Apples – nothing beats that crunch on the first Discovery each August

Bees – I love hearing them and seeing them at work and remember that a third of our food is pollinated by them

Cosmos – my favourite annual. See last month’s column for more details

Dahlias – back in fashion now. My favourite is the scarlet Bishop of Llandaff

Eschscholzia – better known as Californian poppies. Bright, cheerful and obligingly self-seeding

Felco – the best secateurs and with their red handle you can always see where you left them!

Grit – about a ton of horticultural grit has made our clay soil workable

Helenium – a mainstay of the late-summer “hot” border. “Moerheim Beauty” is a favourite

Irises – for their transient beauty

Jasmine – for its fantastic fragrance

Kniphofia – or red hot poker. Another stalwart of the hot border and a nostalgic reminder of my childhood home

Lilac – short seasonal interest admittedly, but what a smell!

Mizuna – a cut-and-come-again leaf that peps up salads

Nicotiana sylvestris – its statuesque, white flowers are the scent of summer nights

Oleander – its sickly-sweet smell conjures up holidays in Ibiza

Pink Fir Apple – nutty-tasting knobbly potatoes that sum up why you should grow your own

Quince – for puddings, preserves and to scent your kitchen if you put some in your fruit bowl

Roses – of course! Generous Gardener and Paul’s Himalayan Musk are my favourites

Squash – easy to grow, easy to store, easy to cook

Tomatoes – shop-bought tomatoes just can’t compare

Unmissable moments – seeing the first snowdrop, picking bunches and bunches of daffodils for the house and for friends, the first sweet corn of the season slathered with butter, glimpsing the electric blue of the kingfisher as it patrols our stream…

Viburnum – like v tinus Laurustinus and the other late winter bloomers that cheer me up with their scented flowers

White – the best colour for flowers, as they are still visible in twilight and are often the most fragrant

X – exercise! Gardening is cheaper than a gym, gets you outside, is productive and birdsong is much more relaxing than thumping pop music!

Yew – adds gravitas and structure to our garden and the birds love the berries

ZZZ – a shocking percentage of people in the UK have insomnia, but I can’t think that many gardeners have problems sleeping after all their exertions.

As Eric Robson of Gardeners’ Question Time says, “Goodbye and good gardening!”

I always grow cosmos bipinnatus in the borders and the cutting patch, as they are reliable germinators and will happily keep flowering for several months. The TV gardener Sarah Raven says that her 1m x 1m patch can produce 2 buckets of flowers a week from late June to October – that’s very good value from a couple of packets of seed. It is possible to buy some varieties of cosmos as bedding plants from a garden centre, but I avoid them as they tend to be the compact types which just get lost in my borders! I have therefore always grown them from seed and have found the white cosmos “Purity” and the bright pink “Dazzler” to be the best. Not only are they prolific flowerers, but they also produce lots of nectar and pollen making them attractive to bees and butterflies. Last year the cool wet summer meant that the cosmos put on a lot of growth and reached nearly 5 feet and while the flowers didn’t appear until late August, they looked spectacular until late October and the first frosts.  As with all annuals, it is better if you can deadhead them, but I have noticed that they perform just as well if I don’t and towards the end of the season you can save the seed and try sowing it next year.

Another annual that loved last year’s rains were the sweet peas that produced vases of flowers for weeks. I go for fragrance over colour or size, so I prefer varieties such as the small bicolour “Matucana” or  the dark purple “Lord Nelson”. It is important to keep cutting sweet peas so that they carry on producing flowers – once you start to see any pods, they are starting to set seed and will put their energy into that rather than flower production. So even if you have filled all your vases, keep cutting and give them to friends – you’ll be very popular.

Another favourite annual is amaranthus caudatus or Love-lies-bleeding.  It produces drooping panicles of dark red blooms – giving rise to its dramatic name – and for extra drama I have always planted the dark red/purple foliage variety. In fact I find that it plants itself as it obligingly self-seeds every year. As it can grow to over 3 feet it will need to be staked, as the drooping flowers can drag it over.  Again, last year’s cooler, wetter weather produced whopping plants that flowered until October – not bad for freebies!

I have not been adventurous with my seed potatoes this year and have stuck to the tried-and-tested. For the first earlies I have Pentland Javelin and the second earlies Maris Peer. I have once again chosen Pink Fir Apple for our main crop salad potato – knobbly, waxy, with a nutty flavour, it has resisted the blight well over the last 2 poor summers and also kept well in storage. In response to the problems we have had with blight I am trying out the organic Sarpo Mira for our all-purpose main crop potato, which boasts “excellent blight resistance”. Let’s hope so!

Perhaps because of last year’s poor summer and the seemingly never-ending winter I didn’t get enthused about seeds this year and left it to my husband, whose choices were rather pedestrian. I shall have to buy some late additions that I have found we cannot do without. Top of the list must be Japanese mizuna – a great easy-to-grow cut-and-come-again salad leaf which you need to pick regularly, but can be used to perk up a salad or as a garnish. It seems to make its way onto our dinner plates most days in the summer. I grow one or two plants in the greenhouse for earlier cutting and also have some outside. The other one which my husband has missed is the Munchkin pumpkin. These tiny pumpkins can be grown as climbers if you are short of space – but make sure that your fence can support them as they can weigh as much as 400g each. Like all of the cucurbita family they keep well over the winter, although they are so delicious, that you may not keep them for that long! They are great for dinner parties when you cut them horizontally and remove the seeds, brush with oil and roast for about half an hour, then reunite the tops with the bottoms and serve a whole one to each guest, as one of the vegetable accompaniments to meat or fish. You will earn extra Brownie points when you tell everyone that you grew them!

Sorry to go on about blight, but I was really dismayed that it got into the greenhouse last year and affected the tomatoes. I was therefore intrigued to see in the garden centre and in catalogues plants that have been grafted onto disease-resistant stock. They are really expensive when compared to growing from seed – £10 for 3 – but if their yield is higher, then fewer plants should be needed. I am going to try them out as well as growing my own. All I need now is some sun….

Unlike the moles, the badgers have crossed the road, as my husband saw one waiting at our gate one evening as he was driving out. My husband is not generally given to anthropomorphic musings, but he said that the badger seemed quite unafraid of the car, looked straight at him as if to say “Hurry up” and then trotted in through our gate! This insouciance with regard to vehicles is unfortunately the downfall of many badgers – as 50,000 annual roadside corpses testify – and seems at odds with their general timidity towards humans. As a wholly nocturnal mammal, they are rarely seen and have been the subject of many myths, the oddest being a medieval belief that their right legs are longer than their left, so that they can walk easily round hillsides!

Having read more about badgers I now realise that there were signs that we had a sett in the vicinity. There are well-worn paths radiating out across the orchard, along which they must trundle each night looking for food and it solves the mystery of why all the windfall apples disappeared this year. There are usually lots of tiny ones too small for commercial purposes lying on the ground in winter, as I have always used them for decorating Christmas wreaths, but this year they had all gone. And it’s not just fruit that they like, as badgers put the omnis (Latin for all) into omnivore as they really do eat everything – nuts, frogs, slugs, worms, birds’ eggs, fungi, even wasps’ nests.

Badgers are very unpopular with beef and dairy farmers as they suffer from and almost certainly transmit bovine TB to cattle. Protected under various Acts of Parliament they have complete immunity from persecution, but as the badger population has reached an estimated quarter of a million, there are controversial plans for experimental culls.

As a gardener, I am ambivalent about the presence of badgers. Their sett is far enough away not to be a problem and there is no evidence in the garden of the pits they make as communal latrines. However, I know that these powerful diggers can cause damage to lawns and borders in their quest for worms and other food and that the rabbit-proof fencing would not be strong enough to keep them out. Hopefully Brock the badger will not make himself unwelcome!

Gardening is about planning ahead, sometimes you reap the rewards quickly (annuals flower within weeks of planting) or in years (Asparagus beds take a few years to give good crops). The thing to remember is that it’s not an exact science; you’re at the mercy of so many variables – mainly due to the weather. This dictates everything from the rate of germination, to plant growth, flowering and ripening.

So, if you’re growing your own this year, here’s some advice……..

1. Once the ground has thawed and is reasonably dry, mark the shape of your veg patch with sand trickled from an old plastic bottle. Remove the top layer of growing vegetation and dig the ground over, incorporating as much organic matter as possible. If you are making a bed in the lawn, remove the turf and stack it upside down somewhere out of the way – after a year or two it will rot down into fantastic compost.
2. Start off with a small veg patch this year; if you find you enjoy growing your own and have some success, you can always make it bigger next year – assuming you have the space.