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The heat has been incredible lately. I feel like my vegetables are cooking in the ground where they're growing. I'm used to the fact that all that soft, tender foliage is like a big advert to passing pests and pathogens, but the intense heat is a

be layers of food from tall trees through shrubs down to perennials and ground cover. So starting with things like chestnuts (Castanea sativa); cornelian cherries (Cornus mas) and obvious things like apples, mulberries and plums. Then shrubby stuff like

. The photograph featured here was taken last summer during my visit to the Mr Fothergill’s trial ground, and show mizuna, pak choi and other salad leaves.Salad leaves are some of the easiest crops to grow from seed in pots: just fill a pot with compost, sprinkle

with either a piece of old carpet, some cardboard or some black polythene. Then plant the tubers, re-covering the soil with fleece or a mini-tunnel to keep them warm. The advantages of growing spuds early is that you miss the blight fungus that kills off so

 fruiting until the first frosts. The plants themselves are also daintier than garden strawberries, so they make a very pretty ground cover.You can still just about get away with sowing alpine strawberry seed this May, since the cold winter weather has put