growing potatoes

sounds good advice

Keep them in the shed til easter and they'll be good to go as soon as you get them in the ground. Still about another month to go so if you're not planting them straight away there's time to dig a bit of manure into the soil which will help the potatoes no end. Think you can get bags of manure from B&Q nowadays.

Just put my first lot of potatoes in last weekend but it tends to be slightly warmer on this side of the pennines and not so many frosts as in Yorkshire.

 

sorted two plots of land out in garden 1 is 2msq. other is 1m by 3m. orderd 10 bags of manure at £15 to mix in with soil. would you just do spuds for first year?

 

Spuds are dead easy to grow

So are good to start with. They're quite low maintenance and generally produce a decent crop.

It's worth having a go at lettuces, spinach, radishes etc as they grow dead easily and quickly and you can always just pick leaves off and come back. Only downside is they are prone to being eaten by slugs.

For about a tenner you could buy a set of garden canes (7-8 ft high ones) and also grow a few runner beans/french beans. Set up a row of canes about 20cm apart and just pop a seed at the base of each cane and provided they don't get eaten by slugs you'll have a crop of beans that will keep going all summer.

If you've a little bit of space leftover then when B&Q start doing the strawberry plants it's worth spending 3 or 4 quid on half a dozen strawberry plants. Again very easy to grow and reproduce themselves very easily and will keep you in strawberries for years. Only maintenance on those is making sure that the ground around them is covered in straw as this stops the strawberries sitting on top of the soil and getting wet and then rotting and then make sure you trim off a few of the shoots the strawberries send out once the fruit is done. If you put some strawberry plants in the ground at easter you'll be eating them by the end of May with any luck.

As long as you keep on top of weeds, slugs, and watering during the hot summer days, you can't really go wrong with any of these.

This website is quite good: http://www.gardenaction.co.uk/

 

dig pidgeon manure into ground mate does em world er good,

 

Tykes1912 obviously thinks he knows more than Baron Greenfingers TM nt