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 fruiting until the first frosts. The plants themselves are also daintier than garden strawberries, so they make a very pretty ground cover.You can still just about get away with sowing alpine strawberry seed this May, since the cold winter weather has put

August can often feel like a tricky time on the allotment. Lots of things like salad potatoes and beetroot have been harvested, leaving large gaps or whole beds free. Then there's the interruption of a summer holiday - should you sow anything new

is the perfect time to start.It's too late to sow onion seed now, but you may find that friends still have some sets left over (my allotment neighbour gave me some surplus red onion sets - 'Red Baron' I think). I also bought white onions ('Marco' F1) from

). Prepare the soil well with some rich compost and, like dahlias feed once a week with a general purpose feed.Nigella damascena is another attractive and easy plant to grow. The seeds can be tossed in the ground and will happily grow without much attention

. These 'leaf' signs will make this the optimum time.Looking at my calendar again, in period one, Sunday 13 June is marked as the moon in Cancer, so this is the best possible day in that period to plant leaf crops like spinach, chard or successional sowing