An exciting package arrived today – a large seed order, seed potatoes and onion sets that mean that I will soon be able to start populating the garden vegetable beds and polytunnel.

The potatoes, I will set to chit in egg boxes in a cool light place in the back porch. More beans and peas can be started off in toilet roll tubes inside, to be transferred into the polytunnel for earliest crops. Toilet roll tubes should never be just thrown away. They make perfect little pots to start seeds in. Some other things can also be started indoors to be planted out in March or early April.

Other peas, seed from last summer’s allotment crop, I will be growing for fresh greens, placing them close and eating the shoots when they are a few inches high. They are delicious – a concentrated hit of pea flavour months before the…