In an extract from her new book, The Productive Garden , Stephanie Hafferty explains how to save money and use traditional wisdom for homemade nasties-free loveliness

What to plant, grow, prune and buy this month for your great outdoors

Carpeting woodland in clouds of white star-shape flowers and filling the air with a heady, intense aroma, wild garlic is abundant in April. This bulb hibernates for most of the year before bursting fo

Position logs randomly around garden borders rather than in neat piles to recreate the way they fall naturally from trees in the wild. You could artfully arrange them around spring-flowering plants or

Anne outlines her top jobs to be getting on with over the coming fortnight

Giving garden wildlife a spring in their step