The Learning Begins!

Neither of us have ever had a garden before, nor attempted to grow anything aside from the odd carrot or herb. Now suddenly we have over a thousand square meters of land and a desire to become mostly self-sufficient in vegetables. Where to begin?

Well, the good news is that the land has been cultivated for many years and has been reasonably well looked after. There are grapes and a number of fruit trees as you can see on the rough garden plan, here. The rest has been used for potatoes, cabbage, kale, beans and other vegetables common around here. That's quite a lot of land, so the first thing we did was set about turning part of it into lawn (or perhaps rough meadow might be a better description). That should reduce the area we have to worry about!

Our bible is a book given to us by my sister Barbara: The Royal Horticultural Society book of Organic Gardening. This publication is an advocate of the no-dig bed system of vegetable production -- and the "no-dig" bit sounded good to us! So in March, we set about gradually creating beds in three areas to allow a three-year rotation system. We fixed on a bed size of 1.2m wide by 4m long, and will try to stick to this as much as the topography allows. So far we have three beds planted or sown, plus one and a half seed beds (not very successful). We are gradually taking the land over from the previous user, our neighbour Alice. She's had kale on much of it through the winter, and after a spring crop it is now coming to the end of its cycle.

We began by planting just small quantities -- we don't want huge gluts of produce! Lettuce, capiscum, tomato, salad kale, and beetroot came as seedlings from the market. We are also attempting to grow rocket, tomatoes, and various herbs from seed. Also some Japanese vegetables -- daikon and gobo (Greater Burdock) so far. These latter are going great guns, while local seeds all seem to be struggling. It seems we may have sown many of them too early. As I've already implied, we have a lot to learn!