Future plans

With such a small plot you do tend to mull a lot of ideas over as to how to expand your growing potential. This year that has included inter planting kale and fruit trees amongst the shrubs in the 'pretties' garden, and growing buckets of potatoes (see post below).

This year I intend to construct a couple of large raised beds to add to the front garden to help increase the harvest. Additional carrots, salad, beetroot and then leeks etc will all be planted in these beds and boost the amounts of the produce we use day to day. It is my intention to make these from scaffold planks lined with plastic, similar to those on Blickys blog. However due to where they will be positioned I don't feel that I could totally wrap them in plastic, like Blicky. I will obviously post their progress as I construct them over the winter and then the fun and games of trying to fill them!

In addition to these I will also be hanging a few more baskets and troughs on the wall for tomatoes. I could turn the entire garden over to tomatoes and they would not go to waste due to the volume we can consume, so being able to grow some additional bush and basket types will go down well.

As a footnote to this I tried a few 'Hundreds and thousands' basket toms this year, however they were planted far to late in the season to do them justice. However the tiny toms explode in your mouth like sherberty tomato tasting bombs. Gorgeous, and my little lad eats them like sweets. I had always been put off by these in the past due to the cost, as a true Yorkshire man, £3.50 for around 6 seeds does not sit right, especially as I assumed them to be F1's at that price.

Following a chat on The grapevine I discovered http://tomatoseedsuk.co.uk/seed-shop.php and not only found them at a more reasonable price but discovered that they were not F1's so I could save seed for the following year. Bargain.

Other major plans include procuring a dozen metre long soil pipes to have a crack at growing some exhibition long carrots. This year for me and for the crack but maybe to show locally in the future, assuming they still have shows in Donny?

However as life can and often goes to rat droppings at the drop of a hat, this may all be subject to change!