It’s been a long cold winter here (relative to our usual expectations) but hopefully now we are near the end. I was out on the balcony last weekend and there are even signs of growth in places – raspberries and garlic come to mind. There were some carrots and kale that survived the freeze (fair [...]

We’ve been growing kale for a few months on the balcony, and have already enjoyed a fine few meals with it. A few days ago I was surprised while watering to find it crawling in long black and yellow things.

About 20 caterpillars had taken up residence on one of the kale plants and pretty much [...]

We are now into April so it’s time to stop worrying about cold nights and ground frost as we pass “Last Frost Day”.  Things are looking a lot greener on the balcony already.

To celebrate, I tranplanted out some of the lettuce and broccoli seedlings and direct-sowed the dwarf borlotti beans and the climbing beans. The [...]