Mary Berry: Queen of the kitchen and garden Dill is a favourite, sowing it successionally as it does tend to run to seed, but regular picking helps stop this. She often uses it on new potatoes and with gravlax (See recipe on telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink). It's a dish that's quick to make, providing the supermarket debones the salmon, leaving the skin on and preferably removing the pin bones, too. She serves this with her own Mary Berry & Daughter mustard dressing (available from Waitrose) but adds fresh chopped dill to it. Buckler-leaved sorrel is another easy, well-used herb. When cooking spinach, Mary adds an eighth of the quantity of this fresh, lemon-tasting plant. It sharpens the taste. She may add a little cream and butter, but stresses that it is important to quickly wilt it down and not cook it much more than that. She grows rocket too, advising, "Rocket is a magnet for flea beetle, but sow after August and you will avoid having leaves peppered with their minuscule holes." For earlier in the year, she recommends sowing it in wine boxes on a ledge, too high for even the most adventurous flea beetles. Salad burnet, with its pretty, evergreen leaves, is harvestable through winter and she loves to add to salads. Traditionally, this was used for rheumatism. Lemongrass she grows, too, in the herb garden, overwintering it in pots in the greenhouse. Fennel and beetroot are two favourite vegetables worth growing, underused and easy to grow, especially the tasty, baby-sized specimens. To deal with a tomato glut, Mary makes sun-dried tomatoes. She recommends taking regular-sized tomatoes, cutting them in half, removing the seeds and putting them cut-side up on baking parchment before sprinkling with sea salt, garlic and fresh thyme. Cook at 120C/250F/Gas Mark ½ for three hours or in the simmering oven of a range. As for courgettes, Mary recently feasted on a delicious-sounding salad of long courgette slices, 5in or so, cut with a potato peeler and served topped with toasted pine nuts dressed simply with oil and lemon. Soft fruit is the easiest to grow but needs using or preserving. Mary does a summer red fruit salad from mixed currants, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, loganberries and sometimes mulberries, served chilled with cream or crème fraiche. The blackberries look highly promising this year, so she suggests a coulis, warming the fruit with a little sugar (no water) and then sieving when cooked. It is delicious over ice cream and perfect to freeze. Mary's glasshouse is filled with pelargoniums, stacked at different heights, and a large vine, which tempers the sun. This room is primarily for eating in, and the family has supper there every night. It has a fridge, table and chairs and gives a feeling of dining in the garden while tempered from extremes. I have tried many plants, including bougainvilleas, but the pelargoniums are perfect. All they need is deadheading, feeding and watering and they always look amazing," says Mary. When they have large numbers to feed they cart out old trestle tables, checked tablecloths and folding director's chairs to a favourite spot under the old ash tree. In their courtyard is a heavy white metal table and chairs if they want to eat outside. Mary Berry has engaged a wide range of ages during her long career. No doubt both Miss Blackburn and Miss Date would be extremely proud of their former pupil and would ply her with praise if they could see her now. Mary Berry's 'Cook up a Feast" (£20, Dorling Kindersley) and ' Family Sunday Lunches" (£20, Headline) are both out now