What to grow this year?

(picture at www.theguardian.co.uk/lifestyle/2009/sep/13/nigel-slater-growing-vegetables)

No not really! As much as I wish this was our garden... it isn’t. This is my dream garden which really belongs to TV cook Nigel Slater. It is amazing isn’t it? There is a reason I haven’t included photos of our actual veg patch! It is a bit of a mess. Tim dug it over at the weekend and covered the soil to warm up a bit for the new years’ growing season. All we have to do now is decide what to grow.

Last year we had a burst of productivity and made ourselves two raised beds out of scaffolding planks. We were very pleased, even though it cost Tim a fingernail and a nasty trip to A&E when he hammered his finger to one of the planks. We had varied successes and failures (tomatoes a big flop) (potatoes yum yum yum). So, with a view to learning from our mistakes (don’t grow radishes and beetroot if you don’t like radishes and beetroot, you won’t like them any better just because they grew a metre from your back door) we need to decide on what we actually want from our limited space, and what will work.

This is the layout of our plots... we had potatoes in the square last year and courgettes, petit pan, beetroot, chillis, lettuce, beetroot and other various guff that didn’t grow in the rectangle. This year I know I need to move the potatoes into one part of the rectangle because of crop rotation. So I have a little quandary over what to do with the square. I’m thinking either a cute little herb garden or... cover the plot with a net frame and make it a fruit cage... That would be rather cool wouldn’t it? My grandparents had fantastic success with 2 little blueberry bushes last year but they were in pots which would be more flexible for later years. I will have to ponder that one.

My idea for this year is not to do what we did last year and try to grow some of everything... even things we didn’t want to eat really. This year I would like to focus on growing stuff, or varieties, that we can’t get easily at the shops. Herbs would be good, because they don’t last long in the fridge, I can’t cook without them and they are expensive to buy. I have been saving my loo roll tubes for propagating seeds, I’ve been saving them all over the bathroom floor in fact!

I will be back with photos when it’s all looking pretty and not a second earlier!

xHx