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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

The Gardeners' World Grow Yourself Healthy campaign is all about growing your own fruit and veg - no matter how much space or experience you have. So it's great that one of the five growing plans supplied is dedicated to growing in containers. My

I recently spent a few days in Barcelona. The orange trees growing there were laden with fruit and looked stunning in the February sunshine. I loved seeing them growing outside in the streets, though admit to having felt a pang of jealousy on behalf

).It's not just my friends, I once viewed a flat and the prospective landlady pulled out a dead tomato plant that had been growing on her window sill, asking me why it hadn't fruited. From what I could tell it was a cordon type and was planted in a 10cm diameter

Last year I had a great crop of chillies. I was so pleased with them that I couldn't bear to throw the plants on the compost heap when they'd finished fruiting. So I saved my favourite two to overwinter indoors as an experiment in chilli endurance

're usually grown in the UK as annuals, chilli plants (native to South and Central America) are perennial, so overwintering them shouldn't be a problem, if you live somewhere nice and hot. The theory is that if they survive winter, the plants flower and fruit

or espalier, try MM106 or MM116 rootstock. For larger trees, choose MM111. You can get smaller rootstocks such as MM26 and MM27, but these tend to produce a smaller crop of fruit with greater susceptibility to pests and disease.What are your favourite apple

the crop. This is because they need a long season to flower and produce fruit, so if you sow them late, by the time they flower the season has started to change and it's just not warm or light enough for them to do well. They also need a good summer - low

, while the same species in Cornwall will have adapted to salty air and a longer growing season. What's more, these important genetic differences can determine when the plants come into leaf, flower and fruit, so the same species imported from elsewhere

which he would plant two pumpkin plants. My sister and I eventually got pumpkins in time for Halloween, though mine was oblong (I didn't think he'd done such a good job).Twenty years later, I grew my first pumpkins on my allotment. I chose the F1 variety