Hardly a day goes by without some new superfood being lauded in the press but few receive more accolades than the berry family. From your common or garden strawberry to its more exotic cousins the acai and goji - berries get top billing every time.

A Guerrilla Gardener ‘adopts’ land they don’t own or have any legal rights over – typically an urban oasis of dereliction or a bit of lawn outside their block of flats - and uses it to raise food or flowers. Guerrilla gardeners sometimes work secretly at night to regreen their cities. Others do it in full view and use it as a way to involve shedloads of people from their community.

If this is your first year of Grow Your Own, then little and often is a good maxim to follow. There’s many a time in my early days of growing that I’d sow a whole packet of seeds and then have 100 beetroot or lettuce all ready at the same time. You can expect some seeds not to germinate or to get nipped off by your resident slug or cutworm, so it pays to sow a little extra – but don’t go overboard.

At least his April had something happening, even if it was only ‘stirring dull roots with spring rain’. There’s not a lot of stirring going on in our plot, and not a lot of rain either. The ground is still as hard as stone and I can’t remember the last rain shower we had.

Yesterday, I was looking round the smallholding, searching for signs from nature that spring was coming. Apart from a few leaf buds and a peely wally attempt from the grass at growing under my feet, we may as well have been in February.

You need to grow what you love to eat and in the right quantity. Yes, of course you could grow enough courgettes to feed the rest of Scotland, but, as I know from bitter experience, once you’ve done five weeks of courgettes with everything and your friends start to run and hide when they see you coming with the odd 5 kilo or so, their attraction tends to pall.

While trying to persuade a mature honeysuckle into a new pot, I managed to impale my foot on an old and surprisingly sharp stalk from last year’s tansy. Ouch!  - or words to that effect.

Still, it’s a timely reminder to wear the right gear for gardening. This definitely does not include M&S leather slip-on bow pumps – even if, like me, you’re only planning a quick five minutes of working outside. You never know when a bit of old perennial will jump out and get you.

You can almost taste all those truly scrumptious meals you’ll make and visualise your freezer, fit to burst with your stored harvest, as your seedy wishlist takes shape. It’s a task perfectly suited to all these rainy, snowy and blustery days, because it’s real gardening (honest) without the backache.