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garden is tiny and my soil shallow, so I'm growing dwarf French beans and spinach in pots.As well as being small, with shallow soil, my garden is shady, but it gets two hours of strong sun in the afternoon, which I hope will be enough for French beans

As container-grown fruit and veg start to crop, it's important keep your eye on the ball to ensure they stay productive. I've just harvested a small batch of French beans from my late container sowing as part of the Grow Yourself Healthy campaign

.I love the way home-grown salads start off as a meagre collection of leaves in spring, then steadily grow as tomatoes, broad beans and other ingredients are ready to harvest. The watercress growing in my pond is always the first leaf crop I pick, followed

I've a confession to make: my efforts at growing veg in pots, as part of this year's Grow Yourself Healthy campaign, haven't been a great success. The French beans I sowed indoors germinated well, but as soon as I moved the pot outside, Sid

freezer will be full of rich tomato bases, herby ice cubes and blanched beans.Of course, I’ll have no time for anything else, but I’ll have a wonderfully productive veg patch and a belly full of delicious, home-grown food.So without further ado, here is my

magnet for bumblebees.There are a few green manures to sow now, suitable for a range of soil types:1. Grazing rye (Secale cereale) improves soil structure. Sow from August to November and dig in the following spring.2. Winter field bean (Vicia faba

gardener – naturally gave me the bit of garden she didn’t want: a north-facing bindweed-ridden patch of earth beneath an apple tree. There I grew courgettes, carrots, lettuce and runner beans. I harvested the carrots too early (how my mum laughed

with questions on how best to overwinter it. He's hooked.Wary of low light levels and leggy seedlings, I've set up a small lamp over my heated propagator. It looks a bit like an SAD lamp for plants, but hopefully it will do the trick. Tomatoes and broad beans

and hollyhocks, and a lone foxglove! On the allotment, we still have strawberries, blackberries, raspberries and beans.It's all very well having cheery flowers, and being able to pick strawberries and raspberries in November, but I hope this doesn't happen every

plants (such as peas and beans, clover, vetches and bird's foot trefoil) to provides bees with the best quality pollen and give them the greatest start in life. Mow your lawn less often to encourage white clover and birds’ foot trefoil to grow and provide