So pleased my book recommendation led to positive outcomes.

Planted garlic today and now I'm hoping for a cold snap because it'll need a period of vernalisation.

P.S. I'd love tree lupin seed if you want to do a seed swap. Let me know what sort of seed you'd like by a PM if you are interested.

I belong to the cottage garden society and we do a seed swap which works out at 12 packets of seeds for £4 postage. You can choose veg or flower seed. If you send in seed you get more packets back. If you belong to an allotment society they often do bulk orders which brings down the price of seed. A...

Not seen a rabbit again today so think they have taken my threats seriously.
Our old cat used to hunt baby rabbits and occasionally an adult one. We've had the population explosion since she died. We eat rabbit when I have time to skin them. Otherwise the neighbour's ferret gets them.

I got some cheaper seeds from Thompson and Morgan - well under a £1 a packet - mostly 80p but beetroot was 40p. They can list them in price order. The sting was that postage was £6.24. I often share seed and plug plant orders with my neighbour - often we only want 1/2 of what they are offering anyway.

That's a very good tip because it would also work on parts of the flower beds, We've had a horrendous summer with rabbits. They nibbled parts of our sheep pasture down to bare earth. Then suddenly not a rabbit to be seen. We suspect myxomatosis. But then they started attacking from the road side of ...

Apparently, he supplies local outlets and restaurants with salad leaves all the year round from an acre of ground. His experience of this and his enthusiasm comes through in the winter veg. book. He uses no dig methods mostly on open ground. I learned as much from the photos of his plot as I did fro...

I caught a young rabbit in veg. netting this summer and was just about to 'do for him/her' against the side of the raised bed, when my grandson came trotting up the garden - 'What are you doing, Nanny?' I couldn't in front of him. It took 4 releases before it got free of the netting. Since then rabb...

I had a book from my daughter for Christmas - Winter Vegetables by Charles Dowding. It's one of the most informative gardening books I've read for a long time, but also full of his own experience and ideas. If you want ideas on covering the hungry gap or increasing the amount of produce from your pa...

Eating out is also cheaper - and children's clothes and shoes. I remember paying £5 for my eldest son's first pair of shoes 34 years ago but that was at a time when my husband earned £3,000 a year and it kept us. 36 years ago I bought all my groceries for £5 a week which I make about a 11th of our i...

I had a similar experience. I was at the Gardener's World show 2 years ago and SAGA were giving free seeds in a saga shoulder bag with their literature, so what would you do? Well free seeds and bag is not worth rejecting so I had it. Later, we were enquiring about something at a stall and he said t...

I was looking after my grandchildren on a day that I didn't feel too well and we had a Tesco fish pie for dinner to conserve my energy. (My husband had bought it when he thought I might be ill enough for him to have to cook!) Suffice it to say - it was awful! So salty! Fortunately, they didn't like ...

They are very out of date. I have not long retired from primary teaching and tables have been part of the maths curriculum for years. All my 9 year olds knew most of their tables - we spent a short amount of time on it almost every day. I made sure that ALL the children I taught knew 8x7 and 7x8 = 5...

These are the very pretty french partridge The common partridge seems to have got very uncommon, but they breed these french partridge for the shoots and so they abound. These partridge and pheasants are all over the place here - and seem principally to be dead on the road because they've been relea...