townx

This year's gardening project, since we've recently moved house, is to have a vegetable patch. I'm not particularly fussed about where our fruit and veg. come from: we buy local organic mostly, but I'm not strict about it. So it's not through any sense of wanting to be self-sufficient or mistrusting suppliers. It's more a case of wanting a challenge; plus there's a sort of vegetable patch in the garden already; the aspect is good (south facing with some shady parts); soil is heavy clay but we had loads of compost we could add from pots, growbags and compost bins left by the last inhabitants; and I think it's something Madeleine will enjoy.

Anyway, I decided to start small with half a dozen easy to grow crops (germinate well, grow fast and are reasonably tough) which we enjoy eating or which taste better really fresh. I've gone for:

• Spinach 'Tardy'
• Lettuce 'Catalogna'
• Sweetcorn 'Sweet Nugget' (short plants; I love corn on the cob)
• Wild rocket
• Pumpkins (that one was Madeleine's choice - they take up a lot of room, but I like pumpkin soup etc., you can make Halloween lanterns from them, and they're impressive plants)

My choices of variety were based on reading Organic Gardening by Charles Dowding, and browsing The Organic Gardening Catalogue. I ordered the seeds from the latter, which seems reasonably priced. Delivery was pretty fast and accurate. The book I mentioned is interesting and gives some good tips on when to sow and which varieties to go for. (I've been doing organic gardening for about 8 years and it's taught me to grow the things which want to grow, grow plants which resist the local pests, and to encourage beneficial insects and animals. So I fully expect lots of failures all the time when gardening, and use those failures as object lessons.)

We planted some in the "greenhouse" (more like a green polytunnel) in newspaper pots Madeleine and I made together using this Paper Potter implement, which is part of the fun. Madeleine likes making the pots and filling them with compost, pushing the seeds in, watering them. We also put a few wonky rows of seeds into one of the beds, as per instructions, and labelling them; though the wind and Madeleine's hands ensured that we'll probably just end up with a big mixed patch of all sorts of stuff. All part of the fun.

We're also doing sunflowers and nasturtiums, both of which are easy and produce good results. You can eat the nasturtiums too, of course.

This weekend I also harvested a load of spring onions which were already growing in the garden, planted by the previous owners, and have been making honey and mustard salad dressing to go with them. I'll probably be back onto making pickles before too long.

Here's hoping we get at least a few of our own plants to eat. I keep checking the pumpkin seeds we planted last week, hoping that some of them come up, as Madeleine seems quite keen on those growing. Wish us luck.