Search - Articles

as an added ingredient. He could make anything and everything horticultural come to life and he could make me cry laughing. His description of freshly picked pears and how the juice dribbled down his chin is legendary, and better than most arguments

surprised to find that when the kids and I went to a local Pick Your Own farm, we discovered that their summer-fruiting raspberries were also rather iffy.The creamy white-brown larvae may be anything up to 7 or 8mm long, and although they’re not always easy

This is the time of year when I go tomato crazy. Suddenly I've gone from eating relatively few tomatoes to buying punnet loads from the shops. There is no doubt that if you go for the British Grown logo on the front of the pack they taste 100

.To top it all there's very little raspberry beetle damage - those horrible little browny maggoty things that sneak out of the top end of the fruit. I can't seem to pick the fruit fast enough and the entire family is going around with bright red stains

, I can even secure it over taller crops without wasting any raspberry-picking time!

and pots... and even in gaps and holes in walls. They will be there... and the pickings will be rich!I wonder what the greatest number ever found in one place is...

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

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

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