"Cup Surprise" - very similar to a couple of the ideas above. Every child is given a small plastic disposable cup to take home and fill and wrap with Xmas paper. These are then sold (for 50p or £1, can't remember) very popular and always sell out. A school calendar? IOne year our school pr...

Frantony, I've been thinking of posting a thread very similar to yours. I took the plot on last year and everything I did manage to achieve felt like an achievement. This year, despite all my plans, the overall yield has actually been lower, andthe only thing to have really benefited has been the co...

That title sounds like the biggest case of product placement since John Travolta discussed burgers in that Tarantino film! The subject matter doesn't sound any less likely to me than male strippers in Sheffield, or that brass band one with Ewan McGregor. Suggest KG gets in with some product placemen...

Hi Colin, This year (i.e, last autumn planting) was the first time I had garlic on the allotment, the previous year there were potatoes on that patch, and before that the plot belonged to someone else. I've planted garlic in successive years on the same patch in my garden without problem, thought of...

Dug up all my garlic yesterday. Sadly it seems to have been affected by onion white rot, the majority of it. This was on my allotment where I planted loads of the stuff last autumn, 4 different varieties from 2 suppliers. The previous 2 years I've planted bulbs from the supermarket in my garden and ...

Or as a English teacher used to say to us:-
Cliches - avoid like the plague

When I was a small child we used to have the hard paper occasionally - presumably when the budget wouldn't stretch to soft. This was a real treat for me because a) it could be used as tracing paper b)you could fold a sheet over a comb, put in mouth and blow - this was supposedly a musical instrument...

In a recent edition of KG someone wrote in about how they sowed purple sprouting broccoli in July and it turned out to be a better crop than his earlier sowings. I hope he's right because my PSB sown in April failed, so I want to get some more in soon.

according to today's Gardener's Question Time on R4 a variety of strawberry called Maxim is more drought resistant than most.

Malk - I always assumed you were a Malcolm, so that makes being 5 months pregnant pretty strange!
I think the book should include the blue bins (not that I'm obsessed or anything)

Dear all, Thank you for your replies. I'll plant all but the floppiest, and see what happens. Earlier spent some time trying to calculate how much more land I'm going to have to clear to get all my seedlings in - some very serious digging is needed!

I ordered off the internet some cabbage seedlings. They arrived last week and I potted them up as I knew I wouldn't be able to put them in the ground for a while. The seedlings were a lot more advanced than I had expected - 6 - 8 inches?, and the lower stems were kinked. They stayed kinked when I po...

Chantal, You don't get them from anywhere, they just appear, mysteriously from nowhere!

Beccy, That's what They want you to believe, that they're orange juice containers, but it sounds far too plausible an explanation to me.
Jopsy, I'm with you on Mr Tenannt.

Why? Where do they come from? Who put them there? What was in them before? I'm not complaining - they are very useful, and I inherited one when I took on my plot. It's just that they seem to be on every allotment I see - from the road, from trains, photoes on the internet. My personal belief is that...