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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

easily access buildings•    they carry Weil’s disease, which is potentially fatal to humansI paid close attention to my garden and realised I had to act when I spotted Ratty mopping up split niger seed from the bird feeders in broad daylight

Two years, I felt the need to grow a local, native plant in my garden. I gathered rosehips from a field rose at the edge of a nearby canal, soaked them in water and sowed the seed in coarse compost.The pots sat in a corner of my patio, doing nothing

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

the birds, but also make a delicious ketchup.I won’t consider which fruit and vegetables I’ll grow just yet. Perhaps that’s a blog for another week.Which plants would you grow in your dream garden, and why?

, 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

respectively).While I'm not going to enter the record books for growing the tallest sunflower, I reckon I'm in with a chance of setting a new World Record for The Greatest Number Of Hoverflies You Can Squeeze Into A Four-Metre-Squared Garden. Everywhere I look

invertebrates to amphibians, hedgehogs and even birds. A stumpery is similar to a log pile, but you can have a bit more fun with it. It consists of upright logs half buried in the soil, allowing moss, lichen and fungi to grow. Some gardeners plant ferns

, 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

frosts.My garden in East London hasn't seen rain since before Christmas. We've had snow, of course, and the promise of rain - dark clouds, even a thunder storm, but no water (we did have a two minute shower last Friday but it by the time I recognised