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've listed some of my favourite fruits below.Plants grow up to 1.8m and bear sweet berries from July. Best suited to large, sheltered plots.Good soft fruit varietiesBlackcurrant 'Boskoop Giant'Grows well in shade and on heavy soil. It forms red berries

and sweeping grey and black whiskers at both head and tail ends. They'll eat almost anything, even tough poisonous cherry laurel.And that's the other thing about most insects, it is the larva that is the long-lived stage, spending weeks, months or even years

Sometimes wildlife crosses the line between welcome resident and unwanted nuisance. Perhaps it's my own fault for providing temptation, but when you grow your own fruit there's always something tempting on offer.Blackbirds certainly have an instinct

Good morning and happy 'Grow Your Own' Week to you all.There are, I have to admit, many other gardeners who are hotter on vegetable growing than me. Give me herbaceous borders and I can muddle through and make them look pretty good, but when

than Allium species. Then they send up tall slender stems (about 1.2m) topped with a tight bud, shaped like a torpedo. Over the next few weeks this bud gets fatter and fatter, while the membrane holding it in gets thinner and more papery. Some of you

, for those of you who have not met it before, is the most phenomenally over-the-top cherry tree. A vast amount of frothy white blossom that is spectacular for a week or so in May.Here are the first leaves of Rosa rugosa 'Snowdon', a wildish rose that I have

. It produces sweet-tasting cherry tomatoes and has shown some resistance to splitting.Tomato - 'Maskotka'Sweetcorn grows well in the UK, if placed in a sunny position. The sweetcorn variety 'Mirai' produces three small cobs (approx. 20cm each) per plant

To celebrate Gardeners' World Magazine's Harvest Week, running from 12-18 September, I thought I'd share a few of my favourite easy harvest recipes. One of them is a salad - so isn't technically a recipe - but it's so good it's worth a mention

the year. It can reach a height of 10m.Prunus serrula, Tibetan cherryFeatured in Toby Buckland's gold medal-winning Ethical garden at BBC Gardeners' World Live 2008, Eriobotrya japonica is a small tree with large, evergreen leaves. Grown in a sheltered

and cherry laurel, but against one hoarding is a mass of ivy and it’s still in flower.Ivy is a very important late nectar source for all sorts. The bush is ablaze and abuzz with insects. Twenty or more red admirals and small tortoiseshells vie with countless