Help me plan my veg garden!

Coz800

I agree that seeds are the way to go. Just clear the ground, mark out a line in the earth, put the seeds on, cover them over and water them.

tobit

The best and easiest veg to grow is spinach, which is expensive to buy because it needs to be picked by hand and doesn't keep well. But it's a doddle to grow and makes yummee soup, or steamed as veg with garlic and butter, or in bakes, or with pasta, or young leaves as salad. Look for 'Spinach Beet' or 'Perpetual spinach' seeds. The seeds are quite big, too, so you can plant them one at a time along a shallow drill about six inches apart. Cover with fine soil, water well, and keep watered. Wait till the ground is warm - say mid-April - before you sow. If the soil is good and the plants are kept regularly watered you'll soon be picking bags full of big, lush leaves. Enjoy!

The biggest problem with any veg is keeping slugs and snails at bay. The best way is to encourage birds - blackbirds and thrushes love munching slugs and it's so satisfying watching a thrush beating hell out of a snail and then gobbling it up! But you have to do your bit, too. Visit your veg patch as dusk is falling, or immediately after it's been raining, look carefully on the soil and under leaves and collect every slug and snail you can find into a big bucket. Then empty the bucket as far away from your veg patch as you can get - and away from gardens - perhaps a piece of overgrown waste ground where hungry birds hunt anyway. You'll never manage to collect every slug or snail - there'll always be some for the birds to find too.