KG’s Olivia Peace chats to top gardening bloggers from the world-wide web. This month she meets Amy Nield who logs her progress on Twitter and Instagram

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As spring approached and with a little assistance from her garden helpers – aka her two children – Amy Nield had managed to clear, clean and compost, organise the pots and plant strawberry runners in some guttering, and that’s not all she’d done. We had a little chat with the gardening mum who loves to grow her own…

ENERY YEAR AMY TRIES TO SQUEEZE A LITTLE MORE INTO HER PLOT

So, why did you start on your own plot?

It’s been 10 years since we began gardening, and we pretty much started by growing vegetables – mainly potatoes and salads. My mum is a keen gardener and my husband’s grandfather grew a lot of his own vegetables, but our main inspiration for starting our own plot was because we were regularly visited by a man who had originated from Italy before the Second World War – Mr Zompie. He owned a large vegetable garden, which my husband used to deliver horse manure to from his father’s farm. In return, Mr Zompie would bring us armfuls of broad beans, plums and bottles of home-made currant wine. It wasn’t long before we were asking him for advice on where to start with our own vegetable patch and he taught us everything we needed to know. Sadly, he passed away last year, but he is never far from our thoughts when we are working on our plot.