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Since leaving London last winter for the peace and quiet of the countryside, life has unsurprisingly taken on a slower pace. I don't push people out of the way, I happily amble along the street and I've even been known to smile at strangers.

But one thing I didn't envisage myself doing was standing in the middle of a field with gardening gloves and a spade, digging and bagging up horse manure in the burning sunlight. The manure bagging is not a new craze that's sweeping the countryside, but it has played a crucial part in my new hobby of growing vegetables.

Now some may feel I'm a little young to start gardening but apparently I'm not young enough. I seem to have missed the boat when it came to basic gardening skills, planting 40 lettuce seeds in a small pot, so convinced was I that anything I touched would die before even germinating. When I started, everything was an experiment and I casually went about filling trays with a variety of seeds that I thought would be 'nice to have'.

Some weeks later I had ten watermelon seedlings that I had no idea what to do with, along with ten courgette seedlings, twelve small tomato plants, and of course about three million lettuce shoots all vying for my attention. I really had no idea what I was doing, but everything I read was far too advanced. Gardeners used terms like pinching out, bolting and thinning, which all meant absolutely nothing to my inexperienced brain.

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The results of Hajar's gardening efforts

With summer approaching fast I didn't want to take any further chances with my new green babies. I decided it was time to go back to basics and start from the beginning. To gain some confidence I needed someone to talk me through everything step by step.Ìý I found my saviour in Incredible Edibles, a charitable project for Irish schoolchildren whose showed me in the simplest of terms how to grow a lettuce.

I learned that thinning was cutting away small seedlings to make room for the bigger ones, how long the lettuce would take to grow and what conditions it needed.

This just goes to show that even though there's an assumed level of knowledge and ability for adults in certain fields, when it comes to the internet there really is something for everyone and absolutely no such thing as a stupid question.

Exploring a new hobby can be a daunting prospect as so many websites are for people who want to nurture a passion rather than start it from scratch. For a newcomer to a forum – no matter how anonymous they might be – it can take a lot of courage to post simple questions.

If you’re new to something, an online search will reveal you’re not the only who's asked ''.

Much like everything in life, if you just get stuck in, you'll start to pick up the language, will unavoidably make mistakes, but you'll hopefully improve along the way. And if you need to ask, there's plenty of information out there.

Gardener Carol Klein reveals how she uses the internet on the site and ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Gardening has lots of resources including simple videos on how and when to plant seeds. The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Gardening message board is a great place to search for handy hints and tips from other gardeners.

But when it comes to getting the most basic of explanations, there's no shame in asking questions on such online forums or seeking out simple guides for younger audiences – especially as no one's ever likely to know it's you.

Unless you blog about it.

Hajar is a regular contributor to the WebWise blog and has also made award-winning programmes for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio. In her spare time she loves reading, writing and singing.