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.All this has got me thinking about a lovely system of categorising vegetables coined by Joy Larkcom in one of her books on growing salad. She gave every crop a Value For Space rating, or VSR ... but I think this is a topic for another time.I wonder which crops

plants.Apart from an apparent aversion to some vegetables, I always felt John could tackle almost anything horticultural. His voice was friendly, and advice often laced with humour in a way only John could deliver. How we'll miss that voice.A special

, and turning waste into useful compost. By keeping my worms warm over winter, they'll continue feeding on the peelings, banana skins and vegetable waste I add each week – along with the paper and cardboard, too.When it’s fully broken down I'll use the new

talking. It's claimed to be a 'Lost Crop of the Incas', although whether anyone can prove this I don't know. My seed comes from the Heritage Seed Library, a collection of unusual, old and heritage vegetable seeds run by Garden Organic. Members can choose

's a really compact marrow called 'Bush Baby' from Unwins that will be perfect for my veg beds, and those baby leaf salads and oriental vegetables look delicious in the Suffolk Herbs catalogue.Then there are the sweet peas - so many wonderful fragrant

remember sitting with a group of friends in a student bedroom watching Geoffrey on television. So, 'growing your own' is the latest gardening trend, is it? Well Geoffrey was certainly inspiring the nation with Mr Smith's Vegetable Plot in the 1970's

vegetable waste like potato and carrot peelings, banana skins, tea bags, fruit skins, and so on (and NOT cooked food waste). I'm also experimenting with composting cooked waste in a bokashi bin, but haven't quite mastered this yet - a topic for a future blog

Ask me to recommend just one vegetable crop to grow for great returns and it would have to be tomatoes. Which other crop can match it for variety? Whole catalogues are available, listing literally hundreds of different varieties of tomato seed

.An inspiring book I often turn to for ideas is a small paperback by Joy Larkcom called Vegetables from Small Gardens, first published in 1976 – I'm not even sure if it's still in print. Joy introduced me to a lovely concept – the Value for Space Rating (VSR

temperatures is complex, but indicate that increasing the amount of vegetation planted in either traditional or new ways will reduce air temperature. I won't get into a discussion about global warming here, but suffice it to say that rather than simply