Home-Grown Harvests - the hard way

So we've finally got it. A veg plot - almost an allotment if you will - courtesy of my fabulous father who turned up unexpectedly and unannounced a couple of miserable rainy wednesdays ago to build my husband a surprise raised bed for his birthday. Well, i say it was meant to be a surprise - I was working from home and my husband (henceforth MCD) was made redundant not an hour later - so in the end we all built it together - well i supplied bacon and mushrooms sandwiches and coffee, and MCD was allowed towards the end to dig the compost in - but only after the tree trunks had been removed, the 3 feet deep concrete drilled through (that wasn't part of the plan) and 4 or 5 tonnes of soil worked in to our frankly nutritionless mud. All in the pouring rain. And with birthday banners to boot.

But still - it's done and is a thing of joy and beauty. We've got potatoes, broad beans, onions, rocket planted out in serried ranks - with cavolo nero, rocket, runner beans, sorrel and lettuces all straggling through on the kitchen windowsill till they're old enough to look after themselves.

I shall be posting on a regular (hopefully weekly!) basis on how we're doing. We're complete novices - it's my parents with the green up to their elbows (They're in the Yellow Book of Gardens for Goodness' sake - how can we compete?) but we are embracing the grow-your-own zeitgeist with open-armed and unalloyed naive enthusiasm. After all last year we had a stonking crop of tomatoes. But it's hard work - we don't know what we're doing AT ALL - and Alan Titchmarsh is a godsend, but MCD isn't one much for reading, so the theory comes via me - and i'm not the one at home doing it all (Gardening leave need not be a euphemism...).

Any hints, suggestions, even - god forbid - questions, i shall try to answer them or direct you to the lovely Alan at the allotment blog on the observer. He really does know it all. Hopefully in a year's time - so will we.