four or five years ago have

saw a note on the British Bugs email interest group that someone had found it on his allotment in Suffolk and was enquiring about its status. At least the soil is sandy there; if it can make itself at home on our heavy London clay, it can live anywhere

woodpeckers in East Dulwich, and I've noticed them more regularly over the last few years. I often see them up at the allotments by Dulwich Woods and sometimes in Peckham Rye Park. Even at a distance there is no mistaking the distinctive undulating flight

.So there I am digging up at the allotment last week and there are worms all over the place, much to the amusement of nearly 3-year-old who examines them all. We find the biggest and the smallest, the fattest and the thinnest, the reddest and the darkest. It