We Grow Our OwnThe trials and successes of life on our allotment

Over the next few weeks, the Tesco Real Food Website is challenging people to come up with their favourite BBQ recipes.

Thank you for all of the entries for this month’s competition.

Remember that you choose the winner of this month’s competition, so once you have chosen your favourite, continue down to the bottom of the blog, and complete the form to register your vote. You might want to cook some of these recipes too to help you decide which one is your favourite.

The vote closes at 12 noon on 31st August, so get voting!

Here are this month’s finalists …

After a short break last month, here is this month’s Cultivate, Cook & Click Competition.

So, here is a reminder of the rules …

I’ve just been given a sneak preview of the top 20 gardening blogs by the nice people at Wikio ahead of their official release on 5th August.

It’s getting towards that time of the year when allotment holders start complaining that they have a glut of a one particular fruit/veg or another. When that happens to me, a glut is just the excuse I need to start making jams and preserves!

Nettles can sometimes get a bad press. They are obviously a pain in the veg plot, and can be painful to weed. However, they can be turned into a feed for your plants within four weeks (more of this another time) and can also be used in cooking (again, watch this space!)

The range of flowers that you can eat is wider than most people think. Some you may already be familiar with: stuffed courgette flowers, salad rocket, and herbs such as dill, chives or coriander. Others may come as more of a surprise: nasturtiums, violas and marigolds, for example.

Kavey of the fabulous Kavey Eats is one of the bloggers on the judging panel for the Tesco Real Food Challenge, looking for the nation’s best real food cooks. She’s been partnered with Jamie Theakston on the Talk & Fork category.

She asked on Twitter for a volunteer to cook and blog a Tesco Real Food Challenge recipe for her, I jumped at the chance, particularly when she told me that she wanted me to cook Jamie’s Theakston’s recipe – ‘Mushroom and Herb Risotto’ – as risottos are one of my favourite dishes.

When I ran into Joe from The School Of Artisan Food at the Derbyshire Food Festival, we made an arrangement for me to go up to the Welbeck Estate near Worksop in Nottinghamshire to have a look round.

Following on from my video blogs giving tips on how to get your chilli seeds to germinate, and also how to make sure they grow from tiny seedlings into big healthy chilli plants and how to pollinate your chilli plants so that they produce chillies, this video blog explains how to deal with the most common diseases and nasties that can try and harm your lovely chilli plants!