Newbie who knows nothing - help required!!!

[COMPOST CORNER]

If you have the room, most children love a pumpkin.

[reetnproper]

Hi Connie,

Deffinitely grow pumpkins. You don't even need to grow them in your veg beds - plant them amongst your flowers.

Runners and climbing french beans are great because you could actually grow these up against your fence if you string some wire along the fence or up bamboo cane 'wigwams', in large tubs.

And a great fast sprouting seed is good old cress. My girls love watching these grow because they literally sprout within hours of sowing, can be grown indoors in an old margerine tub and are ready for eating in 7 days.

Have fun
Reet

[jackyspratty]

Hi Connie, agree with everyone really. Plus its not often I can give advice! But in similar position with trying to engage my 2 sons in growing.

Have had success with ...
Radish, spring onion - boys don't ike them but they are easy to grow
Cut and come again little gem
Variety of herbs in hanging baskets
rainbow chard, really beautiful colours.
fruit bushes in pots, including a vine (pulled up by blasted squirrels!), blueberries
beetroot
Squashes - gonna try changing the shape of them this year! square shaped, eight shaped, plus you can carve initials and faces on them as they grow.
Runner and french beans
Potatos are like buried treasure!

Enjoy x

[connieeccles]

thanks thanks thanks again,

my brocolli has started sprouting in its seed tray, which has renewed my interest in it all, cant wait 2 plant it all out.

love the idea of purple carrots, will have to look out for them

great advice from lots of people, wot a website this is xxx

[chris]

I'm growing purple haze carrots too. I also found some Baby Carrots (Ideal) from T&M that can be sown now.. They crop fast, so mine are in large raised pots - probably have sown 1/3 of a pack to see if they *do* germinate in this cold weather, but the pack indicates Jan onwards!

[organic]

Hey Connie.

Since you're unlikely to have anything actually in the beds yet, might I suggest a method?

Try and get hold of a book called Square Foot Gardening. I've got it out on loan from my local library and will be buying a copy once I've got some spare coppers that aren't earmarked for seed and other bits and bobs.

For your setup, 1.2m x 1.2m beds it's the perfect system to get the most you can out of that space and with the least effort too. According to the system, those two beds could provide one person with all their in-season veg for a year (minus potatoes, which he doesn't cover in the book) or two people with a year's worth of in-season salads.

You mentioned being a bit short on time...
The guy who came up with square foot gardening did so precisely because he thought normal methods were too time consuming and labour intensive. He seems to be working on the basis of doing about 5 minutes work per day and that being plenty to keep weeds down, keep up with watering and get a good harvest.

If you want a peek before you check the library (probably best to search their online catalogue in case your local one doesn't have it but another in the area does) have a look here:
Square Foot Gardening: A New Way to ... - Google Books

Just be aware that it limits the number of pages you can read, though, so have a look at the contents and see which bits you'd like to read first.

Personally, I got about half way through the first chapter and had already been sold on the idea, and short of a container and vertical system of growing I don't think you'll find anything more productive for small spaces.

If nothing else, the book is pretty good at explaining when to plant things outside and figuring out what to grow and how much of it to sow. Those bits stand up regardless of whether you choose to use the square foot system or not.

You're already ahead of me though... I was out of action for a while so am quite a bit behind on getting things started. In some ways this cold weather is a blessing for me.

Good luck with it!

[connieeccles]

thanks very much, that sounds ideal will defo have a look.

have been pleased with all the things in seed trays so far they are looking good, jst cant wait 4 gud weather so can actually get started !!! i am not a patient person!

[chris]

One thing I don't understand about squart foot gardening is that say you get clubfoot... it's the "same" soil, so surely moving it 1-2 foot over to the left/right/up/down/whatever isn't going to really help prevent? I may have mis-understood the whole concept, but I'm assuming that you rotate within the squares ?

[organic]

You don't really rotate as such and certainly not (at least, not in the "official" method) from one square to the next. You follow each crop with something different and just by keeping things moving around the plot avoid planting the same thing in the same place.

It's a much more natural (and I don't mean "like nature" - maybe "automatic" is a better word) way of rotating in that it just happens by virtue of the fact you're moving things around.

Also, I think part of it is not having a load of the same thing in a huge block... by splitting up so there's some sprouts here, a cabbage over there and a few blocks of carrots dotted here and there you're less likely to get diseases in the first place. Right or wrong, I dunno, but that's my understanding of it.