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.Cover with fleeceGrow carrots in narrow beds surrounded with 60cm-high barriers of polythene, or fine-meshed netting – this is another good way to stop the female flies finding your crop.Make fly barriersGrow carrots alongside strong-smelling companion plants

is an organic method of maintaining a natural balance in your garden, aiding pollination and keeping pest numbers down. Common plant combinations include growing herbs with roses to deter aphids, and planting alliums around carrots to ward off carrot root fly

now. They’re much more likely to germinate and grow successfully now that the soil’s warmer. It would have been a risk planting them a few weeks ago when it was still so cold.Some vegetable seeds can be sown directly outdoors now. I tend to sow only

, incidentally, is a plant that takes two years to flower from seed: it puts on leaves, stems and roots during the first year and then flowers the following summer. A lot of vegetables are actually biennial (for example beetroot, sprouts, carrots and celery

and courgette plants are extremely productive, so you'll harvest generous amounts from a smallish space. Salad leaf seeds are another good investment, as they grow fast and give useful crops from the tiniest patch, or a container.Early and late crops are another

potager – a walk-through area with beds planted prettily with vegetables instead of flowers.But if you have a conventional veg patch or allotment, with crops grown at traditional wide spacings, try intercropping. The idea of this is to sow or plant quick-growing