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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

As container-grown fruit and veg start to crop, it's important keep your eye on the ball to ensure they stay productive. I've just harvested a small batch of French beans from my late container sowing as part of the Grow Yourself Healthy campaign

first venture into growing fruit and veg, and the many mistakes I made while progressing to the level I'm at today (pretty good, I think). It's been a steep learning curve.For a brief spell, aged 11, I had a vegetable patch of my own. My mother – a

red blotches on hawthorn leaves and, of course, moths that devastate horse chestnut trees.On the whole, I like leaf miners. I don't enjoy finding them in my saucepan after harvesting spinach in the dark, and I was upset when they mined my aquilegias

without feeling guilty. I can't wait for my first nettle soup of 2011, perhaps accompanied by a wild salad of hairy bittercress, orache, fat hen and clover.If you're waging a war on garden weeds, why not view them in a different light and start eating them

greenhouse in Manchester in the hot summer of 2006. They did rather well. This time I'm in London and we’ve had pretty good weather, but I don’t have a greenhouse and my garden only gets sun for two hours a day.My grafted plants 'won' the contest about four

for annuals like basil and coriander, as they're less likely to run to seed, enabling them to put their energy into leaf growth, instead.I've already had my first chive and mint harvests of the year, and can't wait for my first basil, tomato and mozzerella

at the back of my south-facing border, close to the wall where they'll be kept warm at night. As an experiment, one is planted in a bucket of semi-rotted compost, like a portable bean trench. All are staked with tall, strong bamboo canes. (They're only about 2

) harvesting her first home-grown fruits a few months later.The one thing we had in common was early access to a garden. Would we be sat in this office without that privilege? Gardening doesn't just help heal temporary blips, it changes lives. That's why

which he would plant two pumpkin plants. My sister and I eventually got pumpkins in time for Halloween, though mine was oblong (I didn't think he'd done such a good job).Twenty years later, I grew my first pumpkins on my allotment. I chose the F1 variety