The longer day light hours and the warm, sunny weather interspersed with heavy downpours have seen to it that everything in the vegetable garden has grown at a rate of knots this month - including my own enthusiasm for ‛growing your own'!

I really can't explain the immense sense of satisfaction and pride you get from transforming a non descript patch of land into a wholesome, delicious, pesticide-free food to feed your family and with the recent news of the Queen now ‛growing her own' at Buckingham Palace and the 25 million pound euro lottery winner announcing that the win will change everything in his life - except the time he spends on his allotment - it appears I'm not the only one to have been seriously bitten by the veg growing bug!

In fact, the whole nation is warming to the idea of spending less time between the rows of the supermarket isles and a little more time between the rows of their own raised beds and now, thanks to a brilliant new initiative created by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, even those with very little time or space can now hook up with ‛landowners' or ‛would be growers' by visiting www.landshare.channel4.com so there really is no excuse for not getting involved!

It's an initiative I'd whole heartedly recommend as when I decided I'd like to create a vegetable garden at Heald Farm I don't mind saying I was more than a little daunted a) by my lack of knowledge b) by my lack of time and c) by the amount of work I thought would be involved. For those reasons I devised my own (rather lower tech!) version of Hugh's ‛landshare' scheme and put a notice up in our local village shop announcing that I had the space, enthusiasm and willingness to work at creating a flourishing vegetable garden but was seeking someone with similar enthusiasm and bags of ‛know-how' to come and join me!

To my delight I received two responses. One from Nigel (now our very own MumKnowsBest Gardening Expert) who has a lifetime of experience being head gardener at numerous National Trust properties around the country (and just lives up the road!) and another from Dennis, a retired headmaster who also lives in the village and has grown his own vegetables all his life (as did his father and both his grandfathers before him who were both professional vegetable gardeners!)

Talk about hitting the jackpot! Thanks to the immense knowledge and guidance of both these extremely talented people I have not only gained the confidence to turn my dream of a flourishing vegetable garden into a reality and now have gone on to create a fruit garden too (more of that later), I have made two great new friends and thanks to our combined efforts we all have more organic vegetables (o.k. it's not officially certified but there's not a pesticide in sight) than our combined families can eat!

And so down to business - here's an update of what's been happening at Heald farm this month .....

With all the beds planted the main jobs for this month have been making sure that everything is well watered in the dry spells and the odd bit of weeding here and there (although I must say, there has been a lot less weeding than I expected as the beds are so full there's little opportunity for any weeds to take root!).

We did erect some netting over the brassica bed to keep the cabbage butterflies at bay by simply cutting lengths of water pipe tubing, pushing them into the ground then covering with fine netting (available from all good garden centres) and hooking over nails banged into the side of the raised beds - a rather rustic approach that has proved to be very effective and the cabbages are looking superb!

New Plantings I have also planted some squash, courgettes, cucumbers, runner beans and calabrese in the remaining two beds (which were all put in as small plants rather than seed simply because I visited a summer fayre and bought the plants from a stall holder) along with some leeks, parsnips and another row of rocket and spinach leaves.

Tucking in
To my great delight we've been able to begin eating some of the produce from the gardener - early new potatoes (which boiled with some fresh mint and served with a little butter really were the best new potatoes I've ever eaten!), spinach (which I have added by the bucket load to home made lentil based curries to create that irresistible dhal type texture), lettuce, mixed salad leaves (that are bursting with a whole variety of flavours including a lovely mustardy leaf that really adds a zing to salads and sandwiches), radishes, rhubarb and spring onions.

The Jerusalem artichokes that were given their own raised bed are growing rapidly and as they are a member of the sunflower family I have planted a few of our own sunflowers to add a bit of colour to the garden later on. The new bed of potatoes has really sprung up too.

Creating a Fruit Garden
However, the real development this month has been the decision to extend the garden to include fruit! Call me over ambitious but when Denis suggested the idea of creating another long bed to plant our very own raspberries, strawberries, gooseberries, loganberries, blackcurrants, red currants and white currants I simply couldn't resist. The idea that once bought these would fruit every year without the need to keep re-planting also appealed and helped me to convince myself that the ¬£100 or so I spent buying all the plants was actually an ‛investment'!

How to Take Strawberry Plant Cuttings
The strawberries plants have begun to throw out runners across the ground now and Denis explained how to create cuttings from them to create a whole set of new plants for next year (most strawberry plants only last for about three years so it's a good idea to create and plant a set of new ones each year).

The process is actually very simple. Just cut a 3 - 4 inch length or garden wire and fold in half, fill a small plant pot with compost, place the pot beneath a spot on a runner that has a cluster of leaves and peg into the soil with the wire. Dig the pot a couple of inches into the ground to prevent it being knocked or blown over, keep well watered and within a couple of weeks the runner will have taken root in the pot at which point, simply snip off from the original plant.

Tune in again next month for all the latest development down at the Heald farm fruit and veg garden!