Last year the cats enjoyed sitting in the raised bed and eating the sweetcorn leaves. While this didn’t cause any problems for the cats, and I think the sweetcorn would have failed whether it had been chewed or not, we would prefer to keep the cats off the vegetable patch.

We achieved this last year by building a huge frame out of garden cane which we covered in netting. The netting was then held down at the bottom by threading twine through both the net and some eyelets that were screwed into the side of the raised bed. This did keep the cats out, but it also made it difficult to get the frame off for weeding and harvesting.

This year we are trying to design something that makes it a bit easier for the humans to get to the vegetables, but that still keeps the cats out. Our current thoughts involve a wooden frame with panels that can be individually removed when we want to access the plants. The plans will need some refining, but we are hoping to get building this weekend.

My other job for this weekend is to start of some parsnips and carrots. I am planning to put them in modules in the coldframe as the temperature is much higher now than it has been for the last few weeks and if the temperature does drop, they can be temporarily moved into the house.

In other vegetable news, the potatoes that started chitting last Sunday are already showing some tiny shoots and the onions are still growing but they still aren’t looking to healthy. I am considering whether to start some more onion seeds off, just in case these ones don’t work.

We went to Webbs on Saturday and bought three potato growing bags and got a fantastic deal for seed potatoes – 10p per seed potato.

We chose Ulster Sceptre first earlies, Marfona second earlies and Ambo maincrop. As we have only ever grown potatoes by planting supermarket potatoes that have sprouted before we’ve eaten them, so didn’t have any prior preference for certain types. We made our decision based on what the potatoes are best for – we usually bake or roast potatoes, rather than boil or mash.

The onions are coming up well now, but they are flopping over, rather than standing upright, which I though could mean that they aren’t being watered enough. However, they are developing a white fluffy mould on the surface of the soil, which could mean that it’s too damp. If anyone has any suggestions, I would be glad to hear them!

I was particularly impressed that they have a square foot gardening option, so that you can turn off the “number of plants to a row” and have “number of plants to a square foot” instead. These are given in the top left hand corner of each square.

The number of plants to a square agree with most of the plans that I had already made, but the number of onions per square is much higher than I had planned.

I will probably experiment to see how many I can get away with squashing into a square.

This site is also useful because I am considering putting my name on a waiting list for an allotment, so I have been using it to get an idea of how much I would be able to grow in all of the extra space that I would end up with.

And a photo of the onion seedlings.

Fingers crossed that the rest will appear in the next few days.

We get most light from the bottom of the raised bed, as you’re looking at it, so we will try to keep the taller vegetables towards the back of the patch to avoid blocking light from the smaller plants.

All of the explanations of square foot gardening suggest that crop rotation isn’t needed in square food gardening because everything is so close together that the roots of one plant will spread into another plant’s squares anyway. This is good for us, because it means that we will be able to use a similar layout each year without having to consider growing the taller plans in pots when they are in the point in the rotation where they would risk blocking light from other plants.

I feel like the growing season is almost here now. Although my onion seeds are yet to show any sign of life, despite their new warmer place on the kitchen windowsill, the green manure is now well dug in and it shouldn’t be too long before the vegetable patch is almost ready to be used.

First, on Friday evening, one of our cats (the same one that sat on our onions) jumped onto the cold frame, and caused one of the plastic panes to get pushed out of the wooden frame.

Luckily for Koshka, our cat, she is far too cute for us to be annoyed with her.

How could you be annoyed at a cat that's this cute?! Photo taken by my boyfriend: www.steve-j.co.uk

Then, this afternoon, in the strong winds, the whole cold frame blew over and send my onions flying.

It’s all fixed now – my boyfriend re-inserted the plastic pane and re-enforced it with some extra wood and I planted new onion seeds and put them on the kitchen windowsill to germinate.

Also this weekend, I dug in the green manure that had been growing in the vegetable patch. It should rot down over the next few weeks, ready for me to use the vegetable patch for vegetables.

We have lots of Early Nantes 5 carrot seeds left over from last year because we were given a pack after buying a packet for ourselves, so we will be growing these again this year. We weren’t planning on trying any other varieties, but I bought a gardening magazine yesterday and they came with a packet of St Valery carrot seeds, so I’m now thinking of trying these as well. The St Valery carrots should be ready to eat later in the year than the Early Nantes 5 carrots, so hopefully it will extend our carrot harvesting period.

All the books and websites that I’ve read suggest that parsnip seeds don’t keep very well from one year to the next, so, even though we had a few seeds left from last year, we have bought a new packet of Gladiator F1 seeds to try this year.

Both types of carrots and the parsnips need to be sown at about the same time of year. All of the packets say to plant directly into the ground and then thin later, but planting into modules and then planting on into their final spaces once the seedlings showed worked well for us last year, so we’re planning on trying the same again this year.

We will be planting the seeds into modules in three stages, a month apart, starting in early February in the hope of spreading the time over which they are ready to harvest, and then planting the seedlings into the ground after a month. I will probably plant the Early Nantes 5 carrots in February and March and the St Valery carrots in April. Assuming the weather has improved by early February, I’ll be putting the modules into the cold frame.

We will be using three squares each for carrots and parsnips. Carrots can be grown at 16 per square and parsnips at 9 per square. I’ll be starting double this number as seedlings.

Last year we had a massive tomato harvest and spent most of the autumn trying to find new things to do with tomatoes.

While this was great because it gave me the opportunity to make green tomato chutney, the tomatoes did take over the vegetable patch and block the light from other vegetables.

This year we will be cutting back on the number of tomato plants that we’re growing, and restricting ourselves to just seven of our squares. Our square foot gardening reasearch has shown that tomatoes require one square for each plant.

My boyfriend likes Red Cherry tomatoes while I preferred the Golden Sunrise tomatoes, so we are also hoping to have two of each of these plants.

The San Marzano 2 tomatoes worked well being sun-dried (in the oven!) so we will have one San Marzano two plants and the final two squares will be used for Marmande tomato plants, as these tomatoes worked well for pasta sauce and green tomato chutney.

I am planning to plant double the number of seeds in a seed inside in mid-March. Based on how quickly the seedlings appeared last year, I am hoping to start taking them outside at the end of March or the start of April, ready to plant the best half into the vegetable patch in mid April.

If they grow as well as they did last year, we should hopefully have plenty of tomatoes towards the end of September.

Onions

Before Christmas we planted some onion sets into pots, in the hope that they would be ready in the spring or early summer. Unfortunately, one of our cats sat on the shoots and so it’s unlikely that they will do as well as we hoped.

This weekend, I am planning on planting onion seeds in a seed tray that will be left on a windowsill the seedlings are getting established. Once they are a reasonable size, they will be transferred into bigger pots on the windowsill and then they will be transferred to the vegetable patch in mid-April.

We have decided to dedicate four squares to onions, two for red onions (Red Baron) and two for white onions (Bedfordshire Champion). Based on our square foot gardening research, we should be able to grow five plants per square, so we will be starting double this number inside, then choosing the strongest to plant out.

We will definitely be making sure to protect these onions from the cats and other animals with plenty of netting over the vegetable patch.