Dear Tigger, I was idly reading the programme for the Ilkley Literature Festival tonight when I saw that the man of your dreams will be attending in October and also that he is a Yorkshire man. Just thought you might like to know!

We have now harvested all our potatoes other than Sarpo Mira. They were sown as five tubers each of Rocket, Charlotte and Pink Fir Apple and 20 tubers each of Kestrel, Pentland Dell, Anya, Sante and Sarpo Mira. And the verdict: none suffered from blight (quite different from last year!) but we are n...

I doubt DOW would be interested in collecting our big pile, glallotments! It was wheelbarrowed down a steep grassy hill with two sharp corners and a step and would have to be taken up the hill again with a wheelbarrow, forked over the fence and then taken by tractor across a sloping pasture to the n...

I don't know about peppers but I think I read once that it is warmth rather than light that makes tomatoes ripen (after all, they colour up in a dark, warm place after they have been picked!). Your shading should therefore not cause any problem, Gilly. It's probably just not been warm enough yet.

Happy Birthday, Primrose! May all your veggies thrive!

The everlasting onions you sent me some two years ago are going strong, by the way, and proved very useful, when last year's "big onions" ran out this spring.

Gorgeous day today (as were the last three) and lots of butterflies on the buddleias, particularly painted ladies, but also red admirals, peacocks, one meadow brown, comma and just one small tortoiseshell. The latter would have been the dominant species a few years ago but their numbers really have ...

I am really sorry, Geoff, That must be awful for you. May next year's harvest be wonderful!

Macmac, I used to have the same problem, but now I put different foods into different supermarket bags, like all the frozen peas (frozen in two-portion freezer bags) are in a Tesco bag, broad beans in Booths, French beans in Waitrose, calabrese in Morrisons etc, so I can just fish out the correcly c...

One thing we have noticed around here is the early appearance of "winnel (whinnel?) straws". I don't don't' what they are called in other parts of the country but here they are the yellow dried grass stalks which stick up above the green grass. And this year they are certainly covering roa...

I planted most of our garlic (Solent Wight/White) last October and kept just a few for this spring. Now that they are ready for harvesting I realise there is no difference at all in their size, in fact, this year's harvest is enormous, some heads almost tennis ball size! They were planted fairly dee...

Poor OH, I hope you get better soon!

I must be very boring but I can't think of anything I don't really like. OK, there are thing that don't suit me, but as long as they keep somebody happy, they are welcome to have it/do to their heart's content.

Just thought of something: cigarette smoke!

Apple trays tend to be the strongest.

I don't think you could mistake Anya for Charlotte, Primrose. I think they are a cross between Desiree and Pink Fir Apple and are always slightly elongated, usually with a pink tinge and stay very solid.

I only ever steam potatoes and our few Charlotte (just five grown in bags) cooked ok this year.

We store them the same way as glallotments and it has worked for us for many years. We also write the variety on large sticky labels on the side so that, when you stand in front of a stack of, say, six or eight boxes, you can see immediately which are first earlies etc. Every so often we re-stack th...

I find Sarpo Mira produces a lot of 'volunteers'. In spite of very carefully going through the soil when harvesting, they always turn up the following year, presumably because they have a wider spread than many other varieties. We always dig them out the moment they appear, mainly to preserve the 3-...