Got space for a vegetable plot - when/how do I start?

[ChickFlit]

Have recently acquired a piece of land attached to my garden which will give me room for a small vegetable plot. Being a total novice I'm unsure what to do next.

My neighbour has said I can use his rotavator to dig up the ground - so first question when would be the best time to do that?

I'm not going to be wildly ambitious this first year, so will probably go for stuff we eat carrots, leeks, brocolli etc so I need to know when to get that kind of stuff in. I'll also go for salad stuff as well but I know I will have to start that off on the dining room window.

I did get some raspberry canes off Freecycle last year, so I'm hoping that they will take this year and I can have some nice fruit. I know I'll have to put some netting over the bushes to keep the birds off them.

All advice greatly appreciated, I'm really looking forward to getting stuck in.

Depends what your soil is like. Ours is so wet and claggy it would be hard to rotavate right now. If you are like us I'd wait until it dries up a bit - March?

The work with vegetables comes from weeding and from watering. The larger the area you cultivate, the more weeding you'll have to do. I would start small and see how you go. Also I would make sure there's a tap/ enormous water butt nearby.

Depending on what the ground is like now, there are various things you can do. As KATTT has said, you don't want to rotavate until the soil is workable.

Particularly if its lawn, though, you really want to do something to start killing off the grass now, just rotavating grass in doesn't work that well.

We moved into a new house 18m back, and turned much of the lawn into garden - I covered the grass with a thick layer of newspaper, then a good quantity of anything and everything in the way of organic matter that I could get hold off (round here there are plenty of semi rotted leaves in the alleyways, for example). Then (because I already have it) I put landscape fabric over the top, but that isn't essential.

One bed I wanted to start planting in straight away, so I skimmed the grass off the top & rotavated, but I had to weed a lot to keep the grass down once it was planted, and that bed is still much more weedy.

Come the spring hopefully the grass will have died & started to rot down, & you can scrape all the stuff off into a compost heap (which you'll need anyway) & rotavate. Or you may find that it has rotted down enough that you can plant big things through it (but beware slugs).

If you're a total novice I'd particularly recommend this book which really does what it says on the tin.

If you're plot is covered with brambles etc, then you probably also want to start clearing now, in some ways although a bit more work to start with once you've got rid of them you have a really clean sheet, whereas grass can be a bit of a PITA to get rid of.

There's a pretty good book here.

Is your neighbour with the rotavator a keen gardener? People love being asked for advice on gardening - they're the easiest people to approach.

Thank you for the advice, the ground probably is too claggy, lots of rain and we do have a high water level. My neighbour has nice flower beds and a lawn but not a vegetable plot. I'll lay some tarpaulin over the area where I want the grass to die for now. It's not a lawn but a field so still grassy, just not nice cultivated grass.

Thanks for the book recommendations I'll get them ordered now.

The guy who owned the field previously built a hill, basically shoved a load of topsoil on top of old kitchen units etc, and this has gone to weed badly. DH cut it back before we actually bought the land just to kill off the weeds before they went to seed, but I was thinking of pouring some strong weedkiller over it, killing it all off and then converting it into a rockery of some description. There's lots of work to be done to turn it from field to garden and to be honest I haven't really got that much of a clue other than to cut the hedge down between the two dig it over and put in some grass seed so that we've got a continuing grassy area.

It's going to be a steep learning curve for me this year.

good luck with your growing year... we were novices last year and it is amazing how much produce we managed to grow - so rewarding and wonderful to eat our own food,

we are currently making plans for each bed, and woeking out timings for planting etc,