Foodies Blog

1. Gardening With Children at http://gardeningwithchildren.wordpress.com

This is the most directly relevant blog. It has some great ideas, is written really nicely, and has great photos. They cover related things like some recipes using the food you grow, herbs and wormeries. And they run regular competitions too.

2. In My Grandpa's Garden at http://www.mygrandpasgarden.com/home

This has a reasonable range of content, but it's main feature is that it is delightfully readable, and follows through a story properly - rather than dotting from issue to issue and never seeing the outcome, on this one you can see genuine successes and failures.

3. You Grow Girl at http://www.yougrowgirl.com

This site is great, has lots of great tips and ideas like how to make your own liquid feed, watering tomatoes with a dash of milk, propagating mint etc. She also categorises a lot of the entries by season which suits our site a lot, and even has a section on gardening related crafts.

4. Backyard Gardening at http://www.gardeningblog.net

This is part of a wider site with a forum and a smallish range of nevertheless very useful articles. The forum is massively well used. However it's the blog I like the most. It's slightly on from the basics of 'how to plant seeds' etc and covers random but fun things like how to stake a tree, why phlox is good, the effect of squirrels on butternut squashes, and a really cool photo log of a hydrangea (I know, not food but cool) over a whole growing season. Just nice to dip into.

5. Skippy's Vegetable Garden at http://carletongarden.blogspot.com/

The Skippy in question is the adorable dog belonging to Kathy, who has been veg growing for 20 years. She's in Boston, so a lot of the seasonal stuff is a bit out, but what I like most is that she remembers to categorise every entry against an index of vegetables. So you can, for example, look up every entry she has written about her kale plants (2) or tomatoes (21) without having to run keyword searches, which most blogs won't let you do anyway. She also put in the cleverest thing - a planting calendar - where you enter the date of your last frost and it calculates roughly when to plant things. And if you like to find out what other people are planting, she shares her planting list, even which varieties she has chosen. A very helpful site.

6. The 20 Minute Kitchen Garden at http://20minutegarden.com/

This couple work on the idea that you can run a productive veggie patch in an small urban garden on an average of 20 minutes a day (or as they put it, "An Organic Urban Yard in Less Time Than a Sit-Com". The navigation contents are not as easy as some - you have to wade through the entries mostly chronologically - but if you like the premise of small bites of activity, this is full of good tips and snapshots of their labours.

7. Your Small Kitchen Garden at http://www.smallkitchengarden.net/

As the title suggests, aimed at people with limited space. A really frank depiction of their experience trying to make the most of small spaces, trying out so-called 'space saving innovations', experimenting with containers (carrots in a pop bottle, anyone?) and lots of good pictures of the experiments. If you're in a small space this is a must-read.