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Getting going
Hello All 
Google has often brought me to forum posts here over the past couple of years, while I have been trying to work out what on earth I am doing with my gardening endeavours. Yesterday, I received my first ever worm bin, so I thought it was time I stepped things up a bit and actually register!
My Mum and Grandma are both keen gardeners, so I've had a lot of exposure to gardening concepts from an early age. I've had various houseplants over the years, some more successful than others, but never had any outdoor growing space until I moved to my current home a couple of years ago. I'm very lucky to have a largely south facing garden, but it's a bit shaded in places by trees and other houses. I'm also renting, so I can't dig up the lawn for raised beds, which takes out a lot of the best growing space. Fortunately, I also have a good-sized concreted area where I can put containers, although only one corner of that gets 6 - 8 hours of sun a day. I do have a sun-room, but it gets far too hot in the summer for anything to survive in there (I know this, because I came home one day last year and everything was looking very sad, with only a few plants surviving with a change of environment and lots of TLC), and I can't leave the windows open while I'm at work.
Last year was my first real attempt at a proper container garden and I did okay overall. I had a lot of failures, but I learned a lot from my mistakes. One of my biggest challenges is dealing with the slugs. They absolutely wiped out some of my crops (for example, not a single cabbage survived) and I'm going to have to have some better strategies for dealing with them this year. I also killed some seedling by doing silly things with fertiliser and leaving them in my too-hot sun-room for too long (bye-bye all my strawberries, cucamelons, peppers and aubergines).
This year, I am devoting a lot of my space to greens, as I can eat a lot of those, and they worked well for me last year (chard, beetroot greens and turnip tops were all very successful for me last year - my chard is still looking good). Quite a lot of the varieties I've gone for should do okay in part-shade, so I can reserve my sunniest growing space for things that really need it. I probably have more seed varieties than space to plant them, but I think the more I learn about the plants now, the more successful I will be when I finally have a garden I can turn into a permaculture paradise
Anyway, I'm looking forward to benefiting from the many years of shared wisdom here. Nice to meet you all.
Google has often brought me to forum posts here over the past couple of years, while I have been trying to work out what on earth I am doing with my gardening endeavours. Yesterday, I received my first ever worm bin, so I thought it was time I stepped things up a bit and actually register!
My Mum and Grandma are both keen gardeners, so I've had a lot of exposure to gardening concepts from an early age. I've had various houseplants over the years, some more successful than others, but never had any outdoor growing space until I moved to my current home a couple of years ago. I'm very lucky to have a largely south facing garden, but it's a bit shaded in places by trees and other houses. I'm also renting, so I can't dig up the lawn for raised beds, which takes out a lot of the best growing space. Fortunately, I also have a good-sized concreted area where I can put containers, although only one corner of that gets 6 - 8 hours of sun a day. I do have a sun-room, but it gets far too hot in the summer for anything to survive in there (I know this, because I came home one day last year and everything was looking very sad, with only a few plants surviving with a change of environment and lots of TLC), and I can't leave the windows open while I'm at work.
Last year was my first real attempt at a proper container garden and I did okay overall. I had a lot of failures, but I learned a lot from my mistakes. One of my biggest challenges is dealing with the slugs. They absolutely wiped out some of my crops (for example, not a single cabbage survived) and I'm going to have to have some better strategies for dealing with them this year. I also killed some seedling by doing silly things with fertiliser and leaving them in my too-hot sun-room for too long (bye-bye all my strawberries, cucamelons, peppers and aubergines).
This year, I am devoting a lot of my space to greens, as I can eat a lot of those, and they worked well for me last year (chard, beetroot greens and turnip tops were all very successful for me last year - my chard is still looking good). Quite a lot of the varieties I've gone for should do okay in part-shade, so I can reserve my sunniest growing space for things that really need it. I probably have more seed varieties than space to plant them, but I think the more I learn about the plants now, the more successful I will be when I finally have a garden I can turn into a permaculture paradise
Anyway, I'm looking forward to benefiting from the many years of shared wisdom here. Nice to meet you all.
but I'm hoping if I move it from my hot sun-room back into my cold house, some of them may still sprout.
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