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already served me so well, I'm still picking tomatoes from the plants in it, together with the odd yellow (meant to be yellow, not yellow and wrinkly!) sweet pepper, and at this time of year it really is great to have some of your own more tender produce

and I'd forgotten how clumped it becomes. As I tried to pick up an 'end', it just tumbled out of my palm, back into the water, dragged by the weight of the rest of the gelatinous mass.Eventually I tore a section off and plopped it into the Tupperware box

to discover that it was riddled with thin plastic strips, rather like the stuff you find inside a music cassette. Useless. Far too much to pick out and I certainly wasn't prepared to incorporate it into my lovely (albeit rather heavy clay) Hampshire soil

the garden. It's a bit 'pot luck', but then that's the fun of gardening. If I really wanted to maximise my returns I could collect seed by hand, picking off the pods at the moment they split, but before they've dropped their cargo. Kept on a sheet

or a bad thing - do they fill the rabbits up so they eat less of my vegetables, or do they merely serve as an appetizer, before the bunnies move on to my prized crops?). Dandelions are also popular with children, who love to pick the flowers and play

. Some emerged along the drive at Christmas, and from the responses to my daffodil blog it seems lots of other people had super-early (if somewhat confused) daffodils.My May daffs are in what we grandly call the 'picking plot', which is a slightly unkempt

pickings over the next month or so. If my eyes aren't deceiving me the ripe ones have gone. Is that blackberry juice dribbling down the beak of that bird up there?What I need is some netting ... a barrier to keep them away. I've covered fruit with netting

are our best crop and the children especially like picking them. So when I first spotted all the flowers I knew we were in for a bumper yield this year.But two weeks later when I called in to see what was on offer I was met with bare stalks. Not one berry

the trip in my tiny motor - but I thought it would pick up. And it would have if I'd treated it well; planting it with plenty of organic matter and bone meal, pruning off the dead, diseased and damaged wood, and watering it in the dry summer last year

houseplants, and I'm often surprised where you can pick one up. Of course good garden centres usually have a dedicated area under glass for indoor plants, and M&S sell some nice ones, but how about Tesco's? Just look at what I found there last week (pictured