I grew chillies for the first time and am still harvesting them and making hot tomato relish with them. It's a joy to be still picking autumn raspberries. I am making a pot of jam most days. Weren't we into snow this time last year? For the first time ever corn was an unmitigated disaster and I gave...

Well Alan, I think you achieved what you wanted! You've brought some of us out of the woodwork and made us post.

We had such a dry summer that wide cracks have opened up in the field behind the house, in parts of our house and throughout the garden. I always mulch, so this hid the dryness of the soil but this year did nothing to combat it. I had to water but it doesn't really compensate with some plants and sw...

Found Johnboy's comment on swallow migration interesting, because a week ago I felt sure I heard a swallow singing on the wire but my husband said that they had long gone. He has lost a lot of hearing in recent years and his hearing aids aren't working very well at the moment and he is no longer rel...

Leics/Rutland border - 2 frosts last week - enough to blacken some dahliah leaves and tip the outside tomatoes and prompt me to dig up my dahliahs and pick all the green tomatoes. Reading these posts makes me realize that, although Leics doesn't sound as cold as the Yorkshire moors, our position her...

I had the worst ever crop of sweetcorn this year - fed the whole lot to the pig - nothing ripened.
Did anyone else have as bad a crop?

What colour are their combs? If pale, it could indicate red mite. Red mite runs them down and they can die very suddenly.
Hens are a bit like sheep, who know 101 ways to die - often surreptiously!

One other thought - when we have persistent moles digging up our lawn we pour a small drop of Jeyes fluid into their latest molehill, which seems to dissuade them and always sends them somewhere else. I suspect it's not very environmentlly friendly but sometimes desperate measures are needed. I wond...

Can I recommend the parsnip - Turga? I've never grown it before - germinated well and grew evenly without forking etc. It was the best set of parsnips I've ever grown in 20 years and I didn't do anything special or different.

I've always been amazed at the characters that emerge from the hen flock. We have a fairly young Isa brown hybrid at the moment who has discovered a roundabout route into the garden, which is banned to hens. She joined us the other day when we were weeding the rhubarb patch and manuring it. We had t...

You have my sympathies. My problem is rabbits, who invade and devour everything. Since we live on a smallholding, we can use an air rifle, which my husband keeps up in the bedroom. He takes aim from an open upstairs window and has successfully kept the problem to manageable proportions. Do I gather ...

Don't do that - they'd probably eat it - and it might give them tummy ache!

We have a smallholding and so a plan of action against rats is essential up in the barns. All food in the barns is kept in metal containers. We watch for the telltale signs of rats - droppings, bite marks etc. We leave poison down in 'safe' places which the rats are used to frequenting all the time ...

They seem to fruit quite a way down. You don't need much fruit to jam. 1/2 pound will make a jar and they soon mount up.

My raspberries are still going. We had a frost the other night which didn't deter them and I've carried on picking them and have jammed them. It's probably the best jam I've made this year. I can't get over the Autumn Bliss raspberries. We're NOT sheltered and yet there they still are in November, w...