One of the many comments I got on my feeding a family of 4 for £50 post was that we must be green fingered or have a lot of room for growing vegetables.
The truth is we don't and I am not, we have a small back garden, but in 2009 MadDad built me 3 raised beds, they are not large, they are 6 foot by approx 3 foot and we also have a couple of barrels that we fill with potatoes.
But those raised beds and what pots we have round the garden supply me with a steady supply of vegetables right through till the Autumn.
At the moment we have the following
Bed One - Draft Beans, Runner Beans and Pea's
Barrel - New Potatoes
Bed Two - Spinach, Rainbow Chard, Kale
Barrel - New Potatoes
Bed Three - Leeks and Onions
6 Hanging baskets + Home made fence baskets - Strawberries
2 troughs - Cucumber
2 troughs - Tomatoes
1 Container - Courgettes
4 Containers - Herbs
2 Containers - Salad leaves
Come Autumn, we will be planing garlic and Spring cabbage, we have already eaten the spring onions and all the radish that we grew.
We have grown everything from seed and have shared the initial cost of the seeds with our neighbours who also grow and friends that have an allotment. We don't have a green house, but I germinated and grew all the seedlings on the window ledges!
We planted our apple tree 3 years ago and this year is the first year we will see many apples from it (we only got about 7 last year), but you need to bear in mind that our back garden was that of a new build - full of clay and bricks with very little soil at all.
We also planted a pear tree and will get our first fruit from that this year, which is very exciting indeed.
Upkeep and Daily Maintenance
We bought a reduce water butt in the sales last year and we water the beds and containers every night which takes us about 15 mins , or longer if the boys help! I also go out a couple of times a week and weed, but we don't get many weeds as we plant very close together.
Slugs and snails are our main enemy, but the boys are well trained. If they see a slug or snail, they squash them.
I think this post shows that you don't have to have a lot of space or a huge initial outlay to start growing your own vegetables.
