Keen to be on top of all my gardening chores ready for next season, I was leafing through my allotment bible (foreward written by the gorgeous Hugh Fernley Whittingstall himself), to see what crops needed to go where next year.

Apparently this is the order of the land: Legumes (beans to you and I) – brassicas – onions – potatoes.

I have a very slight spanner to throw in the works. How do I put brassicas into the bean bed when the beans are still larking around in there?

Reading the science behind crop rotation, the beans ‘fix the soil with nitrogen’. Does that mean that the bean roots are full of the stuff, or am I supposed to be digging in the whole things?

And another thing. How are the onions for next year meant to go into the brassica bed? The book tells me that I can start setting onions next month, but the brassica bed is still chock a block with stuff I’m hopefully going to be eating at Christmas. Quite frankly, they just won’t fit!

So do I put the onions somewhere else for now and move them later? I’ve already got pots full of purple sprouting broccoli and savoy cabbages in a holding bay. When I started out this gardening adventure, I never realised it would be quite so complicated. If only onions came straight after spuds…

Confused.com…