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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

tray to keep moist. Within weeks beautiful well-rooted plants had developed, ready for planting directly outside without risk of disturbing the rootball.Following this success I've tried growing other crops in newspaper pots, including beans

It's the ‘Gourmet grower’ and ‘Allotmenteer’ packs that I'm finding most useful. Early potatoes planted this week will have produced tasty new potatoes for harvest in June, while broad beans sown outside into warm soil should have their first pods for picking

trumpets bursting open at tip of yellow courgettes are pure beauty – and yes, they are good enough to eat (deep fried in a tempura batter sounds appetising).Flowers adorn climbing beans, squash, tomatoes, aubergines, chillies, garlic chives and many more

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

A belated happy new year to one and all. May your beans be beauteous, your snapdragons sensational and your turnips on time. As I write this in the blushing dawn of the new year I feel it appropriate to come clean about something that I ought

species of rove beetle regularly turn tail and disappear into the morass when I lift off the lids. Last week I found a shiny black domed beetle about the size and shape of a kidney bean - Hister merdarius. It's very scarce, so has no common name and being

... round shrubs, roses and flowers, along the base of the hedge, around fruit trees and bushes, and over the veg plot. Beans get a good, deep mulch of compost to help conserve soil moisture, too, but it's not just water retention that mulching is good for

charming lady asked me a question about some scabby broad beans at Gardeners' World Live and I had to admit that I hadn't a clue; she gave me a very dirty look.In an attempt to improve my knowledge, I've been scuttling around my borders looking for critters

need to do less sitting, and more cultivation. But it doesn't look too bad. I can see where the recent snow has pressed the netting down over the strawberry bed, and the canes from last year's French beans have blown over. But apart from that it doesn