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- organic home-grown plums to eat straight from the tree with enough left over to freeze and cook during winter. My 'Victoria' plums are swelling nicely, so I just hope they have the flavour to match their appearance.Crops have certainly been affected

should net the trees, but they're growing in such a difficult place it would be more trouble than it's worth.Our plum and gage trees, however, are laden with fruit – so much so that the heavy crops are bending branches. Sadly, the quality of fruit

by brown rot. They were still delicious, though. The first plums were all harvested yesterday as they too were targeted by wasps.There has been a steady flow of blackbirds into my greenhouse - presumably after the tomatoes. I really adore blackbirds

time, our damson tree has cropped. This seems to have been the best year for growing stone fruit in ages - the crop is enormous. Just today we were harvesting damsons, filling trugs to the brim with soft, superbly tasty fruits. It was worth the wait

This year I'm determined to only grow one variety of tomato. This is because my garden was overrun with tomato plants last year and I couldn't get onto my patio for growing bags and poorly staked cordons. So 2011 will see a more streamlined effort

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

's Delight' is great for eating fresh in salads I'm looking for something meatier to cook in soups or sauces, so for this my tomato of choice is the large Italian plum tomato called 'Roma'. It's fat, fleshy and very productive when grown outside in a sunny

-trained plum. It forms quite a thicket, with stems growing 3-4m long by the end of summer, so it does need a bit of space. Tiny white flowers will form on the stems that developed into fat green pods. Picked small I throw the whole pod into stir fries, but when

and cooking crops. Do let us know in the comments section of this blog if there are any harvesting tips you'd like us to cover.Finally, do join me and a host of other experts on the ‘Grow Your Own’ Garden at BBC Gardeners' World Live (15-19 June 2011) for more