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Our team member Jana and her partner decided to start their own vegetable garden this spring, hoping to grow some tomatoes, peppers, radish, carrots, potatoes, lettuce, beans, kale, courgettes, parsnips, cucumbers and various herbs. A very ambitious project indeed! We will keep you posted about the developments but for now we have built some raised garden beds in our garden and started germinating some seeds in the house, ready to be planted outside in the garden beds when the time comes.
For the construction of the raised garden beds, you can either buy pre-made kitchen garden boxes (we bought ours in B&Q) or construct your own raised beds. We raised the planters by a few inches with some additional wood because the root vegetables need more depth. Then you need a liner that has holes in it for drainage (we got ours again in B&Q) and you use it to line each of the boxes. We put pebbles underneath our garden beds, again for better drainage. And then you just need some good quality soil - we used zero peat organic soil that is meant specifically for growing vegetables.
Because the weather in the UK can be quite windy and with lots of heavy rain and cold air even in summer, we thought we should protect our vegetables from these adverse weather conditions. We can't quite afford to build a proper greenhouse but we found a solution in the form of a simple small 'greenhouse' that consists of a steel frame surrounded by a transparent soft cover. We got these for each of our garden beds and now we're just waiting for the weather to improve so that we can plant out our vegetable seedlings!
If you're doing something similar, make sure to fasten the cover properly to the wooden base so that it doesn't get moved or blown away by wind which could damage the plants inside.
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