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Plant garlic cloves in midwinter to ensure your best harvest the following summer. It's always best to buy bulbs from seed merchants that are certified virus-free and bred for growing in local conditions. You can also use shop-bought garlic, but you may find it less successful. I...

We've been enjoying potatoes since the late 16th century when Spanish conquistadors brought them back from Peru.There are three main types, named according to when you plant and harvest them: first earlies, second earlies and maincrop. Depending on where you live, you can plant p...

Sugar snap peas score top marks for taste and texture. As with so many crops, home-grown sugar snaps are much sweeter and juicier than anything you can buy in a shop. You can grow them in large containers as well as in beds, as long as they're kept well watered. A fairly sheltere...

Carrots need space to develop fully so, once germinated, go over your rows of carrots and pick out the weakest-looking vegetable seedlings to leave a 2cm - 4cm space around remaining seedlings. If you're very careful in extracting the seedling from the row, you could try transpla...

Onions are easy and cheap to grow, whether from seed or from heat-treated sets. Follow our step-by-step guide, below, on growing onions from seed (skip to Step 3 for instructions on planting out sets).Onion sets are miniature or immature onions, which can be planted out in March ...

Peas are straightforward to grow and are so sweet and delicious when freshly harvested that they can be eaten raw. There are three main types: shelling peas (where only the actual peas are eaten), sugar snaps (where the entire, fleshy pod is eaten) and mangetouts (which are best ...

beans, but this is probably more to do with weather conditions than my gardening prowess (honestly!). Still, it's always worth trying something new. Perhaps my rooted pineapple top will soon produce fruit too!

varieties to choose from I'll need some of each. And I've never tried growing asparagus. Perhaps I should try growing some next year as the whole family love eating it.But it's not just seeds. The catalogues include fruit, potatoes and onion sets, and bulbs

of flies emerges.Fruit flies (at least two Drosophila species) feature strongly, which is no surprise given the amount of apple cores, banana skins, melon shells and potato peelings we chuck in each week. Although the adult flies are only 2.5mm long

... 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