Author(s): Celia Brooks-Brown

Gardening

Growing your own vegetables and fruit has never been a more popular pastime, but it is far more than a fashionable whim. People are digging up their gardens to grow their own and taking on allotments; the National Trust is creating 1,000 new plots in the next three years to provide for the number of growing fans. These days we want to eat organically and we need to eat economically, so growing your own makes perfect sense. From her North London allotment, Celia Brooks Brown brings real-life tales of her adventures in vegetable growing, such as the joy of spotting the first emerging spears of asparagus in spring, the battles with snails and slugs over the brassicas and what to plant to help fill The Hungry Gap in the late winter months. As the New Urban Farmer, Celia shares her gardening expertise, picked up since taking on her allotment plot in November 2005 and learnt through a combination of hard graft, trial and error, and shared tips from the other allotmenteers.