My veggie plot

The most important area in my garden is down at the bottom where I have my vegetable patch.  When we were looking to buy our first house, our first HOME, the garden was something very important for me to look at.  The garden we inherited with this house is ideal.  A blank canvas, but with an old neglected vegetable patch.

This first year was always going to be a trial year.  A year to see what I had to work with.  A year to learn about my garden and plan for the future.

The area that was already cleared as a veggie plot has been increased slightly but my plan eventually is to clear all the grass in that area apart from paths through.  Down there we also have the chickens and compost bins.

I started off by clearing the area of weeds and old leeks.  The ground was then dug over.  I started off putting a few seeds in wanting to see how things did, going for foods that we like.

Potatoes were an obvious choice. I started with two varieties, King Edward and Desiree.  Carrot seeds were sown in the form of early Nantes with some onions around the edges as I am a great believer in companion growing as a natural and organic way of pest control.

Next to the carrots I sowed some radish seeds for a quick crop.  The next seeds were something I have never grown before and don't know much about, Kohlrabi.  This is a member of the cabbage family.

Round the back of these I had some areas with turnips and sprouts.

The radish came up quickly as expected and were the first harvested crop of the year.  

These grew very well but we did find that the slugs really enjoyed them too.  The potatoes although sown over a few weeks, all ended up being ready almost together as the weather got better and the last lot came on quicker and caught the first lot up.

The carrots did well and we got a few turnips too. The kohlrabi were very disappointing and we never got to try any, although I am going to have another try at growing them.  The sprouts are still in and are growing, but also seem to have been attracting some interest from some sort of pests.

We have a couple of the small green greenhouses made out of plastic and polyethylene.  In these, seeds of cucumber and courgettes were sown in trays and potted on as and when they were ready.  We also purchased some tomato, pepper and strawberry plants.

The courgettes were eventually planted out down at the bottom the garden.  They attracted slugs in a big way and I seemed to be on slug patrol every night.  At one point I thought we'd lost the plants, ended up cutting off all the eaten leaves and hoping for the best.  All the plants grew back and had no more slug damage.  Of the six plants I had five provided lots of courgettes and two huge ones boarding on marrow size.

The cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers were all potted up or put in grow bags and stayed in the greenhouses.  The cucumbers did well.  Tomatoes were quite disappointing and the peppers are still producing.

We have also had strawberries hanging on the wall and have now taken runners from so we have more plants for next year.  We got a crop from the strawberries, but I think they will be going in the garden next year instead of in the troughs.

Lettuce leaves and herbs have also been abundant.

We have learnt lots about our garden and its visitors.  Plans are in place for next year.

But, to become self sufficient I need to have food growing through out the year.  So, there are more potatoes in, more carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, beetroot and fennel, with lots more to be planted.

This year has been a learning curve.  I hope to have better results next year.  But also feeds haven't been used much this year.  Over winter homemade compost is going the be added to the veggie plot and I'm already planning ahead.

I would love to know your experiences, ideas and tips, so feel free to leave them below or tweet me @jphillipsonlowe whether they be regarding gardening or blogging, still learning this blogging lark and any feedback is always welcome.
Thanks for reading.