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Thanks for the full explanation. Your cages look splendidly robust and there is great attraction in leaving the plants to do their own thing. As a rather height challenged creature I think I’d struggle with the picking. My plants are much more crowded and take much more controlling to keep to...

Sympathies. I do have a love-hate relationship with peonies. Here they always flop and that together with how quickly they’re over makes them constantly frustrating. Brief, flawed beauty.

I don’t really understand how tomato cages work. Do you reach into them from above to prune your tomatoes and then to pick them? How do you stop the cages falling over when the plants get heavy? As far as I know it’s unusual in UK to grow tomatoes in cages. Under cover mine grow up strings...

I can vouch for the beauty, usefulness and general benefits of allowing celery, in particular Redventure in my case, to go to seed. Having received seed of Redventure from @Triffid I now have lovely red stalked celery popping up in many odd corners of my garden. Where it’s not significantly in...

Ah, penny drops! Thanks

Interesting. Allium leaf miner arrived here about three years ago. I had always assumed they only like alliums. So allium leaf miner flies will make for celery flowers? I’ve begun to have more celery and dill flowers around so will hope that has an effect.

The brief note that I have from last year is ‘Sparse growth but early.’ I guess sparse growth could equate with delicate.

Interesting, but they seem to have a lot of wasted space - or am I misunderstanding something? And having looked up tobacco float trays, I’m interested to know whether you actually float them in water when raising your seedlings.

Thank you for your detailed description. That’s very helpful and I’ll add it to my notes. When I said mine were delicate and spreading I was actually mixing them up with another variety. My plants are still quite small, about 30cm I’d say, but they have quite meaty-looking peppers forming -...

I’m growing Beaver Dam peppers this year. I’d never heard of them before I got some seed, but have read their interesting history. My two plants are quite small and delicate still. Is that typical for the variety? I’d love to know a bit more about them. Are they favourites for you? I believe...

I use bagging of flowering shoots for peppers as I’ve had some crossing in the past. For tomatoes I simply assume they will come true, as with beans and lettuces. I’ve had occasional bean crosses but not knowingly had any tomato crosses and I grow plants quite close together. On my peppers...

An interesting post. I’m intrigued by these varieties with Lima in the name. There’s a discussion in Beans of New York to the effect that some growers had previously thought that a cross between P. vulgaris and P. lunatus had produced such Lima lookalikes but that at the time of writing this was...

Looking back at your photos, your roottrainers are definitely not the same as the version which has been sold under that name in UK. They certainly look much sturdier. And they don’t operate with a hinge which has always been a weakness in the UK version, as once the hinge goes there’s no way of...

Roottrainers have been available in UK for years. They’re not very cheap but I guess affordable. They’re a great design in most ways but the snag is that they’re quite thin plastic and for the money don’t last long. I ended up with piles of half roottrainers because the hinges broke, so I...

Interesting. At the time I was so affected that I didn’t look into possible approaches to alleviating the effects, nor indeed into the digestive benefits. In what form have you eaten psyllium? I’m rather prejudiced against food supplements. It looks like you can grow Plantago ovata, but the...

Adding my observations to the questions about sunchokes and digestion. I’ve been a vegetarian for over thirty years too, and could happily eat any vegetable until I grew sunchokes. The effect was explosive. I loved the taste of them but the windiness was beyond my tolerance. I reluctantly dig up...

Here fava beans are known for often getting lots of black aphids at the top of each plant, and then when they’re bad they can spread downwards. The usual advice is to pinch off the top few inches to discourage them. It doesn’t affect the developing bean pods and the tops are also good to eat...

That’s really bad news. Let’s hope negotiations move faster than last year. You have so many great seeds to offer that it would be very sad if the whole season passed without being able to trade. Good luck, Canada.

The season is getting exciting. We have had drought conditions here, but with much watering I have planted out young bean plants of several dwarfs: Grumbliai, Resistant Cherokee Wax Poroto Huancabamba, Purple Dove, Valentino Verdolino, Porcelain, Mor Kristin Dior Gold Rush Mogette A couple...

I’m able to sow Aquadulce Claudia in November every year in modules. I plant out some in late January or early February in my polytunnel and they are just coming ready now. Another lot go out of doors and they’ll be ready in another three or four weeks. Perhaps something like that might work...