This is the time of year when people with vegetable gardens start dreaming of heritage vegetable seeds and people without start dreaming of starting an allotment. 

Luckily, way back in 1908, the Liberal government passed the Small Holdings and Allotments Act.  This Act made it a mandatory obligation for all local authorities to provide allotments and cultivated a peculiarly British tradition of local, allotment veg growers that is still with us today.  Can you imagine this sort of far-sighted welfare legislation being gifted to us today?  This doesn’t mean that there won’t be a waiting list, but it does mean your local authority should provide allotments.

It is worth putting your name on the waiting list, even if the list is a long one.  When we lived in Hammersmith I got to the top of the list within a few months, even though there were 20 names above mine.  Each month there are always a few allotment holders feeling the pressure of rampant weeds who decide to throw in the trowel.

To make your life easy, start by sharing an allotment if at all possible.  An allotment is typically the size of a tennis court, which is far bigger than most beginners want.  The other secret is not to leave any bare ground, not even for a week.  Cover what isn’t sown with old carpet, cardboard, plastic sheet, anything that will suppress the weeds.  Even though it might look unsightly at first compared with your neatly double dug neighbours, it will be a good deal more popular than letting the weeds run riot.  And it will make your time there more productive and more pleasurable.  Just uncover the bare ground as and when you need it.

And start with new potatoes (unless there were potatoes in the same spot last year).  Potatoes cleanse the ground, can be grown through weed suppressants and will knock supermarket newbies into a cocked hat.  My other easy grow sowing tips would be French breakfast radishes as you can pick them in 6 weeks, heritage peas for a summer taste like no other (and lovely flowers) and uchiki kuri squashes for their colour and cooking potential.  Squash plants will die in the frost though, so cover with a cloche or fleece if frost is forecast.

If any peas get too big, or when you’ve scooped out the squshes, save the seed for next year.  Just wash it, dry it, then store it somewhere cool.  For allotment holders a gift of seeds is always welcome.  And they will keep your dreams alive for next year.

I have always enjoyed making things. Compost bins, bird boxes, pizza ovens, tree houses, just about anything outdoors that doesn’t require too much skill. Which is why I’m so impressed by all the things made by our customers using our vintage apple crates and wooden storage boxes. Here are some tips I have gleaned:

 - Old wooden crates can be used very effectively to make a temporary bar. Long cable ties are a good and easy way to attach the crates to each other.  The inside of each crate can be used to store glasses and bottles. 

 - Wooden crates make excellent shelving units. Painting the back lightens the inside and gives a sense of space.

 - A crate on its side is the perfect height for a bedside table. If you want to add a shelf, position it slightly above half way.

 - Crates make excellent wooden storage boxes for toys. Castors add mobility and make them more fun for kids (to tidy away their own toys!)

 - Whether to buy new or old crates depends on what you have planned. New wooden crates do not have writing on them but they are stronger and cleaner than old reclaimed crates. Old wooden crates have a lovely worn tone that comes of years of use in French orchards, but if you want something clean to paint then new is probably better.

 - Varnishing old crates can bring out the real character of the wood. Their character is further highlighted by placing the crates on clean white shelves.

 - Wooden storage boxes and crates can help bring a sense of order to an otherwise unstructured world. At last your CDs or LPs can be arranged in alphabetical order!

- If you intend to use wooden boxes for storing fruit or vegetables, ventilation is critical. The corner batons should stand proud of the sides so that stacked crates are well ventilated and easy to move.

 - For a permanent retail display unit made of old wooden boxes, each box should be screwed into the wall for stability. A mix of different size boxes will make for a more interesting display.

For more ideas, see our wooden storage box gallery.  

There’s little colour yet in the garden which is why the crocuses are so welcome. The crocuses are also an important source of pollen for bees battling to feed their burgeoning brood.  You can see the bright yellow pollen payload stashed in little holding bags on the hind legs. Amazing isn’t it!

The bees are also all over the rampant stinking hellebores, which has a paler off-white pollen.  Each spring I tear most of the hellebores out as they spread so (and stink), but this year I think I’ll be a bit more tolerant.  With this cold wet spring the bees need every help they can get to avoid starvation.

Its early days for seed germination, but I don’t feel I have made a very good start.  My outdoor sowings of broad beans, beetroot, radish and parsnip show no signs of life and the success rate with my toms too has been poor. The golden sunshines from our four coloured tomatoes are up, but the others are staying stubbornly under the duvet.  Surely the outside cold can’t affect my germinator indoors?

My potatoes are chitting nicely (in the camper van egg cup), but I’m in no hurry to plant them out when the ground is so cold.  This year the earlies I am trying are Casablanca which caught my eye because of its disease resistance credentials.  Having said that, if we get the glorious early summer we deserve then they will be whipped out of the ground in June before any disease has a chance to take hold.

The grasses have had their annual crew cut and the herbaceous plants have been cut down for spring.  I haven’t divided the bergamot yet, which has strayed too far from its original position, so that is my next job.  I also need to cut back the dogwood, to get the startling new growth next winter.

Garden birds are nest building and the blackthorn will flower any day now so hedge cutting must wait until the end of the year.  Feeding the birds is still important, although caterpillars will soon be the food of choice for blue tit chicks rather than nuts or seeds.  To increase your caterpillar population plant a horse chestnut tree (or bury a conker in the autumn).  The birds and the bees will thank you for it.

Sourcing new products is not easy as easy as it sounds.  Aside from the practical considerations like environmental impact, price and reliability of supply, there is the ethereal challenge of the aesthetic value of a product, which is much harder to define.

What we set out to do is find products that we think will not only be long-lived but will also be long-loved.  If our immediate emotional response to a product is positive (i.e. we like it) that’s a good start, but we also try to stand back and reach for a longer term relationship.  Simple is good, but plain simple may be too fashionable, too flash in the pan.  Plywood is a good case in point.  We love the clean pale natural matt of plywood, made even better by its sustainable credentials, but will its simple looks last?  We have a new flower press that is beautifully crafted for us from plywood and laser stamped with a subtle motif of flowers. We like to hold it, to feel its petals and its curves, and hope others will too.  When we envisioned this product, we had mother and child in mind.  Time will tell if our flower press makes it to the next generation, but that is our goal.

Another new product that we feel will be long-loved is the frontier wood burning stove.  Its rounded belly perched on tripod legs make it a characterful camping companion.  And its mat black styling suggests a classic to cherish rather than a barbie to abandon.  It will consume your waste, comfort you and feed you.  Our hope is that if looked after, its belly will hold within it years of happy memories of battling with bushcraft and boiling of bacon.  We hope the frontier stove too will be passed down the generations, but even if it doesn’t its belly of stories will.

The last new product to go online this month is born of the same aesthetic but with a very different outcome.  It is an unsmooth unsleek fibrous rope for beans to cling to.  Runner beans, climbing French beans and climbing borlotti beans all need to reach for the sun once the last frost has passed and they need something grippy to help them on their way.  Bean poles, bamboo canes and trellises will do the job, but bean string brings a new dimension.  It can help beans to scale sheds and span spaces usually the preserve of perennials.  And it will bind bean poles together with fibrous fingers that won’t loosen their grip until the growing season has passed.  What it lacks in longevity it makes up for in tenacity.  For us the aesthetic value of all these three products is very high, but only time will tell.

And then the snow came…..  However much warning we receive and however familiar we are with it, I still find snow gobsmackingly beautiful.  One minute everything is green and spring-like, the next its white and bitter.  I love it.

Grabbing a traditional wooden toboggan and heading into the Chilterns is an automatic reaction for us.  It is ridiculously steep and littered with life-threatening obstacles, but the setting is unbeatable and as long as we’re moderately sensible it is the best place I know for tobogganing.  The slopes push our beech davos toboggans to their limits, but given that they are hand-built in the Bavarian Alps the toboggans are in their element.  It is the toboggan drivers who sometimes aren't.

This weekend we also succeeded in completing a long held ambition of mine, to build an igloo.  Ever since my father built one on our lawn when I was 10 I have wanted to do the same, but before now I have never been it the right place at the right time.  This Sunday I was.

All we used was a shovel and a rectangular plastic bucket.  Three of us spent around 4 hours making bricks and lining them up with enough overlap that they eventually joined at the top.  Admittedly it looks more like a marshmallow birthday cake than an Inuit igloo, but it was fun to do and made a snug camp for two.  It would have been very tempting to sleep in, as it was so gorgeous inside with candlelight bouncing off the snow walls, but having heard horror stories about the dangers of suffocation from collapsing snow I thought it best not to.

My igloo making tips are:
- Don’t make it too large, not only because of the workload but also because the roof becomes so high that you cannot reach the centre from the outside.
- Most rectangular buckets have angled sides.  Use these angles, and overhang each brick by 2-4cm, to make a 'dome'.
- Each brick is wedged in place by the bricks either side.  You may need someone to hold the bricks at either end before each course is completed.
- Making the bricks is the bottleneck.  At least two buckets would speed things up.
- Make the entrance hole at the end, when the igloo is complete.  If each brick is properly supported this should be possible without any collapse.
- Don’t go in the igloo without anyone being outside.  If it did collapse you might need someone to pull you out.
- A toboggan is useful, for ferrying snow bricks or for keeping out unwanted visitors (Roger the ram take note!).

Jan job one, bird box cleaning.  Its never a job I relish, but its one of those Jan jobs that its very pleasing to have done.  This year one box had three abandoned eggs, which I think are wrens (?).  They are tiny, no longer than a 5p coin, with a generous splattering of pinky brown.  Up until the end of Jan it is legal to remove eggs, but from 1st Feb to the end of July they must be left well alone.  They must also be disposed of and not kept, which seems a shame as they are such pretty things.

For the first time I can remember, a couple of the nest boxes were slug infested and several were quite wet inside.  The wettest year on record has clearly taken its toll!  None of the boxes have drainage holes, so I think I will now drill a couple of holes at least in the more exposed ones that the slugs have taken a shine too.  It may also be that some of the boxes are approaching 15 years old and simply need replacing.

Jan job two, hedge cutting.  This really needs to be completed by the end of January before the birds contemplate nesting.  The year has started off so mild that the birds may have already started reckying prospective sites.  We do have some hedge that we have allowed to run riot, with huge brambles battling with towering boughs of field maple, but for the most part this is a mistake.  On balance the best frequency and timing for most flora and fauna is to cut a hedge in the mid winter every other year.  This allows berries to develop on plants that flower on last years growth, for example, without the hedge getting too leggy.

Jan job three, honey bee health check.  The first part of the health check concerns the ever increasing problem of varroa mites.  These little critters weaken the colony and need keeping in check.  If the natural thymol treatment didn’t knock them back in the late summer, then having another go with Oxalic acid before mid-Jan is an option.  My bee books that are more than 5 years old don’t regard Oxalic acid as necessary and I am still in two minds about whether dripping such a caustic chemical over my bees is in their long term interest, but I can also see that they need all the help they can get. The current consensus seems to be in favour of the treatment, so I will probably apply the treatment this weekend, covering the cluster with a hessian sack as I go to minimise heat loss.

The second part of the bee health check is much easier.  It involves a quick heft of each hive to establish whether there are sufficient stores.  A hive with plenty of stores is very heavy, a hive running low is an easy lift.  Our hives are fine for now but with the current mild weather they may soon not be.  There is a steady stream of bees returning with (catkin?) pollen, which may mean the queen is already laying and stores are being eaten faster than they can be replenished.  So another job for this weekend is to make fondant, which is winter bee food much like Christmas cake icing.  If all goes to plan this will keep the bees fed until there is enough to forage in the spring and give us a fair chance of taking off our first honey in the summer.

Barn owls have long been a favourite of mine.  We get a glimpse of one about once a year and each time I’m struck by their stark beauty and haunting hunting instinct.  What I hadn’t realised until last week was how much their hunting success depends on a particular talent; the silent approach.  Richard Hammond demonstrated this in spectacular style on the BBC’s Miracles of Nature, by lying in a field blindfolded next to some owl bait.  He only realised the owl had taken the bait as it left, such was the stealth of its attack.  You can imagine a vole at dusk wouldn’t stand a chance.

But despite this extraordinary talent for hunting, like most of our native birds, barn owls are not thriving.  The rough grasslands which provide the best hunting habitats are increasingly rare and whilst set-aside strips of tussock grasses help, there is still a huge habitat shortfall.  And there are shortages of roosts and nest sites too.  Like most animals, barn owls need both food and shelter to thrive.

Which is why I spent last Saturday building and erecting a barn owl box.  The building bit was very straight forward (thanks to box the designers at Wildlife World) and took less than an hour.  Siting it took a good deal longer.  The tree I had in mind had to have more branches removed than I had anticipated and the bramble hedge at its base was larger and more aggressive than I would have liked.  But by dusk I had finished the job, so we now have a barn owl box up and waiting for a tenant.

Spurred on by the sight of our barn owl box I have vowed to get ahead and clean out our other bird houses this weekend whilst its still mild.  Garden birds start reckying for nest sites early in the year and if we have snow in January I might want to be out tobogganing rather than climbing ladders.

Whilst it is tempting to leave nesting material in the box, most birds prefer to find their own clean material and old nesting material can harbour undesirable bugs.  A clean sweep is best, even for barn owls.

Every year there are winners and losers in the veg garden. Some years the beans flourish while the root crops flounder and other years it’s the reverse.  This year, despite the shortage of sunshine and surplus of rain, there are still some winners.

Our biggest triumph was the sweet potatoes, which were this year's wild card crop.   Their convolvulus tops had done a good job of obscuring at least one raised bed, so much so that I feared they were going to be all talk and no action.  But I was wrong.  Each plant produced a good meal of tubers and I’m now hunting around for sweet potato recipes. I can only assume that the incessant rain suited them.  But aren’t they a staple crop of hot arid countries?

Peas were also plentiful as were borlotti and French beans.  And the self-seeded flat leaf parsley and rocket was abundant all summer long.  Maybe it was too cool for them to bolt?  But our squashes, which I had expected to be swollen by the rains, were smaller than normal and successive sowings of beetroot and lettuce struggled to germinate.  For the tomatoes, yield wasn’t a problem but ripening was. We are now over-flowing with shiny green tomatoes.  Having made two batches of green tomato chutney I suspect the rest are destined for the compost heap.

It was a poor year for tree fruits too.  There is some dispute about whether this was due to untimely frosts or a shortage of pollinators, but my hunch is the latter.  The honey bee and bumblebee populations are struggling and are now less well equipped to cope with a poor summer. If the bees can’t fly due to bad weather then the crops suffer, but so too do the bees themselves.  They risk running out of stores and if the virgin queen can’t get out to get mated then it’s curtains for the colony.

And as we're being told extreme weather is on the increase, what should we do?  I’ve got two suggestions.  The first is beekeeping.  Not the intensive honey factory kind, but the back garden amateur kind first pioneered by the Victorians.  For gardeners with a  bit of space and a bit of time, keeping bees is a thoroughly enjoyable way to help rebalance the environment (and to get some honey).  My second suggestion is foraging.  Whatever the weather there is always some tasty natural creature or plant which is thriving.  There must be enough wild blackberries in our lane alone this year to feed an army of foragers.  And then there’s all those boletes and parasols and blewitts (wild mushrooms to you and me).  There’s always something to forage out there.  But not everyone’s a winner.

The last five years has seen a surge in interest in grow your own veg. Spurred on by celebrity chefs and TV gardeners, we have been encouraged to convert our window boxes to herb planters and to replace our lawns with raised beds. The carrot that is dangled before our eyes is a cook’s paradise – a ready supply of organic, local, seasonal veg. Why wouldn’t you?

The problem for me starts with organic. A holistic, long term approach to farming is clearly good, and I’m right behind it, but the health benefits lauded by some ambassadors for organic have been firmly debunked and when you factor in the high levels of wastage that organic crops produce, the case for organic is further weakened. For me certified organic is well intentioned but a step too far.

Seasonal and local are important benefits, but increasingly veg markets and supermarkets are recognising this to, so for many of us the season/local benefit can be achieved without growing your own. Even more so if you’re lucky enough to live close to a good farmers market, albeit that they frequently charge a kings ransom. Having said that, the high prices charged by some farmers markets seem reasonable when you factor in the real cost of growing your own veg all those seeds that never germinated, seedlings that fell foul of the slugs and over sized courgettes that one minute were almost ready for picking and the next were over sized truncheons.

So why grow your own if you can buy seasonal veg locally? Does it taste better? Well yes sometimes, but by no means always. An onion is an onion is an onion, whether its home grown or not. The same goes for squashes, leeks, parsnips and maincrop potatoes. But there are those vegetables, fewer than half I would say, that do taste better straight from the garden. Peas and sweetcorn picked when just ripe and dropped into the pan of boiling water before the sugars turn to starch are sensational. Outdoor cherry tomatoes picked while still warmed by the sun and popped straight into your mouth are unbelievable. And new potatoes lifted when no larger than a walnut knock the best local new potatoes into a cocked hat.

So there are real taste benefits of growing your own, at least for some vegetables, but at least as important for me is the immense pleasure to be had from growing unusual heritage varieties and experimenting. The supermarkets have got better at offering a wider choice of varieties, but their tomatoes are still round and red, their beetroot is still purple and their carrots are all orange. There is part of me that is relieved. It might be a slap on the cheek for grow your own enthusiasts if supermarkets started selling four colour tomatoes, four coloured beetroot and four coloured carrots, as they do with heirloom varieties in the US. But the truth is there would still be plenty of other reasons to grow your own, reasons not trumpeted by the celebrities and reasons the supermarkets can never satisfy. The exhilaration of battling with nature, of nurturing baby seedlings and of excavating muddy root crops. For me, this is the real joy of growing your own veg and why I think it’s a trend that’s here to stay.

We were lucky enough to go on a guided walk through the wild flower meadows of Greenfield Farm in the Chilterns recently.  The farm has several stunning meadows, each surrounded by ancient beech woods.  The prize meadow, which was started in the late 1990s, now boasts over 100 species of wild flowers, including 5 species of orchid.  It is a glorious sight, which is gobsmacking from a distance and even more extraordinary as you get up close.  So why aren’t there more wildflower meadows like this?  Why can’t we all replicate this, even on a small scale, in our gardens?

The fact is, the setting of Greenfield Farm is very favourable for wild flowers, far more so than most of our gardens.  The soil is chalky, the aspect is a gentle south and the wind is tamed by the surrounding woodland.  A considerable amount of skill and effort has undoubtedly been deployed too, but these natural factors are a huge advantage.  Unless your garden is a depleted, flinty hillside, wild flowers are going to be hard work.

Our garden and meadow is about as far from a flinty hillside as you can get.  It’s a clay loam that makes it easy to produce plump vegetables and a lush lawn, but it also produces sturdy thistles and feisty nettles. 

So can we do anything about it?  The answer is yes and no.  There are things we can do to increase the number of wild flowers and attract more invertebrates (think massive insect hotel!) but we will never be able to replicate the amazing diversity of a chalky hillside meadow.  So it's worth doing, but we need realistic goals.  100 species is way too ambitious.

After consulting Charles Flowers and others, we have decided on a four pronged attack:

- Yellow rattle.  This is a clever annual that attaches itself to the roots of grasses and in so doing weakens them.  Over a few years this should reduce the grass population.  The main drawback is that it is most effective in the areas that already have the weakest grasses, so it won’t help as much where the grasses are strong.

- Grazing and cutting.  Grazing with sheep from August to April and haymaking in July.  The sheep help deplete the soil by eating the grass, they tread in the yellow rattle seeds and their hooves makes small holes for wild flowers to colonise.

- New seed bed.  Kill off all existing growth with a herbicide and rotovate to prepare a new seed bed.  My hunch is that the soil is packed with undesirable dormant seed which will relish the new space we provide it so we going to test this in a small area first.

- New plants.  Collect and buy seed of wild flower varieties that are most likely to survive, for example birdsfoot trefoil, which is common locally and reasonably robust.

That’s the plan.  One more wildflower meadow is on its way.