Dear Old H, I love 'what have you got in your shed' as a line of enquiry. Lordy! Lots of kettles and gas rings, lots of rat droppings, erm, ancient and forgotten bottles of stuff I never use, erm, bits of string that I will never use again all rolled up nicely. Erm, a neat row of Asda's cereal boxes...

On Sunday we had quite a few visitors to our allotment site who were all fascinated by the bag-in-bucket spud growing techniques adopted by many of our plot-holders. It is a system, originally devised by a couple of our old-timers, now adopted by about half the tenants of our site for achieving soun...

I believe you should keep them away from beans - the blackfly problem and also they can apparently inhibit the beans from flowering, not sure how or why but I read that somewhere (I think it was Joy Larcome).

On the tunnels, I have a couple of the netting ones, but found they blocked out too much light. I only use them in the early stages now - I prefer pond netting to most other types, its the right sized mesh and lasts for years.

It looks like being a good year for birds at our allotments too, all very busy. In the last week or so I've seen a Great Spotted Woodpecker and a nuthatch on my fat-ball feeders for the first time, as well as the usual gang of tits, finches, robins et al. More thrushes than usual too. All good news.

As I mentioned on a previous thread, our allotment site is among several to take part in filming for a pilot episode of what we hope will be a new TV series following a year on allotment sites. This is real gardeners and real plots, who grows what, why and how. I've suggested the producer has a look...

An independant film production company has been working on our allotment site recently (they're visiting quite a few) with a view to making a gardening series for TV based around a year on the allotments, but using REAL plot-holders and progressing the whole trend for veg-growing programmes a step b...

Glyphosate gets to work best if you bash the beggars first and spray into damaged stems, especially things like brambles - take a hammer in one hand and the sprayer in the other. Be prepared to go over it twice. You'll win in the end.

Why are you doing this? Sow coriander outdoors at the end of May and it will burgeon all over the place no problem.
Pity it runs to seed so fast though, so just sow a bit at a time.

Yep, the slugs are awake and munching already on our Liverpool plot - you have been warned! It seems a bit early to me but there they were, feasting on my precious young tarragon plants and leavy tiny, baby slug trails.

This was featured in Monty Don's around the world in 80 gardens feature when he was in south America - if you taped it, have a look. This lady was making very small, slow fires well banked down to produce the charcoal an crushing it before feeding it to her beans.

If we're testing whether the soil is ready to receive its first spring sowings, here's a tip my grand-dad was taught by the head gardener who trained him as a boy in the 1920's - the oldies are often the best. Here goes... when you think it's nearing time to make some early sowings, sow a test patch...

I've had purple sprouting that didn't start anything meaningful until the middle of April, which is tiresome if you want the space for spring plantings. Some late-season varieties are very late indeed - we had some purple sprouting that was still doing its thing in early June one year. At least I ho...

I find all the oriental greens tricky to grow to maturity with any success, just too many bugs like 'em! I tend to grow them a cut and come again subjects so I can snatch a taste before slugs, flea beetles, caterpillars and who knows what else chomps through them. The only one that seems fairly easy...

Allotment sites benefit the community around them if they want to - and frankly if they want to survive, its a must. I know of sites which have devoted plots to schemes for young offenders (several of whom have graduated to becoming plot holders and one is even on the committee now).. we have a plot...