Having scraped the dish clean of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's sweet potato and crunchy peanut butter gratin (mot to be missed) one of the children threw me a challenge, “Can we grow sweet potatoes?”.  “I don’t see why not” I replied, not having the faintest idea of how to go about it.  And then I noticed sweet potato ‘slips’ advertised in a seed catalogue.  Two months later they arrived with precise instructions, to soak for 24 hours, pot for 3 weeks and then plant under black plastic.  The plants looked so knackered that I almost didn’t bother, but a week on they have perked up and now I’m feeling quietly confident.

It may be a while before it warms up enough to plant them out, but as long as I remember to water them often they should be fine indoors.  It is a member of the convolvulus family, so I’m hoping for pretty blue flowers as well as orange tubers.

This cold spell is also making me nervous about putting tender plants in the cold frame or greenhouse, so my golden sunrise and little red pear tomatoes are forming an orderly queue inside.  At times like this I’d like them to stop growing for a while, but I doubt they’ll oblige.  Sun, where are you?

The young broad beans though seem to relish the rain and the cold as does the purple sprouting broccoli.  The asparagus is less impressed.  Since popping its head up a few weeks ago it has refused to budge.  Hopefully its just biding its time, waiting for a bit more warmth.  Whatever the weather there are always winners and losers.  Lets hope the sweep potatoes are one of the winners.

This weekend I collected my first nucleus, my first bee colony starter pack.  We drove to Banbury and met the very courteous and helpful Viktor and Lucy Zaichenko at honeybeesuppliers, who introduced us to our new pets.  Everything seemed to be in order (although what does a novice know?) so we put them in the car boot and headed home (they were in a sealed box!).  It was a bit like collecting any other pets; one minute you’re an interested observer, the next you’re a responsible owner.  The inevitable flashed through my mind, Am I mad? 10,000 more mouths to feed!

The bees travelled well, cushioned on their picnic blanket.  There was no car sickness or unpleasant smells, just a low level contented buzz.

So then it was time to pop them into their new home.  I had intended to do only top bar beekeeping, as I believe top bar beekeeping is better for the bees, but after a lot of discussion decided to start with conventional WBC frames and progress to top bar in my next hive.  In theory top bar beekeeping is easier as the bees are left to their own devices more, but without a local top bar beekeeper on hand to advise me I felt using WBC frames was a safer place to start.  And one of the advantages of the Home Beehive I’m using is that it can be used for either approach, so I can convert it to a top bar hive at a later date.

All five frames were covered with female worker bees.  No doubt there were some male drones too, but for the untrained eye they were too difficult to spot.  We did see our beautiful, sleek queen though who is almost twice as long as the workers.  She is shinier and darker than the others and she has a white spot on her back to make her easier to see.  She had clearly been hard at work as there were lots of eggs in various stages of development.  Just what a beekeeper wants to see.

My job now is to keep the queen happy.  To do that I need to keep the workers happy, which means feeding them with sugar syrup.  Its so cold at the moment the workers will not want to be out foraging.  A few of them have been scouting around, hopefully reporting back the good news that there is a field of rape within 200m, so I imagine they will be able to feed themselves in a week or two.  Not many pets can manage that!

Who hasn’t dropped in at a local garden centre and come away with a handful of plants with only the vaguest idea of how they will fit into your garden. That lavender bush that was a little piece or Provence or those pansies that said ‘take me take me’.

I’m all for bit of freestyle, but random planting seldom pays off. If you want your garden to do certain things then it helps to have a plan and this is particularly true of wildlife gardening. Here are some dos and don’ts that is my wildlife gardening plan.

Water is good. The ideal setup is to divert rainwater from a gutter or downpipe into a pond. If you can’t make a pond, then at least collect the rainwater in butts for use in your garden. The kits to divert rainwater from a downpipe are cheap and easily installed. If you can manage a pond a few semi-aquatic plants will help clean the water and provide drinking stations for bugs and birds.

Not all plants are good. Bedding plants may provide instant colour, but many of them are as useless as plastic flowers for wildlife. They have been developed to look nice after a tiring road journey from Holland rather than to be rich in nectar or pollen. There are plenty of lists available of wildlife friendly plants, but two rules of thumb that I find helpful are 1) favour flowers that are single not double (more nectar, seeds and easier to navigate) and 2) favour plants that offer food in the spring, autumn or winter and not just the summer. There is usually a surplus of food in the summer.

Mess is good. Long grass, rotting logs, weeds (nettles, dandelions, clover etc), dead leaves, and rocks all provide safe havens or sustenance for little creatures. Which means resisting the urge to tidy. Sanitised swept paths and bowling green lawns make for wildlife deserts. Write in on your shed door now….mess is good.

Chemicals are bad. I’m not someone who is hung up on the whole organic thing, but in your own back yard you really don’t want to be using chemicals. Besides which there are plenty of wildlife friendly ways to achieve the same goal. If you have problems with greenfly, make more space for ladybirds. If you have problems with carrot fly, plant onions. And if you have problems with pigeons net you plants or try a scarecrow. Always try netting, companion planting or biological controls first. But at least as important is your mindset. Broad beans with blackfly taste just as good as broad beans without!

Compost bins are very, very good. It is one of life’s no brainers. Your waste is converted into something that is useful for you, your soil and for the many invertebrates that feast on it. And its so easy. Pile your uncooked veg waste into a compost bin, mix in the odd piece of card board and grass cuttings and after 6 months you should be good to go.

If you want to go one stage further, then you can build or buy products that encourage wildlife. Insect hotels, pollinating bee logs, hedgehog houses and bird boxes are all designed to help the wildlife in your garden. There is no guarantee they will have tenants, but at least they are part of a plan. A plan to make your garden more wildlife friendly.

Beekeeping officially starts for me next month. I’ve been contemplating it for years, but its only now that I have plucked up the courage to go for it. I have ordered a ‘nuc’ and collect it sometime in April.

A nuc is the nucleus of a new bee colony. It includes a queen bee, a few males drones and around 10,000 female workers. The plan is to coax them into a beehive at the end of the garden and then to help the colony grow into healthy 50 odd thousand bees.

When I say help the colony to grow, nature will play a far greater part in their destiny than I ever will. This is not just because of my novice status, it is also due to the fact that I am trying the non-interventionist top-bar approach which takes the view that the bees know best, so they should be largely left to their own devices. The idea is to interfere as little as possible After all, bees seem to have got on rather well without us for several thousand years. And they are basically wild animals not domesticated pets.

Despite leaving nature in charge, I’m still pretty nervous. I’m nervous about being stung (I can’t remember being stung since I was a child), I’m nervous about other people being stung (which is clearly much worse) and I’m nervous about the bees dying or vanishing due to my incompetence.

But with nerves comes excitement. When you know so little about something, everything is new and astonishing. This weekend I had my first experience of peering into a hive wearing a bee suit and it was truly extraordinary. The bees buzzed but didn’t bite, or sting or rage. They were the perfect hosts. Maybe they sensed I was a novice and wanted to give me a soft start. Or maybe they didn’t have much honey to defend, so they knew better than to waste energy attacking me.

So instead of harassing us the bees focussed intently on the job in hand, which seemed to be collecting pollen. Every second a bee arrived with sacks of little yellow pollen like planes landing on a busy runway. Every bee knew what to do and where to go, like a well run factory after a winter break. No nonsense. No dawdling. No need for any human’s to help them. Long may it continue.

My seeds have arrived!  There are a few newcomers, plenty of reliable regulars and a handful of long lost friends.  My job now is to make them all feel at home

The first newcomer to enter the germinator will be the colourful chilli collection.  These range from the fiery cayenne to the more docile Hungarian hot wax.  Chillis can be slow to germinate so I might have to relocate them into a plastic bag if there is too much of a queue for the germinator.  I love chillis and thankfully slugs don’t, so if they all germinate we should have a enough for a chilli festival of our own.

Hot on the heels of the chillis will be tomatoes.  I will start with golden sunrise and little red pear as these will be grown in the greenhouse, so I don’t need to wait for frost free nights.  The big chunky marmande and black Russian will end up outside, so these can wait till the end of March.  I don’t want the plants to get too big too soon, otherwise I will be needing more bubble wrap, fellece and cloches.

My last newcomer this year is the herb chervil, which even the best stocked supermarkets seldom seem stock.  According to Albert Roux, it is the key ingredient for an omelette fine herbes.  Its got to be done.

For the regulars, its ups and downs.  The ups are borlotti beans which I am hoping to grow up coir bean twine.  Previously I have grown borlottis on dwarf plants which has been very successful but this year I thought I’d go for a few bean wigwams which always add interest to the veg plot.  It’s the sweetcorn which is going down.  The last couple of summers the corns have been a bit dried out, so my logic is that shorter plants might cope better with less rainfall.  I have opted for the short and sturdy F1 variety early extra sweet.

Chicory is now a regular too and this year I am adding more varieties.  My pallo rosa will be accompanied by catalogna and treviso, the former green and spiky the latter red and rounded.  I need to wait for early summer though before sowing these and then should be rewarded with plenty of colourful bitter salad throughout the autumn.

I am also welcoming back three old favourites which have been pushed out in recent years.  Crystal apple, which is the most delicious crisp cucumber.  Its appearance can be a bit pasty, but its crunch is unbeatable.  Yellow scaloppini, which is more picturesque and more courgette-like than the gem squash it is pushing out.  And the last of my old friends is horseradish which I spent the first five years here trying to eradicate.  It had spread to every corner of the garden and had dug in deep.  I’ve now got over the trauma (after another 10 years!) and am ready to give it another go, but this time it will be contained in a planter sunk into the ground.  With some old friends its worth taking a few risks.

The mornings are already getting lighter and yet my head still hasn’t made the transition to the new gardening year.  Despite the over-wintered broad beans having broken through some weeks ago, I’m still mulling over last year’s successes and failures.  I need to work this through before doing battle with the 2012 seed catalogues.

I don’t like watering my vegetables, so as every allotment holder knows prolonged periods without rain can be problematic.  The fennel never really got beyond spring onion size (although it was still crisp and fragrant) and the cucumbers never outgrew their gerkin cousins.  And the extraordinary sunny spell in the autumn ripened the squashes to the point where only a meat cleaver could break through the concrete skin.  I realise though that the Indian summer was a blip and can’t expect the same weather pattern this year. 

There are some vegetables though whose performance doesn’t seem to depend on the weather.  For years leeks have been my sure-fire crop; low maintenance and a guaranteed winter of tree trunk like stems.  But for my last three years the leeks have suffered from rust, which has splattered them with pustules and drained them of their strength.  Each year I have put my faith in manure and crop rotation to keep my beds in tip top health, but this doesn’t seem to cut it for leeks.  Rust seems to thrive on nitrogen, so this year I’m going to try leeks in the most depleted bed and see if that helps.

Thankfully though whenever there are losers there are also winners.  Last year was the best I can remember for tomatoes (our freezer still has a few loose snooker ball reds knocking about) and we had a bumper crop of courgettes.  That being said, of the four courgette plants, the great F1 defender was responsible for the lions share yet again and the quality was superb.  Much though I love quirky heritage vegetables and the chanciness of germinating open-pollinated seeds, this year I’m going to limit myself to two F1 hybrid courgettes, Defender and probably Gold Rush.

Don’t get me wrong.  Consistency is well down the list of qualities I seek from my veg and generally I’m not an F1er.  I grow frisee lettuce and endive with a shockingly low yield, but the pleasure I get from being able to prepare a late autumn salad makes it a shoe-in every year.  And my brassicas are invariably outshone by the veg display at the market.  But for me its not a competition, it’s a passion.  When I finally get round to opening my seed catalogues this weekend I know my pulse will start racing.  I know that some seeds will disappoint but I also know that some will blow me away.  And that’s the thrill.

I so much enjoy the birds that come into our garden.  They bring colour, noise, charm.  The garden would be empty without them.

Garden birds are invariably timid though, so the best way of coaxing them to settle where we can see them is with bird feeders and water.  This is also good for the birds of course, so it’s a win win.

However, as is increasingly the case with so many of life’s pleasures, its no longer as simple as ‘feed the birds’.  With the rise of diseases like trichomoniasis it may mean using your bird feeder less.  The RSPB advice is to clean bird feeders frequently and if you see any sick birds (lethargic, fluffed up feathers, esp greenfinches) then remove the feeders for a while so that the healthy birds aren’t congregating with the infected birds.  A couple of weeks should be fine.

At least as important though is to make your garden as naturally bird friendly as possible.  The choice of plants, the design of the garden and the way you maintain it can make a huge difference to the bird life.  The best bird gardens have readily available water and a wide range of food all year (seed heads for finches, undergrowth for dunnocks and rotting wood for great tits and other hole nesting birds).  And herbaceous plants are not cut back until late winter, which means at this time of year seed heads like Phlomis look stunning.

Nothing beats a good murmuration on a Sunday afternoon in November.  And that’s precisely what we got at the RSPB’s Otmoor Reserve this weekend.  The signs were not good.  The expert twitchers were shaking their heads as if maybe the mild weather was a bad omen.  But thankfully all was well.  Soon after 4pm successive clouds of black specks soared and dipped in the distance before dancing their way to the reed beds in front of us.  At the last second they briefly soared before diving for a roost, as if the music had stopped suddenly in musical chairs (this blurry photo).  Come to think of it, how do they all find a space?

There has been a chain of letters in the Guardian this month on this year’s exceptionally long season for strawberries.  We picked our last strawberries this weekend, and whilst they had lost some of their firmness, they still had that lovely home grown sweetness.  We have blueberries too waiting to be picked, apparently unbothered by the first frosts.  And yet my radicchio that should be such a treat now has taken one look at the cold and shrivelled up into a brown ball of mush. 

I guess growing your own veg would be dull if every season was predictable and every crop consistent.  The next challenge will be the snow.  Stocking up with rock salt and waxing the runners on your toboggan may seem premature, but these days who can tell.  Maybe its best to keep the barbeque and hammock out too.

Harvesting your home grown fruit and veg is a pleasure, there is no two ways about it.  It makes you feel proud and wholesome.  But it is also a challenge.  Just as a farmer needs to keep one eye on his ripening crops and the other on the weather forecast, so too does the allotment holder and vegetable gardener.  This autumn’s overshoots have included:

- The katy apples we pressed to make apple juice, even though they were picked straight from the tree, would have been tastier and juicier two weeks early.  They looked lovely and bright red on the outside, but they had started to become puffy, which made the juice dull brown instead of lively pink.

- I was too greedy with my caulies, leaving them to grow just that little bit larger.  I then forgot about them for a couple of days and bang the lovely white crispness and had been replaced by leggy yellow.

- And don't get me started on the borlotti beans.  I wait all year for these as they are still not sold locally.  We had a couple of very good borlotti meals, but I was hoping for a couple more.  Usually blackened pods is not a problem, but this year they had gone too far even to be dried.

Thankfully I seem to have got my timing better on the tomatoes and courgettes, both of which are still producing well.  Ratatouille again tonight then.