Gardening: Bountiful blooms promise a plentiful crop of courgettes… with a little helping hand

Bright-yellow flowers have appeared on the courgettes, promising a big harvest. Dipped in batter and fried for a few moments, the flowers make a tasty supper-time treat.

Courgettes produce both male and female flowers and you can improve fruit production by picking off the male flowers, which grow on thin stems, removing the petals to reveal the anther and then rubbing the pollen from this on to the stigma within the female flowers, which are easily distinguishable because they have a bump behind the flower.

Keep watering the plants and feeding regularly and you’ll soon have more courgettes than you have recipes for.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t sown leek seeds, then you should now be able to find small plants of these either online or from your local garden centre. Leeks are a winter staple and they are easy to grow in a sunny position and in any reasonable soil, so long as they are well-watered and kept free of weeds.

When planting leeks, water the soil the day before if it hasn’t rained, then trim off both the root ends and the leaf tips before setting them in rows, 30cm apart.

The trick to planting leeks is to use a dibber and then fill the hole around each leek with water and not soil, earthing up the plants with dry soil as they grow in order to blanch the stems.

Pick leeks young, before they turn into monsters, and they’ll be sweet and tasty but even the oldest, toughest leeks still make a fine addition to a pot of soup during the winter months.

Keep an eye on lettuce and pick before it shows signs of bolting and continue to sow fresh seed until the middle of July in order to keep up a good supply.

You can sow radishes now, too, but results are likely to be more disappointing than from earlier sowings.

If you are growing chillies in a greenhouse or on a sunny windowsill, pinch out the growing tips in order to create a bushier plant.

Chillies need a long growing season and if you were late in sowing yours then they may not produce fruits. However, kept over the winter, the plants will then give you an early crop next year, so don’t discard any that fail to perform this year.