It can often be a little overwhelming to start a brand new veg patch completely from scratch, but it needn’t be. If you approach it step-by-step it can be surprisingly easy, and incredibly rewarding. With that in mind, one piece of advice we would definitely dish out is to start soon and not leave it until the last minute. A little bit every now and then goes a long way and makes it all much more fun!
Step 1 – Decide where to situate your new veg patch
You want to choose the part of your garden that gets the most sunshine hours, preferably in a nice sheltered spot out of the wind. A south-facing garden is ideal, but don’t worry if you don’t have this luxury.
Step 2 – Decide what you will be growing in
This will largely be dictated by your garden – if you have a patio then pots make sense, or you could go for a nice wooden planter and treat it as a raised bed. If this is you, then you’ll be off to the garden centre for some pots…make sure they are big enough. A nice wide, deep pot is what you want for any veg.
Step 3 – Measure out your space & layout the garden
If you’re going to build raised beds or dig a bed into the ground, you want to measure out your space first. As a general rule of thumb, 4 foot is the ideal width for a bed as you can access it from both sides and still reach the middle.
Try to leave enough space along walkways between beds so that you can easily wheel a wheelbarrow.
It’s quite helpful to use string to mark out your beds/walkways or draw it out on a piece of graph paper.
Step 4 – Build your beds
If you’re going for raised beds, then these winter weekends are the perfect time to build them. We’ll be covering how to in another post a little later in the month, but if you want to have a little ponder on ideas then hop over to our pinterest board for some ideas. You can, of course, dig a bed straight into the ground instead.
Step 5 – Make your pathways
We highly recommend lining pathways with a weed membrane and covering them with gravel or wood chips. But you might prefer a grass path or stepping stones. It’s up to you.
Step 6 – Fill your beds
Whether you’re growing in pots or beds you want to get plenty of good quality compost or manure in there and dig it over really well. You can always line the base of raised beds with a weed membrane before filling them to keep weeds at bay.
Now you’re ready to go! If you start this process nice and early and do little bits over a few weekends, you’ll find it much less overwhelming and quite a good activity for winter.