Veg Plotting Ideas, Tips & Guides

However, our cat Skipper was paying them far too much attention, so I moved them to the hanging basket out front. The cooler weather there meant they've only started to bloom recently, and most welcome they are too. Once flowering is over, I'm taking a top tip learnt from my time at West Green House and planting them out in the border. I have a plan to revamp the front garden after last year's box demise and these will go there alongside a couple of ferns I have languishing in pots out the back. Waste not want not as they say. These are not the only bulbs I've been chatting about recently. Over on Insta I'm celebrating the pictured poet's daffodil posing on my windowsill as one of my final seasonal narcissus treats, and the lovely fritillary is featured on FloodRe's Flood Resilient Garden's site.Then of course

In the meantime we'll have to make do with the sketched design — as you can see there's a lot crammed into a small space. FloodRe — the garden's sponsor — have an interactive version on their website which allows you to explore the garden's features thoroughly — both in terms of the various habitats and planting — which are also chosen carefully to help with flood resilience, as well as the more engineering aspects to the design. As a result I'm currently pondering whether we can have some extra wide guttering installed on our house as we have real problems with overflows on an increasingly regular basis.Naomi tells me the garden attracted a lot of attention at the RHS Spring Conference recently. I'm not surprised seeing England has had one of the wettest 18 months on record. They've certainly captured the zeitgeist! I hope the garden's design and ensuing conversations will help to galvanise real changes in planning law and garden design. Post Chelsea the garden itself is set to move to Howbery Park in Oxfordshir

 Part of Tom Massey's

What I didn't expect was some rocket plants** to decide to join it to make a quite unusual planting combination. What do you think? I have no idea where the rocket has come from, though I'm pleased to add its leaves to my salads and sandwiches on a regular basis. I especially like how the yellow flowers echo the pollen rings that have appeared on the Echinacea's central cones.Sometimes it's good to go with the garden's flow and enjoy the unexpected items that appear in the gardening area

I also thought the hardy fuchsias in the front garden had gone, unlike their cousins in the back. I naturally assumed this was down to the front garden facing north not quite giving them the conditions they need to thrive. I even bought a replacement 'Hawkshead' at Malvern show recently as I'm particularly fond of its more delicate, pure white blooms.And then, I saw last week the stems I'd cut down to the ground in the spring have sprouted lots of lush, new growth as shown in the top photo, so my latest 'Hawkshead' has a new spot in the back garden instead. I shall bear in mind the top tip I was given in Malvern an

The review bus has ambled down the lane and I'm delighted I'm the next stop on the blog tour for Jean Vernon's latest book Attracting Garden Pollinators. It's great to have a volume which covers all kinds of insect pollinators — as well as bees — as the importance of many of them is often overlooked for our gardens.In the opening chapters stuffed with fascinating insights we find: without wasps we wouldn't have any bees (they evolved from them); some bees nest in snail shells as well as thrushes liking to find them (the snails that is); and hoverflies are highly useful pollinators as well chomping away at those pesky aphids. Jean neatly shows how i

This one's a pyramidal orchid (Anacamptis pyrimidalis), which according to the link likes a milder climate and chalk or limestone grasslands. It also goes on to say that it's developed a liking for the more artificial kind of environment — such as beside roads and canals — so perhaps a front lawn on a limey clay soil is just the kind of place it likes to be nowadays. I'm delighted it's chosen my front garden!I've asked NAH to refrain from mowing the lawn for a while to enable it to set seed, though he's keen to mow the 'meadow' now No Mow May has finished. Perhaps we now have the perfect compromise, leave the front lawn so there's taller herbiage there with a lower back lawn to offer the shorter

Lockdown made this a familiar walk for us all. it's one of the few which takes you to a destination instead of around in a circle and has more of a sense of a journey as a result. Familiarity doesn't mean there aren't any surprises — we were delighted to find extensive bluebell woods either side of the track once we were close to the Bowood Estate. I thought I'd found all the local, walkable bluebell woods during the past two years, and I'm delighted to be proven wrong.There was plenty of wild garlic too — walks there during the rest of May are going to be quite pungent!May the month of May be as delightful for you, whatever's happening in your neck of the woods.

Once the results are in, the organisations involved will have a better picture of the scale of the problem we face here in the UK. They also will have better facts to take to government (both local and national) and the organisations who create or use the plastic — such as food companies — to lobby for alternative packaging solutions.Like with any project of this kind I'm sure the results will lead to further questions and the potential need to drill down further in the data. Whilst there are 19 categories of plastic in the survey, many of them are quite broad and only give an idea of numbers not volume. For instance one of my pieces of plastic this morning is the small wrapper which goes around a milk bottle. This sits along

The Museum has had a couple of Jubilee projects I've been involved with. The Young Photographers group worked hard on their '70 Years, 70 Faces' and found at least one face per year of the Queen's reign. NAH and I went along to see ours at the Yelde Hall and add a new meaning to 'we were beside ourselves'! You may recognise a couple of the faces as Mark Allum (below me) and Lisa Lloyd (top right) from Antiques Roadshow live in Chippenham. I think NAH has fared particularly well in the photos, but then I'm biased!I — along with my WI — made lots of pennants for the 'Joy of Community' bunting display which celebrates what Chippenham means to its contributors. I thought we'd manage 10 if we were lucky, but in the end made 29! I added three of my own as well, and there's around 100 pennants with all kinds of craft and thought on display. If it's crochet, then you know it'

For Houseplant Week I must have picked up the housplant week vibes (which ends today) because I've spent lots of time tending to my houseplants. This chilli 'Basket of Fire' is one of my more unusual specimens and I'm pleased to say it's now entering its third year of cultivation. It can be a bit rampant, but a severe haircut soon brings it back under control.

Garden Bloggers' Blooms Day: Experimental and Guerrilla Snowdrops The snowdrops are finally coming to the fore this week, does anyone else think they're later this year? Of course I could be comparing them to years when they've been early

 Rubber ducks lined up outside my local

You may think these are rather late to plant, but I've checked the bulbs and they're still sound. Fingers crossed for some frosts and they'll still perform magnificently, though probably a couple of weeks later than if I'd planted them last autumn.I've also looked around the garden this morning and there are plenty of signs of other bulbs pushing their noses through the soil. It's always a good time to do this when the nights are at their longest because it all adds to that feeling of hope. Let's face it we all need as much of that as we can get

ATCO is a century-old* lawnmower manufacturer and judging by its appearance this is a relatively old one. Unusually it's been quite hard to find out much information about it online. According to this guide, my best bet is to go back and see if there are any useful looking numbers on the metalwork.* = just over as the company was founded in 1921