When you’ve been all-out deadheading the daffs, putting your tea bags on the compost, and playing with your dibber, there’s nothing like a hearty meal to perk you up.

I like to get my teeth into a large Bombay Bad Boy Pot Noodle, washed down with a mini-keg of Adnams Ghost Ship.

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If you feel naughty eating what they call “junk food”, here’s a little potting tip to assuage your guilt.

Simply rinse out the noodle tub and poke some holes in the bottom with a kebab skewer or your Black and Decker drill.

Drop a few pebbles in the pot to aid drainage, and top with a few handfuls of compost. Pop in a few lettuce seeds (I used the variety Lactuca Gwynethum-Paltrowensis) and put the pot on a sunny windowsill.

Lettuce pray: God’s gift of homemade salad

Soon you will have a robust round lettuce like mine above which you can give to someone in the family who actually likes salad, or just pass it on to someone you don’t like.

Readers often ask me which compost I use In My Lady Garden. I like the one made by that chap from the old TV series Are You Being Served?, who had the catchphrase “I’m Free!”.

I think you will also like his John Inman’s Compost as it is works exceptionally well in getting little specimens to rise.

John Inman’s compost measures up

In my vegetable plot the Black Tuscan Kale is still going strong, as yours probably is. But don’t worry. We can soon deal with that.

Trim off the insect-holed outer leaves down to the rib with your secateurs.

Throw them on the compost heap. The leaves that is, not the secateurs.

Then take all the inner leaves and throw them on the heap, too. That gets rid of the lot in one fell swoop.

Or you could sell the whole plant to a passing hipster for £19.50. They like to shove them in their NutriBullets with that garish green algae, Spirulina, to make a sludgy smoothie to dribble down their beards.

It tastes like shite, of course, but helps them to glow in the dark when they are all la-la weird-dancing out of their heads at music and poetry festivals.

Plums

With the weather changing from day-to-day, don’t forget to protect your fruit blossoms. There’s nothing worse than getting frostbite on your plums. Just pull an old jumper over them and hope for the best.

Don’t be tempted to put your tender plants out yet. I will tell you when it’s safe for us to get down to a nice spot of bedding together.

I have trimmed back my Brucius Forsythia which has been looking rather feeble of late and hope I will get another lease of life out of it.

Now for the answers to your many questions.

* Mr S Y from Cratfield: I really do think you’ll be wasting your money on that trendy hammock if you don’t have two trees.

* Mrs S B from Combs: That mossy mound of yours definitely needs some attention. I would give it a good dressing of Veet or Immac.

* Mr C K from Stowupland: Yes, I must say, your rear entrance does look rather bare. Have you tried putting a cactus in it?

Have a good week!

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Storm Katie prevented us poor plant lovers from the usual Easter jobs in the sunshine or visits to garden centres. I haven’t had such a blowy weekend in many a year.

It was a pity not to get well stuck into My Lady Garden but instead, I settled myself in my armchair with a bottle of Prosecco and flipped through some seed catalogues.

My method is to fold the bottom of the page I’m interested in into a little triangle. The more Prosecco I drank the more the corners got turned up until there were no unfolded pages at all. But what treats I have in hand for you all!

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After the Prosecco bottle was drained I poured a nice cold bottle of Aspall Isobel’s Berry Suffolk Cyder then thought “bugger the weather” and staggered through the rain to the greenhouse to see to my seedlings.

You will find they are very fragile at the moment: the stems are like that cress you get in old-fashioned sandwiches at bus terminals. Watering them brutally could kill them so you need a gentle spray. I didn’t have a water bottle, but the Prosecco and Cyder focused my thoughts to a genius idea which I am sharing with you now.

To make your own water bottle, simply reach under the sink and take out a bottle of Flash Spray Bleach (a Febreze bottle works just as well). Tip the contents down the sink, rinse the bottle out and fill with water. Then make a label and Sellotape it on like the one in my photo below. Don’t worry if it’s not as good as mine. It works just as well as a custom-built water bottle from Wyevale and you will have the satisfaction that you made something yourself and saved money.

My hi-tech, money-saving water bottle

I thank you for all your kind comments after my first In My Lady Garden column appeared last week in The Suffolk Gazette. You are far more inventive than the readers of my previous gardening column, Up the Lady Garden in The Daily Snail.

I cannot answer all of your problems personally but the following replies cover many of the subjects you are worried about …

* ROSEMARY, from RINGSHALL: Yes, you need to give your Rosemary bush a good seeing to as soon as possible to prevent it going even more straggly. Go at it hard with the trimmers. It will need another tidy-up in a few months.

*RACHAEL A: It can be really difficult to achieve perfection in the garden when you suffer from arthritis, but don’t be too anxious. If you have such trouble reaching those little crannies, why not get someone else to do it for you?

*MR S.H. from NEEDHAM MARKET: Those smelly flies of yours need to be dealt with before the weather gets warmer. Have you tried squirting them with Lynx For Men?

Have a good week.

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Please support my running costs by clicking here and buying me a beer!
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