In The Beginning

Having recently returned from a trip to Slovenia, I'm feeling even more inspired to turn my humble garden into a productive area. Most of the villagers have their very neat vegetable gardens close to the house. I'm not sure I could take on a full blown allotment and they're in such high demand these days but have often planted tomatoes, courgettes and a few salad vegetables over the years.

This year I want to plant even more, so that I have a good supply of vegetables and maybe even fruit throughout the remainder of the year. I intend to outline my progress in this blog with information on what I'm planting when and how I get on. I'm not going to grow any major crops but want to plant fairly intensively and productively.

I live in Sussex so the soil is pretty chalky but enriched with my own home-made compost which gets all the prunings, weedings, clippings and cuttings from my garden as well as all the vegetable waste from the kitchen. Waste not want not. Last year I gave most of one heap to a friend for his allotment as I didn't need it all. He grows a huge variety of fruit and vegetables, so I'm not even going to try and compete on that scale. I have a double compost bin and cleared out one side earlier this year by giving most of it to a neighbour and shifting the rest into two large dustbins. One side of the composter was filled a few weeks ago and is now being left to rot down and the other side is filling rapidly but fortunately settles down just as quickly.

There's a large population of slugs and snails with which I'm going to be competing. I expect to be battling with them most of the year as well as the visiting cats, which take great pleasure in using any new areas of soil as their toilet! However, I'll be using environmental pest control as much as possible.

I've been reading a few articles about square foot gardening, so my idea is to have a 3ft x 5ft square (ok, rectangle) as the main veg growing area, maybe some smaller squares and several pots. The garden faces east and gets sun for most of the day from early morning until about five or six in the evening. The patio area where most of the pots will go is in sun until early afternoon - around 2pm.