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I’m a big fan of raspberries, which are the most reliable of all the soft fruit crops that I grow. My soil is heavy and alkaline, and I’ve found that autumn-fruiting raspberries last much longer in it than summer-fruiting varieties. So now I stick to growing autumn varieties such...

The warm weather has brought on a flurry of activity in gardens everywhere. At last, the longer daylight hours and a bit of full-strength April sunshine has pushed some life into my garden.Buds are fattening up well on many of the shrubs and trees

It feels like Christmas has come early at our house. I’ve been given an apple press, and am juicing this year’s bumper crop of fruit. The kids and I are pushing barrows of apples, from our mini orchard to the kitchen.Eric Robson, the chairman

of cress.I love growing cress. The seed is ridiculously cheap, and incredibly quick to germinate. And, of course, growing cress is a great way of introducing children to the pleasures of gardening. Just buy the packets of seed, get sowing and you'll see

, as gardening logic would have it, the winter stems that are by far the most gorgeous are those we temporarily rooted in the middle of my kitchen garden. They are still there, stunning but huge, and a family debate rages as to whether they belong to my partner

I'm rather fond of rhubarb, preferably under a thick blanket of butter crumble or stewed with a dollop of organic vanilla ice-cream.We normally have a great crop from our organic kitchen garden, but this year my rhubarb plants are producing flowers

soggy mess.One advantage of the rainfall has been the success of the biological control I applied to some areas of my kitchen garden. Nematodes are added to water and applied to the soil in spring. They thrive in warm, moist soil and when they come

Autumn is the ideal time to evaluate our successes and failures in the garden. What worked well this year? What didn't? On my veg plot, though, this process is pretty much continual. Photographers from Gardeners' World magazine are always turning up

to spot in the fruit, if you leave the container of picked berries in your kitchen for an hour, you’re likely to see the culprits appear around the edges of the bowl.Sadly, the recent wet weather seems to have exacerbated the problem, because affected

It’s always great fun making Gardeners’ Question Time programmes. Sometimes it comes with an added bonus when we do a feature special, like when I took the opportunity to go and visit the labs at FERA (Food and Environment Research Agency) in York