I am eating a carrot from my garden raw with some hummus.

Growing the carrots has been very rewarding in terms of getting a good yield for very little effort but until now I was wondering if they warranted any more space in the garden next year. I had been led to believe that you haven't really tasted a carrot until you taste a homegrown one, but I have to admit that although my own carrots are certainly tasty I would be hard pushed to tell them from supermarket carrots in a blind test.

But now I know that's only when they're cooked. Raw, you can tell the difference alright: only a carrot fresh from the earth could have that crunch and juiciness!

So now I'm pretty confident about devoting a large patch of ground to carrots next year and am looking forward to trying several varieties. And if they all taste the same I really won't mind as long as I can eat them straight from the garden.

I have just cottoned on to eat the seasons, a very handy way to find out what veg to buy when.

My dwarf bean experiment has not gone quite as well as the carrot experiment. By all accounts I should be up to my ears in them by now. To be honest I am impressed that this tiny plant produced any beans at all. The dreadful cold, wet summer must surely be to blame. That and the irresistibility of young bean shoots to things that go munch in the night. It was rather too late in the season when I realised that I should be planting about ten times as many beans as I was to give any of them a chance of survival.

Anyway, the books say you need to keep picking beans to keep the plant producing them, so I picked this little fella. Anyone got a recipe for a dish where the star is a single green bean?