Apart from all my plants growing nicely, there isn’t a lot going on this week in my garden. I’ve done the required sweeping outside to keep things tidy and watered everything and that is as exciting as it gets this week.

This coming summer, I am going to see how many of my own vegetables I can grow. I’d like to do this as I want to be able to have a broader range of vegetables to eat available to me and that are grown locally to where I live (an often hard task when living in a big city). I also find that a lot of fruit and veg available in supermarkets are not as tasty as they could be and this is a rather large failing really on their part. I am also keen to have a ready supply of things like cherry tomatoes for snacking on rather than reaching for the processed rubbish all the time!

There are several prerequisites for any produce that I will be growing:

• We have to enjoy eating whatever it is that I grow
• All produce has to be quite versatile in that we must be able to use it in a wide range of meals
• Most can be eaten as a snack easily too, so that we don’t end up eating unhealthy food when we are hungry

I am also looking into getting some carnivorous plants for indoors. During the summer, there are often flies hanging around, especially as the cat likes to go outside as and when she pleases so we often leave the doors open. I also find that a lot of the fly sprays that we can buy don’t actually work that well and absolutely stink to go with that, I decided to give some interesting looking plants a try to hopefully have a less smelly solution to the flies over summer.

Before I get to summer, there are a few jobs that also need doing with my existing plants. All my cacti need potting up, along with my mother-in-laws tongue (Sanseveria spp.) plants, which also need dividing. My trees also need repotting. All this will take me a couple of weekends to do around all my other weekend jobs that need doing (including relaxing!). This will then be followed by seed sowing for all my vegetable crops and flower seeds too. It will be a busy couple of months I think!