If you’re pretty new to growing your own vegetables, we’d recommend that you start small with just a couple of raised beds or a handful of pots to tend to. Doing so will give you the chance to get some of the essential knowledge entrenched in your brain so that, next year, you can upsize without feeling overwhelmed.
Unless you have oodles of time on your hands, then two or three small raised beds or a huddle of pots and containers will be more than enough to keep you busy. Critically, you’ll have the chance to make mistakes in the first year, and learn from them.
You will likely plants a few too many things and then regret overcrowding. Or you might go the other way, and plant too far apart before realising that you could have squeezed more in. You will probably learn first hand how quickly you can lose plants to slugs or pigeons, which means you’ll quickly figure out ways to protect plants next time. You will definitely learn which weeds are prevalent and how to tackle them, and you’ll start to get a feel for how often you need to water your plot and you’ll see what happens to root veggies when you don’t quite get the watering right and the soil goes from too dry to too waterlogged.
These are all really important lessons, and they are better learnt with a smaller plot so that you don’t get discouraged. Honestly, it is one of the very best ways to learn, from things not quite going as you’d hoped – so start small, use the growing guide that we provide, read our Weekly Veg Out newsletter and browse our videos, and you’ll soon have a bank of innate knowledge that will help you to get better results from a bigger plot next year.