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How hard would it be to design green roofs for cars? Just imagine: you stop off to pick up some groceries, and on returning to your car, you find it's alive with the sight and sound of butterflies and bees tucking into the supply of nectar on its

.I love the way home-grown salads start off as a meagre collection of leaves in spring, then steadily grow as tomatoes, broad beans and other ingredients are ready to harvest. The watercress growing in my pond is always the first leaf crop I pick, followed

the ground. (I love dandelion leaves. There're so crunchy and refreshing after a winter of meagre salads. The trick is to pick them before they flower, after which they can taste bitter.) Then the nettles and wild garlic appear (which together make a

as the plants start to flower.The spinach I'm growing in troughs as a salad crop, as you need to grow buckets of it for cooking and I don't have the space. Spinach is also prone to leaf miner fly, which bores holes into the leaves and lays eggs, so picking

and hollyhocks, and a lone foxglove! On the allotment, we still have strawberries, blackberries, raspberries and beans.It's all very well having cheery flowers, and being able to pick strawberries and raspberries in November, but I hope this doesn't happen every

. Like long-tailed tits, goldcrests eat insects and spiders, but specialise in tiny morsels such as moth eggs. Their beaks are designed to pick out insects from between pine needles. In really cold winters they will occasionally come to garden feeders, so keep

eating pies. But your garden can harm you at any time of year - just the other day my friend came round to dinner sporting a black eye, which she'd received from a thorny bramble while picking blackberries. Another friend once caused herself so much

and children hate the smell of strongly scented hyacinths and paper-white narcissi, which he's not allowed to grow in the house.I don't like the scent of poppy stems and I hate poppy sap. I'm sure it evokes a childhood memory - probably of picking them

paid to any remaining mealybugs.I moved house five times over the next 18 months, so the half-dead orange lived at my partner's mum's, then my mum's, where it picked up a fresh mealybug infestation before I finally brought it home to a flat full of vine

've decided we can grow one variety each, without causing too many problems. So I think I'll pick...