Now is the time to plant Tom Thumb Lettuce seed on the kitchen window sill for an early homegrown lettuce from the vegetable garden.

As soon as it comes up transfer the lettuce to a frost-free unheated greenhouse, or a very light patch under glass. When the seedlings are large enough to handle, thin out gradually, but keep them about 15cm (6in) apart. Read More »

Farming Friends & TopVeg have now collaborated to create a How To Grow Broad Beans growing card.

Click on the image to enlarge and if you wish to print off this growing card, right click on the enlarged image and then click print picture to print out a copy. Read More »

Growing your own potatoes is very satisfying, and does not depend on possessing a large vegetable garden. Salad potatoes grow well in containers.

Choose an early variety of potatoes, as earlies grow well in pots - main crop varieties do not. Potato varieties particularly suited to container growing are:

• Amandine
• Annabelle Read More »

There are so many varieties of early potatoes on sale that it is difficult to choose which is the most suitable for the vegetable garden.

Below are descriptions of some more examples, to be added to the ten early potato varieties posted yesterday.

Ultra-Early Potato – Swift Read More »

There are several different varieties of early potatoes to grow in the vegetable garden, and some are listed below with their specific characteristics.

The three growing seasons for potatoes are:

• New Potatoes, or earlies

• Second earlies Read More »

  new potatoes vegetable garden

The Christmas Cactus is a popular flowering plant which is often passed down from generation to generation, as it lives for a long time and grows to a considerable size.

Allow the Christmas Cactus to rest from late September onwards while the flowering buds are forming. Let it rest by: Read More »

The Easter Cactus is an epiphyte, therefor use potting compost with a little peat mould.

Keep the plant growing right through the autumn and winter.

Allow the Easter Cactus to rest after mid-February by: Read More »

Sowing several varieties of seed for each vegetable in the garden makes growing more interesting and has several advantages: Read More »

There are many seed catalogues to choose vegetable seed from, but gardeners wanting a range of crops are often overwhelmed by the numbers of seeds they buy. Some of the smaller seeds-men, like moreveg.co.uk sell cheaper packets because they have less seeds in them - this often suits the home vegetable garden. Read More »

It is useful to know how many potatoes will be produced by one seed potato when calculating how many seed potatoes to plant in the vegetable garden. Read More »