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Hampton Court Palace Flower Show is always a good place to look for new 'grow your own' ideas.  The Growing Tastes Marquee this year was better than ever: my highlights for 2010 were garlic and blueberries.I could smell The Garlic Farm's beautiful

When I first started growing shallots I did so on the advice of Sam, on our allotment (aged 90 he was still tending his plot twice a day). He told me to plant shallots on the shortest day and harvest them on the longest. I'm a bit more haphazard

. But the reality is that so many artichokes sold in this country are old and tough.Artichokes do take up a lot of space - about a metre per plant. But if you love their taste, growing your own is the only thing to do.  If you don't have a vegetable patch

-fruiting raspberries do need staking: tie them to a fence or wires or they will flail about.We used to grow both kinds on our last plot, but since we now have a large strawberry bed, the first half of summer is well provided for. Half of our raspberry bed contains

of September (these are especially chilled seed potatoes for autumn planting). When growing potatoes in containers it's a good idea to add some granular organic feed at planting time, since most composts only contain enough nutrients for around a month. When

Brambles are the unsung heroes of the fruit garden.A couple of weeks ago I was spring cleaning my store cupboard when I found a stray jar of blackberry jam trapped behind the mountain of marmalade. The pleasure I got when we opened it for breakfast the next day was delicious. Lik...

August can often feel like a tricky time on the allotment. Lots of things like salad potatoes and beetroot have been harvested, leaving large gaps or whole beds free. Then there's the interruption of a summer holiday - should you sow anything new before or after? Unless I've had ...

bread and chutney one of the great culinary combinations?One of my favourite pickles of all is Delia Smith's spiced pickled runner beans recipe. It's made using runner beans, onions and turmeric.If you want to get cracking and grow your own chutney, now

was a full and frank discussion about our individual approaches to vegetable growing (I had no idea he was harbouring such deep resentment over the scarcity of kale). So, it looks as if, under the power-sharing agreement, the allotment will be used

centre. The latter turned out to be an annual chrysanthemum: 'Eastern Star'. All of the above are easy to grow and will also help attract vital pollinators to your vegetable crops.There's still time to get dahlias started now and get a head start