I am ashamed to say that the majority of our vegetable seeds remain unsown this year, for no other reason than lack of time. Or rather that the available time we have is sucked up in other ventures.

And whilst we have some lettuce sown, that remains about the sum total, the balance waiting and rattling about in their unopened seed packets.

On the agenda for the coming weekend is the planting of as many seeds as we possibly can, including sweetcorn, chilli peppers, more lettuce (for a successional crop), and dwarf beans. Progress report to follow!

The herb garden has long been an important part of the English kitchen garden although today with the ready availability of dried herbs and fresh packet herbs from many supermarkets actually growing a herb garden is on the wane.

An easy and attractive solution, particularly for smaller gardens is to grow your herbs in pots. This way they have both a useful culinary purpose but also can have a large visual effect within your garden.

In the past we have grown a small bed, primarily just filled with herds and other culinary plants, but these have now become rather old and woody, or have died off altogether. So this year we are going back to planting our herbs in small terracotta pots and making a display on the patio just outside the back door to the kitchen.

Because we will use most of these herbs in the kitchen, we have restocked with established plants to avoid the need to wait for them to grow from seed. They still need to grow into their pots but this should happen over the course of the next few months

About the end of last year, we were given a present of a small metal bucket, complete with a number of tulip bulbs, and a small bag of compost. I can’t now remember how many bulbs but it would have been eight or ten, certainly no more as the bucket was only of modest size.

These bulbs were dutifully planted out by our then five year old, and lo and behold we now have a bucket of bright red tulips. They took a little while to actually flower and at one point I feared the slugs had got to them (perhaps that is where the missing bulbs ended up), but now there is satisfactory showing. Whilst the bucket is not the most beautiful thing in the world, if you see something similar in the shops come autumn time, this is not a bad present, particularly for children.

At the moment, we have a couple of what must be self seeded bluebell plants gracing one of our borders. In fact, the particular border is one that we have never really tried to do anything with, as it has seemingly been used as a general stone depository in the past, a place where all previous inhabitants have dumped any and every stone and small rock they came across whilst gardening. As such is even more infertile than the rest of our generally stony back garden. In some ways this makes their appearance even more welcome and provides an, albeit small, impetus to think about what we might do with this edge of the garden.