Liz manages the World Food Garden at Hilltop and grows so much on her allotment that she's self-sufficient in fresh fruit and vegetables.

This time of year is a wonderful time for somebody who's self-sufficient in their fruit and veg because your options are really starting to expand.

Through the winter months, you had plenty of stuff stored, but through the spring months, what's known as the hungry gap, sort of April, May, some of those winter stores had run out.

So I was still self-sufficient, but it was a lot of leafy greens and things like that, but was less stuff to add to that.

Whereas now we're heading into the summer, I'm looking forward to my first early potatoes coming out, the first beetroots.

I've harvested my first spring onions.

So the diet can really start to diversify from now on.

Here to tell us more is science and horticulture editor Olivia Drake.

To glean some inspiration, we caught up with Liz and her world food garden colleague, Pavlina Kapsalis.

I love growing some more unusual crops.

Not only is it more exciting for you, it's really good in your diet 'cause it gives you all of these different nutritional things, and I just enjoy experimenting and having fun and seeing what we can grow and going beyond the, the standard.

And I try some on my allotment, and I obviously grow quite a lot here, and it's just nice to put something different in your diet as, um, there is nothing better than trying something re- some beautiful variety of tomato which you would never get in a, in a supermarket or try achucha or chayote, which are crops which you might find in some ethnic markets, but not really in your normal shop, and it's quite nice to enrich your diet in that way, and it's good for us also.

One crop which has been a real success here in our food garden has been amaranth.

So there are a few different varieties of them.

You may be familiar with bedding amaranth or love lies bleeding, but for our edible varieties of it, which we've grown in the garden, Oshberg, which has got beautiful purple leaves and purple flowers.

We've also grown one called Hot Biscuit, which has got its green leaves and sort of more rusty colored flowers.

We're joined again by RHS Wisley's Liz Mooney, who is a firm fan of these sometimes unfairly maligned vegetables.

Cabbages are sometimes a crop people don't particularly want to grow, either because they've heard they're difficult to grow or because they've been put off eating cabbage by some soggy school dinners.

But I really do like growing cabbage.

I find a fresh white cabbage is really nice to eat, a fresh Savoy cabbage harvested in winter.

Or I'm a particular fan of red cabbage, which you braise down with sort of onion and cooking apple and that sort of thing.

And it's just so tasty on the plate as an addition.

You don't just have to eat it as cabbage, chop it up into a crunchy coleslaw or anything like that.

So

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This week, she's running us through everything you need to know about a real kitchen staple, the carrot.

Carrots are a crop I love to grow on me a lot and basically because of the taste.

Shop bought carrots are fairly bland in my opinion but the carrots you can grow yourself, the flavour is amazing.

We did a trial of different carrot varieties here at Wisley last year and it went really well and we got all these different colours and sizes and tastes.

The original wild carrot was actually a pale yellow thing.

I couldn't quite know who first decided this was something to try and breed and domesticate with.

This week she's turning her attention to salads so we popped in to get some of her expert advice.

Each year in Wisley I always like to try and push the boundaries and try new cultivars and one of the main ways I'm doing that this year is through what I'm terming my lettuce extravaganza where we're growing over 80 cultivars across the course of the growing season.

It won't be 80 any single time but from March through to October, November across that period will be over 80 cultivars.

And the reason I'm doing this is that lettuce does come in a huge range of cultivars and varieties.

Whether you're looking at your red or green is an obvious distinction, but then you also have ones which are slightly more bi-coloured.

And then you have everything from your iceberg types, your cos types, your loose leaf cut and come again types, your butter head types.

There's just so much variety within them.

Cucumbers are one of Liz Moo's allotment favorites, so who better to tell us everything you need to know about growing these crunchy classics?

I love growing cucumbers for the simple reason that I love to eat them.

I think that's the most important thing [laughs] whenever you're growing anything.

You've just got to enjoy eating them.

I think they're just so fresh and juicy, and through the hot summer months, they, they get eaten every day in my salads if I've got them available.

So, when you're growing cucumbers, the first thing to consider is are you going to be growing them in a glasshouse or are you going to be growing them outside? I usually do both every year.

I find I have much more reliable success with the ones I grow in the glasshouse.

Here to guide us through everything you need to know from first and second earlies to main crop varieties plus chitting and the pros and cons of no dig versus trench planting is RHS Wisley's Liz Mooney.

Potatoes are a crop which I will grow every year and they're broadly split into first earlies, second earlies and main crop potatoes.

Basically it depends how long they need in the ground in order to give you a crop.

First earlies need a shorter period of time, 10-12 weeks.

Second earlies it's more like 12-14.

Main crop potatoes 16 maybe 18 weeks but they can also just sit in the ground for a bit longer than that so that's the main distinction between them in terms of choosing your potatoes first and second earlies are a great choice if you're in an area which definitely suffers with blight because normally they will be out of the ground before the blight becomes a major problem Good choices for your first early, I love Lady Crystal, that's a really good one to grow.

Casablanca's also really nice and I like Foremost as well.

We caught up with her to find out all about growing a garden favorite, peas.

My name's Liz and I'm one of the gardeners on the edibles team at RHS Wisley, working predominantly in our world food garden.

I have a particular interest in growing vegetables.

In fact, between a few crops from Wisley and my own allotment in Wisley Village, I managed to be self-sufficient in all my own fresh fruit and vegetables.

I just love it because it taps into so many things.

Not only does it make my food taste better and make my food more nutritious because it's fresh, but it means I know where my food's come from.

It hasn't been sprayed in chemicals.