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. It is time to bounce into 2010 with a light step and the feeling that valleys can be crossed in a single bound.Many people will have decided that the time has come to start growing their own vegetables. All those excellent Gardeners World projects and blogs

My father tells a story of when he was in the army. A particularly pompous officer lifted the lid of a dish of vegetables and snorted "carrots are not an officer's vegetable" before storming off.I mention this in light of a brief discussion I had

Think of a vegetable that sums up Christmas. Easy - except that to make things a bit more difficult I am withdrawing the noble sprout from the equation. So that leaves the humble spud and the noble parsnip, and, as far as I am concerned, the latter

It's easy to be sniffy about the ornamental cabbage. It is quite a strange concept; an odd, Frankensteinish amalgam of vegetable and bedding plant. However, my mind was changed - temporarily at least - during a recent trip to New York. I saw

The world of gardening overflows with obsessions, such as giant vegetables, lawns, compost, cacti and many others.One of the most extreme gardening obsessions is the art of bonsai. I was always a bit dismissive of this particular obsession until I

My elder son Archie made his first vegetable garden this year, in the back garden of a slightly scummy, student infested house in deepest Peckham. It was a very enterprising community effort by all of his housemates, involving sporadic (though manic

the dahlia was persona non grata in our gardens and was banished to the vegetable garden, where it was grown purely as a cut flower or for competitions. Dahlias were they garden equivalent of battery hens. Now they range happily through our borders bringing

this as an excuse to loaf around watching old films, but then nothing gets done.So, instead I will spend the afternoon in my mother-in-law’s greenhouse as my wife’s loyal assistant. The vegetable garden is her bailiwick, and I am there to move things and do what I

Good morning and happy 'Grow Your Own' Week to you all.There are, I have to admit, many other gardeners who are hotter on vegetable growing than me. Give me herbaceous borders and I can muddle through and make them look pretty good, but when

built himself from plants and hard landscape materials that he has begged and borrowed.I am not a manic vegetable grower (my wife is in charge of our kitchen gardening) but there is a very strong vegetable presence at the show. Tucked away down the end