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pretty garden and home-grown veg.Starting indoors, there's a propagator, containing seedlings of basil and garlic chives, which are in dire need of transplanting. I also need to pot on the sunflowers I'm growing as part of the Gardeners' World sunflower

of coming up with the name of the plant, I was instantly transported back to the kitchen of the house I grew up in. On red floor tiles just inside the pantry, next to bottles of squash and my mum's wine-making kit, was a brown ceramic vase containing dried

unnatural, and besides, I like getting muddy. On a particularly hot summer's day I grabbed a spade and plastic container and rescued the tadpoles. I got as many as I could, but it was hard as the water had by then completely dried up and they were fully

In January I blogged about 'winterkill', after letters, emails and blog comments flooded in from gardeners who'd found dead frogs in their ponds. One commenter, Wishful Thinker, suggested I blog about winterkill before winter, so people can take

, non-native pond plants. Is anyone else confused?My pond sits under a north-facing wall and is less than 1m squared in size. It has no edges as such, and sits above ground. It currently contains water forget-me-not (Myosotis scorpiodes) and some rampant

A few weeks ago I wrote about moving a bumblebee nest from a friend's garden. At the end of the blog I mentioned that I'd found a wax moth in the nest.Wax moth is a native, natural predator of the bumblebee, but it's one of its biggest enemies

the wiser.I only get pigeons regularly visiting my garden. Last winter I made efforts to entice smaller, hungrier birds, and managed to attract a desperate pair of wagtails, a blackbird, a robin and a blue tit. They disappeared as soon as the ice thawed