Whether you are passionate about self sufficiency, allotment gardening or simply growing a few salad vegetables at home in your back garden, you will find lots of handy tips and gardening advice in this section, together with my gardening calendar. My calendar has evolved from a number of old wall calendars from my potting shed, scribbled notes covered in soil, notebooks and books that I have used over the years. I’ve consolidated all of this to provide a coherent ‘month by month’ gardening advice guide for every month of the year.
One of the biggest ‘problems’ I had during the early years of gardening was knowing when to sow certain seeds and often I would get excited and sow everything too early to find it didn’t thrive or I had forgotten to do the preparatory work. I use these pages myself as a reminder to get the timing right and I hope they are useful to you so you can get the most out of your vegetable garden.
My Gardening Calendar – What to do in the vegetable garden, what to plant outside, in the greenhouse or polytunnel and reminders of garden jobs you can be getting on with.
If you’re still unsure of when to sow seeds or plant certain plants out, then you can usually wait a few weeks or even a month longer. It’s better to have a late harvest than planting too early to lose the crop.
If you are a beginner, then you’ll soon discover that nothing tastes better than your own home grown produce! You’ll get fit gardening, feel good producing your own food and of course healthy eating it. Some years you’ll do incredibly well with some crops and other years you may get a poor harvest of some, but there are ups and downs when you produce your own vegetables. You are at the mercy of the weather and at times will struggle with pests or diseases but you’ll soon learn how to lessen the effect of these or overcome them all together, so the next year you have fewer problems.
What organic gardeners can do to get good results, is put in some ground work to provide the right growing conditions. Getting the soil right and working with nature in a sustainable way will give you a flying start and before you know it you will be harvesting the rewards.
There are a number of useful pages in this section to help you:
Growing your own veg can make a real difference to your diet and your bank balance. But it can also be hard work, and there’s a learning curve, so this article will help you get a good start.
When you’re talking about vegetable gardening then it really does all come down to soil types. Learn about your soil type to understand how you can make improvements.
Having organic soil that is rich in micro-organisms is the essential building block of organic gardening and the key to growing strong and healthy plants.
An essential ingredient to the organic garden, one of the best things you can do for your garden is to learn how to make compost that can be incorporated into your garden.
The key to having a productive organic vegetable garden is to have strong plants and to prevent pests and diseases before they take hold. This can be done by having a Crop Rotation Plan.
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