Whenever I dig over the ground on the allotment I am joined by a robin who recognises that it is a good opportunity to feast on any worms that I happen to uncover. He is quite unafraid, hopping around within a few feet of me and then nipping in whenever he sees a tasty morsel wriggling around. I guess that most gardeners have similar little friends.
I am pleased to say, however, that mine is now a television star. London Tonight came down to the allotment at the weekend to film a piece about how trendy allotments are - and to give my book, One Man And His Dig, a nice plug - and as well as shooting lots of footage of me yakking away while the children slaved away behind me (exploitation is such an ugly word, I always think) they also got some good shots of the robin. There he was at the beginning of the sequence, sitting on a fence post; and there he was at the end, tucking into a lovely fat worm. Lucky chap.
I was also on Radio 4's Loose Ends on Saturday. It is hosted by Clive Anderson these days, although I was being interviewed by Arthur Smith. Anyone interested in hearing Arthur and I talk about manure, courgettes, slugs and Helen Mirren has until next Saturday (April 26) to listen to the show again via the BBC website (I am about three-quarters of the way through the programme, after the comedian Ed Aczel - who is very funny - and before Craig Brown).

No two years on the allotment are the same. Some years the potato crop is terrible, but the beans are fantastic; others years you cannot move for courgettes, but scarcely manage to grow a single carrot. And then of course there are the obsessions. Last year we went completely overboard on the squash front, growing so many that our kitchen looked like the west London entry for the National Pumpkin Festival (is there such an event? If there is, we would have won it hands down). Two years ago I developed a mild lettuce obsession, which I have more or less dealt with now, although I still have the occasional flashbacks.
This year it is tomatoes. For some reason we have gone completely mad for tomatoes, filling pot after pot with young seedlings, which is all very well except for the fact that we only have enough room on the allotment to grow about half a dozen plants. I have no idea what we are going to with rest of them.
I am not even entirely sure where all these tomatoes came from. Some were freebies, given away with things like Kitchen Garden magazine; others were presents, often in the form of seed collections given to our children and then purloined by us. (That is how low we have sunk - taking the seeds from our children to grow ourselves). Some we have actually bought ourselves.
The result is that this year's tomato collection includes the following varieties: Sungold (an old favourite, a very sweet cherry tomato), Costoluto Fiorentino (an Italian ribbed number), Zucchero (no idea: I got it in a seed swap, and presume from the name it is on the sweet side), Yellow Pear (nicked from the kids: presumably it is yellow, and pear-shaped) and Red Pear (the same, only red).
As I write this, we have gone away for a few days to my parents-in-law in Wiltshire, which involved my taking the tomatoes out of the mini-greenhouse - where I was worried they might get a bit overheated if I was not there to look after them (this, of course, is a classic symptom of the obsessive - thinking that your babies cannot possibly survive without constant attention) - and putting them on trays on the kitchen table, which is nice and light but not as hot as the mini greenhouse.
They look great, but it does mean that our kitchen table is filled with 56 pots of young tomato plants, not counting the chilli plants which I also brought in. It doesn't leave a lot of room for breakfast.
I haven't yet broken it to the rest of the family, but we may have to move out for a few weeks.

There aren't that many celebrity allotment-holders around - probably because once you are rich and famous you are not going to spend your time getting dirt under your fingernails just to make sure you can bring a few cabbages to the table - so it is always nice to discover a new one. Here's the latest addition to the roll: John Humphrys. He was interviewing a couple of allotmenteers on the Today programme this morning, and mentioned in passing that he got his first allotment at the age of 14. 14? Did the young Humphrys have to support his family even before he left school? Things must have been tough in Cardiff back in those days: did he fit his veg-digging activities in between shifts down the pit? I think we should be told.

He was interviewing Andy and Dave Hamilton about their book, The Self-Sufficient-ish Bible: An Eco-Living Guide for the 21st Century, and got on to the subject of whether allotments are populated by old men in flat caps, or young and trendy types who knit their own tofu. I don't know about the Hamilton twins' allotments in Bristol, but I can report that where I am in East Acton, the flat cap is alive and well. My allotment neighbours Michael and John are never to be seen without their caps, and I would go so far as to say that I would not recognise them if I came across them bare-headed. I don't wear a flat cap myself, but then again I am a little way off retirement age. I will probably buy myself one for my 60th birthday, if they still make them then.

Intrigued by the Hamiltons' book, I Googled the twins and found an interview with them in one of the papers from a few days ago. It mentioned Andy's tip for preventing slugs from eating your lettuces. "Chuck a load of slugs in a food mixer, blend them and then put the goo around your plants," he said. "They won't come near it."

I must admit I had never heard of this method, for perhaps obvious reasons. If anyone feels like trying it on, I would be most interested in hearing about the results.

Down at the allotment we have been having trouble with the neighbours. It's the age-old problem that has caused fractious relations between gardeners and their neighbours since forever: the bonfire. Gardeners need to burn their rubbish. Bonfires produce smoke. And anyone unfortunate enough to live downwind of that smoke usually finds the experience distinctly unsettling.

(Perhaps the eviction of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden had nothing to do with apples and snakes, but an unfortunate misunderstanding concerning the burning of some autumn leaves).

Most of the time you can get away with it. With a bit of sensitivity - waiting until the wind is in the right direction, only burning the stuff when it is good and dry - it is possible to have the occasional bonfire without sparking off civil war.

On the Bromyard allotments, however, it has all gone a bit far for that. There is a new block of flats just across the road, and they have been getting very narked at the smoke coming their way. Voices have been raised. Threats have been issued. It has all got very nasty.

It is not nice of course having smoke blowing in through your bedroom window. But the allotments were there long before the flats were dreamed of. Are they telling us that we are going to have to run our allotments without ever being allowed to burn our old prunings and cabbage stalks? Are these people for real?

I can foresee the next complaint. Every spring I go to a nearby stables and stock up with horse manure for the following year. What with the noxious smells, the environmental disturbance and the health risk, I expect to be on the receiving end of a restraining order before the year is out...

There is absolutely no point in having an allotment unless you are going to show off: so here, without further ado, is my dinner from last night. Lovely purple sprouting broccoli, as fresh as you like, not to mention young and tender. Delicious. There was also some fish and potatoes, but they were merely supporting players in a culinary production where the PSB was the undisputed star.

Mind you, you've got to be patient with purple sprouting. You sow it in about a month's time, which means that it takes up valuable allotment space for 11 months of the year. Some people might consider that a bit of a waste, but when you consider that it is one of the few green crops around at this time of year, and is the prince of vegetables, I reckon that it is a price worth paying. In fact now I come to think of it, March is an undervalued time of year. Not only is the PSB coming into its own, but there are also leeks to be had - my other favourite vegetable. Let's hear it for March!

I wonder if Anita Pallenberg grows purple sprouting. Remember Anita Pallenberg? The ultimate rock chick, she was Brian Jones's girlfriend and then Keith Richards's partner for many years, and made a number of movie appearances including Barbarella and Performance. These days, I read in the Observer recently, she lives in west London and has an allotment in Chiswick. "This is the third year, and I go out there twice a week at least with another girl and it's fun," she told interviewer Lynn Barber. "I've got strawberries, artichokes, leeks, broad beans."

It never occurred to me that my allotment neighbours might include a former rock icon. Perhaps I had better check.

PS There was a lovely mention in Publishing News of my book One Man and His Dig (published on 6 May by Pocket Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster). It said: "He's entertaining, amusing and his chirpy optimism would help anyone staring glumly at their current patch of mud." Which was nice, except that my wife asked when we were going to see a bit more of that chirpy optimism at home. Oh well, you can't please everyone.

If you ever wondered why most allotments seem to be run by chaps who are, shall we say, no longer in the first flush of youth, there is a very good reason for this. It is because it is a lot of hard work if you are going to do it properly, and if you have a full time job it is quite challenging to find the time to do all your digging and sowing and what-have-you. So I consider myself remarkably blessed that Mrs Low is as keen on the allotment as I am, and is often to be found there toiling away when I am stuck behind my desk at work.

There are, however, one or two drawbacks in running an allotment as a couple. Sometimes, for instance, you have to listen to what the other person wants. Sometimes you don't get what you want. It is all very galling.

Since getting our plot, however, I have learned all about the gentle art of compromise. I have, for instance, generously permitted the cultivation of beetroot, a vegetable which in my opinion is fit only to fed to farm animals (and then only if they have been very naughty).

The other area where I have had to give in is on the subject of coloured vegetables. I am something of a traditionalist, believing that vegetables should be the colour they were when I was a lad: carrots should be orange, cabbages should be green, tomatoes should be red. My wife, however, thinks that there is no point in growing your own unless you include some interesting varieties. And that means growing a few fancy coloured ones, like purple Brussels sprouts and Red Russian kale.

For the past few years we have grown yellow courgettes alongside the traditional green ones. I have to admit they are pretty good, too. But the variety we grew last year, Soleil, turned out all wrong - a rather bilious shade of yellow with green streaks. They looked seasick. I don't know what went wrong, but I thought we had better try another one this year.

The question is, which? We once grew Taxi, which did pretty well our first year, but it is not widely available these days. Anyway, I am not sure I approve of growing a vegetable named after a New York cab on a London allotment. Some people rate Gold Rush highly, while others swear by Orelia. Then there's Parador, and Jemmer, not to mention One Ball, which are yellow and round. It is all very difficult. Perhaps I can interest my wife in the Italian variety Lungo Bianco, which is white, or Nero di Milano, which is black, or at least the sort of very dark green that passes for black. Then there is always Rugosa Friulana, a warty thing described by Seeds of Italy as "very ugly" - they're not joking - but also extremely flavoursome. Still, I've got about three months to go before I have to sow my courgettes: I expect I will have made up my mind by then.

Leeks: you can't really beat them, can you? Here is last year's crop, covered in a tasteful dusting of snow and none the worse for that: it takes more than a light outbreak of winter weather to put leeks off their game. Along with broad beans and purple sprouting broccoli they are one of my favourite vegetables, and all the more lovable for the fact that they are one of the few things available to eat from the allotment at this time of year.
That, though, is the very reason why I am feeling rather guilty at the moment. The leeks in the picture are Musselburgh, one of the more popular leek varieties, and for the last couple of years they have stood the Low family in pretty good stead. Productive, reliable and tasty, they are pretty much without fault.
So why have I betrayed them?
I bought my seeds for the year the other day, from the rather wonderful Real Seed catalogue; but instead of sticking to the leeks which have done so well by us for the last few years, I was seduced by some fancy French variety. Bleu de Solaise, they are called, and according to the Real Seed people they are long, with blue-grey leaves, and very hardy. In a comparative trial with Musselburgh, they were noticeably more vigorous, growing faster and bigger. They sound great.
But frankly, why bother? The old ones were more than good enough, so why change? The fact is, I am just a bit of an old tart. Like many gardeners, I cannot help wondering whether there isn't some variety out there which is better than the one I am growing already. It is a perpetual fascination with the new and the untried, a classic case of the grass always being greener on the other side. Or in this case, the leeks. And not exactly greener, more like bluer.
Anyway, one cannot just grow the same thing every year - that would be boring. All the same, I cannot help feeling mildly guilty, as though I had let down a trusted friend. Sorry, leeks.

It's a fantastic time for gardening, January. Now you might think this is a bit of an odd thing to say, what with the weather being cold and wet and there not being much action on the vegetable patch apart from a few brave leeks manfully holding their own against the depredations of winter, and half a dozen cabbages which look moth-eaten but will probably taste wonderful. But much of the joy of gardening is about anticipation, and if January is good for anything it is for looking forward to the rest of the gardening year.

There are the seed catalogues, for instance: I read them the way some men read motoring magazines. All those varieties, all that promise. Shall I get the lettuce Ubriacona Frastagliata (it means Drunken Woman, apparently) or the Cos Freckles? Or shall I go crazy and just get both? Decisions, decisions.

But it is choosing my potatoes for the year that gives me the most pleasure. I can get quite excited about potatoes (especially Pink Fir Apples - here is the remains of last year's crop, still going strong in February). I know they don't look very enthralling or distinguished - rather brown and muddy in their natural state - and their reputation is that of one of the food world's supporting players, a stodgy filler to go alongside the more exciting main attraction. But believe me, once you get into them there is a whole world of potato-related fun out there. Which varieties to grow, how to cook them, the rival merits of the Arran Victory and the Red Duke of York - there is an awful lot more to potatoes than just boiled, roast or mashed.

The other weekend I went to the London Potato Fair, an annual event at a south London school where you can go and choose from more than 100 varieties of seed potato. The room was packed with potato lovers, wonderful eccentric types like the elderly woman I met who was scurrying round the room with a determined air as she tried to track down her favourite spud.

I came away with some Anya, Kestrel, Red Duke of York, Belle de Fontenay, King Edward - oh yes, and something called Salad Blue, which isn't a salad potato at all, although it is blue. My eight-year-old son Orlando chose that one. For any potato lovers out there, we will be supplying tasting notes in about six months' time.

In his time at the Standard, Valentine has covered war, flood, disaster, death and mayhem all over the world. He has also written about supermodels, poker, London cafés and Boris Johnson's bicycle. In the absence of international calamity - or a big breaking story about Kate Moss - he tends his allotment in East Acton, where he grows wonderful things like beans and leeks and purple sprouting broccoli, mainly for the benefit of the local pigeons and slugs.

His book of allotment tales, One Man and His Dig, will be published by Simon & Schuster in May.