However small your garden or balcony, there is always room for some pots.

I have my cut and come again lettuce in a wooden planter. A yucky brown when I bought it, I painted it a lovely silvery green colour and it’s deep enough that all I had to do was to open up a peat free compost bag and pop it in the planter.

It’s really handy, placed not too far from the kitchen, so that I can pick some leaves every morning for my salad to take to work.

Other vegetables and fruits I have in pots or purpose made bags are, tomatoes, potatoes, cucumbers, blueberries and strawberries.

On Gardeners’ World this week, Carol Klein mentioned that she grows carrots in pots and up on a table, to avoid carrot root fly, which can only fly approximately 18 inches from the ground. I really like this idea, which I might adopt next year, although growing varieties of carrots, which are supposed to be resistant to the dreaded pest, has enabled my carrots to be trouble free.

You need to be very vigilant with pots and water and feed them regularly. A good feed with a liquid vegetable plant food around the base of the plants, is a must and never let them dry out.

Now, even if space is too tight for pots, how about the latest trend of growing Micro-Leaves. These are salad and vegetable seedlings, grown to the first true leaf stage, which means they have an intense flavour and are packed with vitamins and minerals. You can buy purpose made growing trays and capillary matting very reasonably from Marshalls Seeds and they also sell a good variety of seeds but I am going to try with seed trays and kitchen roll.

Marshalls recommend kitchen roll triple thickness cut to size and moistened. Then sprinkle the seed fairly thickly and cover with a clear plastic lid. When you water, trickle down the side to stop the seeds washing to the side of the pot.

You can expect seedlings for snipping with scissors for your salads and sandwiches, from between 7 – 14 days and you could grow these all the year round, although expect slower germination in the winter months.

I am going to try with Rocket and Beetroot and I’ll let you know how I get on. If you have a go or have grown Micro-Leaves before, I would love to know how you got on and if you have any advice for me, that would be very useful too.