Right, here goes, lets see if I can actually keep a blog going for longer than a few posts!

I have decided to grow vegetables and herbs in my little back garden for the simple reason that I can and why not! Also where I will be growing is mostly clay, rocks and hardcore, so I'm hoping that by planting and growing seeds in it, and also replacing the clay with compost as I go, will help improve the soil. A lot of the it will be made up as I go along, with some help from the internet! I will try to update this blog regularly and report on the ups and downs of growing food for the very first time!

My little garden is more like a patio with a couple of planting areas, the largest of which is at the bottom of the garden and is full of plants. That area is aprroximately 14ft wide by 5 ft deep. This area is pretty much finished, but there's always tweaking that can be done. It's pretty much left alone though, as it's full of flowers that bees love and as I have a slight bee phobia, I tend to avoid it if I can. That area is also where we keep our compost bin, which is currently inundated with fruit flies and bluebottles, so if anyone who finds this blog have any tips for keeping them away from the house, I'd love to hear them!

The second area, which is the one I am currently using, is a smaller, squarer patch situated in the middle-back area of the patio. This area is approximately 8ft by 6ft and is where the really awful clay and hardcore is located. You can see it in the photo above, with a little patch full of courgette seedlings, which hopefully won't get eaten before i've had a chance to harvest them! I also have lavender plants in the more shady corner of the area and cherry tomato plants (bought from Focus, yes I cheated) in the more sunny corner. With any luck I shall be removing another 40 litres of clay and stones soon and putting in some more compost so that I can grow lettuces, among other things.

Furthermore, I have just acquired from eBay a mini greenhouse that currently has carrot, spinach, spring onion and lavender seeds germinating, and radish seedlings that have just come up in the last week. I've also put my strawberry plant in there, from last year. This hardy little thing survived as a tiny plant in a tiny pot and produced a whopping one strawberry last year! So hopefully now it's been repotted and put in a more favourable location it should be a lot happier. It's already sprouted new leaves, so with any luck it should produce more fruit than last year!

The spinach seeds have been planted into origami newspaper pots, as shown here . They're great as once the plants have grown and need to be replanted, you can keep them in the pots and the decomposing paper adds nutrients to the soil.

I think that's enough waffling for now, hopefully I will update this blog often and let you know how I'm getting on!