We love our agastache, which also makes a brilliant tea, and we grew them from seed - planted in chipping mulch they seem completely untroubled by slugs. I'm interested in your tomato experience as we were very disappointed by the flavour of both the vine tomatoes we grew this year: they were tough skinned and not particularly sweet, but our yellow tomatoes and the plum variety were very good. Perhaps it was a bad year for vine style tomatoes?

This is interesting - my query is about durability, I suppose. Over the years we've tried a number of hot composting systems, and if you can get the temperature up and keep it up, they work. The problems, for us, have always been in the equipment: remaking a cone composter into a hot composter with bubble-wrap and binbags works brilliantly for a year, and then you find you have a cone-shaped snail incubater as they wheedle their way into the crevices of the wrapping and breed happily. We also had an insulated compost bin supplied and it just got taken apart by the weather: it cracked in summer and cracked in sub zero temperatures and the insulation flaked off and if you hit it with the wheelbarrow it dented, and then the rain settled in the dent and froze and cracked the surface ... it's a lovely idea but we're just not careful enough, I fear.