What would houseplant expert Jane Perrone grow in space? GotG7

Although August is the height of the summer, and it’s worthwhile taking time to stop and smell the roses, the vegetable gardener also has to be aware that autumn is just around the corner. That doesn’t have to be a depressing thought! It just means you need to harvest any crops that won’t survive the first frosts, and that you may want to preserve some so that you can have a homegrown taste of summer during the winter months. You should have some new crops on the way to look forward to, and be thinking about potting up herbs to bring under cover for the winter.

Today is the first day of National Plants at Work Week, which aims to promote the use and benefits of indoor plants. You may have been eyeing up the windowsills in your office with a view to growing your own chillies or sweet peppers, but did you know that you can grow your own fresh air too?

I’ve always been fascinated by the Home Front, the enlistment of every man, woman and child in the British Isles in an effort to beat Hitler through food rationing, making do and mending, salvage, growing your own and basically making the most of scarce resources with elbow grease and endless ingenuity. I’ve just read Eggs or Anarchy by William Sitwell, a biography of Lord Woolton who was the Minister of Food for much of the Second World War. He was in charge of ensuring everyone got fed, and improving nutritional standards was one of his aims. It’s unusual to get the ‘behind-the-scenes’ view, and the political situation wasn’t as united as may appear from our rose-tinted histories.

As gardeners, we’re all familiar with finding caterpillars in the cabbages, but we’re also adept at removing them before we cook up our feasts (or, in my case, feeding the whole lot to the chickens). But what if we didn’t? There are plenty of cultures around the world in which insects provide a valuable source of protein, and even in the Western world our food processing systems don’t guarantee us insect-free food, so we’re all eating them unwittingly anyway. (Although, apparently, the idea that we eat spiders in our sleep is an urban legend.)

A little while ago I was talking about the recent extended period in my life when, for a variety of reasons, I was unable to garden. As it happens, I have been reading The Resilient Gardener, by Carol Deppe, which is subtitled “Food production and self-reliance in uncertain times”.

A seed potato is a potato that has been grown to be replanted to produce a potato crop. It’s the usual way that potatoes are made available to farmers and growers – although it is possible to produce potato seeds (also known as True Potato Seed, TPS), it is unusual to do so.

Header image: Terrae Novae destinations: Mars. Credit: ESA–Olivier Pâques

If October starts warm it can provide a nice breathing space, to catch up late harvesting, saving seeds and generally getting the garden ready for the winter. It’s also the time to cover any bare soil, with mulches if necessary, to protect your soil structure from bad weather, and to ensure any tall plants (mainly brassicas) are staked against ‘wind rock’, which can lift their roots out of the soil. You may also need to net brassicas to stop them being munched by marauding pigeons.

This time last year, we remember the unfinished parts of the garden being mostly bog. It was so wet that it delayed us finishing the garden – it was hard to prepare the ground for the new raised beds. The weather couldn’t be more different this year, as the traditional April showers fail to appear, and I’ve taken to watering plants in containers. I know plenty of gardeners were praying for rain, even over the Bank Holiday weekend (when, as we well know, rain often stops play!).

I hopped up to London a while back to be a guest (along with Jeff Lowenfels, author of ‘Teaming with microbes’) on ‘Sow, Grow, Repeat’, the Guardian’s gardening podcast. Wearing my Master Composter hat, I was chatting with Alys Fowler and Jane Perrone on the ins and outs of composting. Find out more about Bokashi, the weird things compost nuts add to their heap and the microbes living in there!

Ah, April, a month that gives us leaves on the trees, blossom in the hedgerow, and a headache with its changeable weather. We gardeners would love April to be a season of sunshine and soft showers. But, instead, we need to plan for sleet and hail, or even snow. As the effects of climate change are felt more widely, we may even need to forego thinking of April as a rainy month at all, and just an extension of dry winters. It’s also at least a month before we can be relatively sure that there will be no more frosts.

Sixty years ago today, Yuri Gagarin launched us into the era of human spaceflight. The Russian cosmonaut achieved a major milestone in the Space Race when he orbited the Earth in the Vostok 1 capsule. This amazing achievement came less than four years after the launch of the first satellite, Sputnik 1.