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and dusty radish.However, I think it is generally an excellent thing to try and get children to grow stuff - if only so that they understand how plants behave. Schools are now much more proactive in encouraging gardening clubs and planting up areas around

. It is time to bounce into 2010 with a light step and the feeling that valleys can be crossed in a single bound.Many people will have decided that the time has come to start growing their own vegetables. All those excellent Gardeners World projects and blogs

Who said gardening wasn't easy? Okay, maybe some parts aren't that simple - grafting, propagation, weeding on cliffs, getting rid of slugs and innumerable other things but some aspects of gardens are unbelievably straightforward.Look at this picture

To continue my (very) occasional series about interesting gardeners: have you ever heard of Johnny Appleseed? He is one of the folk heroes of American horticulture and has been immortalised not only in books but also in a song by the late, great Joe

and there are flurries of snow whipping off the roofs, and a rather disgruntled chicken is scuffling about like a well-wrapped babushka haggling in a street market in Minsk.Gardeners are obsessed with weather. It’s often too dry, too wet, too cold, too hot, not snowy

I thought it would be interesting to use this blog as an excuse to find out more about the many slightly eccentric people who have helped make gardening as popular and exciting as it is today so this is the first in an occasional series: if anybody

blog to another, as they all have links that take you to yet another strand.One of the most prolific blogs is Vegplotting - the adventures of a very keen gardener and allotmenteer in Chippenham, Wiltshire. For even more hardcore vegetable growing try

to be done. Spring is a bit like a rollercoaster: you get very slowly winched up through the long days of winter until you teeter on the top. Then suddenly it is downhill rush as everything starts sprouting and growing and flowering and, unless you

It's January. The weather outside is pretty ghastly. There is not an enormous amount in the garden worth looking at so we must be more imaginative when seeking out our horticultural pleasures.Often the mundane can be very beautiful if you look hard

) was of a Chinese juniper 1.5m tall and 3.5m wide growing in a small, overcrowded garden. Over a period of years it was dug up, pruned and replanted until it fitted into a pot. The whole process took about a quarter of a century and is far from over.The art