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. 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

's not essential. By getting the tubers into the ground a little earlier you should be able to enjoy a delicious crop of first-earlies a few weeks before other crops are ready to harvest. Choose a sunny spot in your garden and warm the soil for a few days

' would look good in March, and I couldn't resist the star-shaped blooms of Narcissus 'February Gold'. I think I've just about got it covered.Daffodils will nearly always flower in their first year, but they need to be planted quite deeply - at least three

 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

Last winter, when I went to great trouble to feed the birds in my garden, my offerings were largely ignored. This winter, I'm trying again, leaving seeds, chopped apples and suet pellets for ground-feeding birds such as robins, blackbirds

a tight-pruned lime and a small cypress. Nevertheless, the city is splashed all over with natural colour as sills, walls, yards and railings are covered with pots and window boxes.Some buildings in the rickety 'old quarter' are so bedecked they look

whipped up. So I’ve been battling the elements again, trying to re-fix my cloches and pop-up covers to the ground. But the soil is so wet that the usually efficient pegs just don’t work. I’ve also had to tie in a large wild rose, whose flailing stems had

Growing pumpkins is easy and great fun. Pumpkins are rampant growers so they benefit from a large root run, plenty of moisture and regular feeding. For this reason, they are best grown in the open ground, or a large half barrel. When planning your

they cover themselves with. If you see them, scrape or pick them off to prevent them from turning into adults and causing further damage to your lilies.2.     Pick off the adult beetlesDoing this is harder than removing the larvae because they fall

rain than us. This is a stark change from five years ago, when we last visited this house and the ground was so hard I caught a mole in my bare hands because it was running helpless over the parched lawn, unable to find anywhere soft enough to burrow