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is full. Hurry up spring. My compost bin fills up every winter. It’s a lovely wooden beehive type that looks perfect in our tiny garden. It’s sited against the south-facing wall and gets really hot and steamy in summer. The frogs love it and it’s full

Thank heavens for winter-flowering plants. These hardy specimens often have tiny, inconsequential blooms, but they more than make up for them with their powerful, sweet fragrance. I rarely notice the flowers of Sarcococca hookeriana, but I’m always

Last winter, when I went to great trouble to feed the birds in my garden, my offerings were largely ignored. This winter, I'm trying again, leaving seeds, chopped apples and suet pellets for ground-feeding birds such as robins, blackbirds

end.In addition to dicing with death in the middle of the road in rush hour, ‘Killie’ the hedgehog faced another danger: winter. He was far too small to hibernate (which is probably why he was still out when most hedgehogs have already entered

Last year I wrote about autumn tidying and the effect this can have on wildlife. I left my garden untouched over winter, leaving hibernating creatures snuggled under a duvet of fallen leaves and rotting stems. None of my plants died or were ravaged

. The wonderful scent of wintersweet (Chimonanthus praecox) was almost overpowering and there was a fantastic winter-flowering clematis, (Clematis cirrhosa) which put mine to shame. There were crocuses galore, hellebores, dwarf irises and - a special mention

the wiser.I only get pigeons regularly visiting my garden. Last winter I made efforts to entice smaller, hungrier birds, and managed to attract a desperate pair of wagtails, a blackbird, a robin and a blue tit. They disappeared as soon as the ice thawed

are often higher than those for sports like football and rugby.Gardening injuries are horribly common. They normally happen in spring, when the first sunny day of the year inspires hours of weeding, pruning and digging after a winter of sitting on the sofa

they are than in summer, they may be more at risk of falling prey to opportunistic thieves and vandals.My first allotment was robbed in winter. Nothing expensive was taken (there wasn't anything expensive to take), but my plastic, walk-in greenhouse vanished

're usually grown in the UK as annuals, chilli plants (native to South and Central America) are perennial, so overwintering them shouldn't be a problem, if you live somewhere nice and hot. The theory is that if they survive winter, the plants flower and fruit