Even if you start off with a fancy variety the seedling progeny gradually

Even if you start off with a fancy variety, the seedling progeny gradually drift back towards the wild pink norm. The beautiful pale 'Apricot' foxglove breeds true, though, and there have been a good many of them again this year, bobbing up unexpectedly in the garden. I would guess they have come from the compost I have been spreading on the bank, for they disappeared entirely for a few years. Now I am putting twists of green wire round their stems to remind me which plants to leave for seed.Last night we had the first new potatoes from the garden with mint and lashings of farm butter. The first crops are special, so special you do not need to mess around with them. New potatoes, new peas and a couple of rashers of thick farm bacon Bliss.

These potatoes were what my mother used to call "moochers", tubers that I never found when I was digging last year's crop. They were, of course, faster into growth than the potatoes I planted this spring and miraculously escaped the late frosts. The variety is the first early 'Concorde' with pale yellow waxy flesh. I am growing it again this year, along with 'Accent', another first early that is quick to mature.Potatoes are not what you could ever call high-profile plants. You do not call up friends and tell them they must come now, immediately, and see your crop.

But like peas, which were a staple crop long before Raleigh ever whisked the potato over the Atlantic, they remind you, bind you to the original point of gardening, which was to keep your family fed.I like that feeling. I like wandering down the path at the end of the day with a bucket to collect things for supper. It should not be a bucket, of course, it should be a wicker basket trimmed with a little posy of lavender and I should have a straw hat swinging from the other hand. Another failure.This weekend we will have the first feast from the new strawberry bed, planted out in one of the quadrants in the fruit garden.

We made this in the big square where we used to grow dahlias and the ground had been well fed and mulched for years The strawberries love it. The new plants have been pushing out masses of runners, but I have cut all these off. A row of parent plants in another place will provide the new plants to set in the second quadrant at the end of this summer.For years we did not grow strawberries because there was a good pick- your-own place quite near; now that grower has given up, so we have had to plant our own. There is no point in buying the brightly coloured cottonwool that passes for strawberries in our local supermarkets They buy fruit that is bred to travel well I want a strawberry that tastes of the sun.

Supermarket produce tastes as dynamic as the expanded polystyrene in which it is packed.The herb patch is in a state of flop. Great stems of sorrel have fallen over the path and the tarragon is lying on top of a row of rocket sown on the advice of our eldest daughter. She is our style expert and if she says rocket is the thing, then we know we cannot be seen without it. Given the ease and speed with which it grows, I do not understand why it commands such a premium in the shops. You need to sow it little and often, like radish.While I was chopping back the sorrel to liberate the rocket, I was thinking about a herb patch I saw a few weeks ago, divided into four small beds, each one containing plants of the most useful common herbs with a centrepiece of a taller, shrubby herb such as a sage or rosemary.The point of having the four beds, explained the gardener, was that you could cut down the herbs in each bed, turn and turn about, so that you always had a fresh supply of growth coming on. One lot of chives was newly sheared to the base, the second was beginning to resprout, the third lot was almost ready to pick and the fourth was at its peak.