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, restaurants, and - ahem - bird tables.I'm not sure how I'd feel if I attracted rats to my garden. I don't mind them (that is to say, I'm not offended by their existence) and I'd never kill one, but I wouldn't like them in my garden (it's only 4m², after all

with the garden wildlife, or at least I liked to think so. I remember my dad waiting for the blue tits to leave the nest box so he could quickly lift me up and show me the baby birds inside. Once, aged two, I found a worm that had been pecked at by a bird, so I

If you're bearing a grudge against your neighbours, one way to exact revenge is plant a leylandii hedge in your garden. Left unclipped, it could grow to up to 35m high and 5m wide. It will be a haven for garden birds, insects and even the odd mammal

and food miles. Reducing, reusing and recycling gardening sundries and using sites like Freecycle result in less waste going to landfill. And then there's the peat issue. Peat bogs lock in CO2, preventing it from escaping into the earth's atmosphere, so

I'm not one for manicured lawns. I think lawn weeds are pretty. I'd really like clumps of bird's foot trefoil, dandelions, daisies, creeping buttercup and self-heal growing among the grass in my garden. In fact, I've just planted some clover

, not like the fat, flavourless cherries currently in the shops. Even with attention from the birds there was still plenty for us.Of course, not every foraging trip or cookery experiment works brilliantly the first time. Once my mum and I gathered rosehips

, that badgers and birds won't dig up looking for grubs, that dogs won't ruin with their scorch marks. And worm casts? What worm casts? Lawn life as we know it replaced by a carpet of convenient, sterile 'turf' -  like paving slabs in disguise.But what is a

of this Chelsea perfection in my own garden. But then it wouldn't be mine. I like my scruffy, battered, half-eaten plants. I like the fact that there are caterpillars available for the birds to feed their chicks with, though I could do without the pigeons

I've had a great gardening year. It's hard to imagine my garden now as it was a year ago - a building site, with a huge pile of sand at one end and 200 paving stones and builders' rubble at the other. Then there was an awful lot of mud as we

What a spring we're having. Provisional Met Office reports suggest April was the warmest on record. It was also the 11th driest, based on average rainfall across the UK. Scotland's rainfall has been 110% above normal levels, while the South-East has