I’ll be growing as many veggies and herbs as I can again this year. Flavour is the most important factor, but I’m also looking at getting as much value for money as possible and keeping the whole thing within budget.

This year’s food gardening budget is being set at a total of £40. That’s £10 for seeds, £20 for new compost and £10 for everything else. A budget’s definitely necessary as you can easily get carried away and spend a small fortune in garden centres or online shops, ask any gardener what happens when they start looking at those tempting catalogues filled with new-season packs of seeds…

The available growing space currently isn’t big enough to completely supply the household with veggies and salad all year round, so I’ve decided not to grow potatoes, maize and onions this year. They take up too much room (or compost) and they’re pretty cheap to buy, so the space is being given to other ingredients that give a higher yield and/or cost more in the shops.

I think I’ll get the best value this year from:

• Herbs: parsley, coriander, mint, Italian and Thai basil, wild garlic, chives, chervil, lemongrass and a few others
• Salad veg: lettuce, rocket, spring onions, radicchio, land cress, radishes, cucumbers, tomatoes etc
• Greens: pak choi, mizuna, mini cabbages, kale, kohl rabi
• Legumes: sugar snap peas, early/late peas, French beans, borlotto beans
• Others: mini carrots and parsnips, Florence fennel, chillis, sweet peppers, green and yellow courgettes, winter squash

The seeds budget has pretty much been spent, but if I can get hold of some runner beans for free then I’ll grow them as well. Got me some tomato and sweetcorn seeds to swap, so let’s see.

Last year had a real element of trial and error, but the experience has helped me to learn more about the microclimate and other limitations of gardening in this spot. I’ll be taking action against some pests and diseases so that I can still grow most of my favourite things, but it’s also time to admit defeat against some problems. Garden pests and diseases are many and varied, so I’ll write about them another time.

For the moment, let’s just say that it’s not viable to grow the following on the tiny plot, for reasons of space, cost, or susceptibility to local pests/diseases:

• Most root vegetables
• Broad beans
• Calabrese
• Maincrop spinach and chard
• Permanent plants (asparagus, rhubarb, globe artichokes)
• Most slow growing plants (cauliflower, big brassicas)
• Fruit trees and bushes

But that still leaves a lot of sowing and growing to be getting on with once the weather starts to warm up.

Are you growing your own this year? What are you planning to grow?

With the more expensive ingredients you can often buy smaller amounts of things too, especially if you’re buying at market stalls or at a cheese counter. There’s nothing quite so nice as a sliver of good cheese, or a few fancy mushrooms or prawns or whatever. The stronger the flavour, the less of an ingredient you need.

Fruit: apricots, bilberries, blackberries, blueberries, cherries, currants (black, red, white), early apples, early damsons, figs, greengages, gooseberries, loganberries, peaches, plums, raspberries, strawberries and wild strawberries. Imported melons and nectarines.

Vegetables: aubergines, basil, beetroot, last few broad beans, broccoli and calabrese, carrots, celery, chard, chillies, chives, courgettes, cucumbers, fennel, globe artichokes, green beans (runner, dwarf and French), horseradish, kohlrabi, lamb’s lettuce, lettuce, mushrooms (ceps, chanterelles, field, oyster, porcini, puffball, shaggy ink cap), new potatoes, onions, peas, peppers, radishes, rocket, samphire, shallots, sorrel, spinach, spring onions, summer squash, sweetcorn, tarragon, tomatoes, turnips, watercress.

Fish and shellfish: black bream, brown and rainbow trout, brown crab, crayfish, Dover sole, haddock, herring, john dory, lobster, pilchards, pollack, prawns, red and grey mullet, salmon, sea bass, squid.

Meat, poultry and game: grouse from the 12^th, hare at its best.

Cheeses: Farmhouse Cheddar, British goats’ cheese. Chaource, Charolles, Valencay.

I think I’m going to be making a vegetable chilli next week, with home grown cayenne chillies, tomatoes, courgettes and whatever else is knocking around in the bottom of the fridge, plus an econo can of kidney beans and some strong cheddar on the top. If it keeps on raining I might also be making a sort-of shepherd’s pie, with carrots, onions and mushrooms, with some mustard mash on the top and greens on the side.

What are you going to cook?

Meanwhile, we’ve had quite a few plates of salad, loads of herbs on our pizza and pasta and some more beans, and there’s an outside windowbox of goodies now too.

The usual suspects:

The windowbox of salads: 

Herbs going wild:

A cucumber plant that had to be repotted (with a few added peas, baby lettuce, pea shoots etc), which is already growing baby cucumbers:

Flowering tomato plants:

Chilis and sweet peppers making buds:

Indoor spinach, land cress and rocket ready to eat:

Beans, radishes and salad already eaten:

And say hello to my little friend – a fully loaded mini greenhouse….

…complete with monster courgette plant:

Are you growing any herbs or veggies at the moment? Any success stories or tips?

The pea shoots have had their fish and chips. They’ve turned into mushy peas and aren’t going to give us a third crop. The first two rounds were great though, two gourmet bunches of pea shoots in one month from a tiny handful of peas and the smallest amount of soil-free compost. Will start another batch at the weekend and ditch the old ones:

The parsley is doing really well, so here’s the last pic of that:

Mint’s catching it up, finally, and the dill is putting out its first true leaves. Basil’s written off until April.

The spicy leaf mix is still fairly useless. Will probably sow another batch next month in a different container.

The iceberg lettuces got off to a good start but are  a bit leggy now. Not sure if they need more sun or less. Any ideas?

The mustard greens seem really happy, and the salad bowl lettuces I sowed in the mini propagator four days ago are sprouting already.

So far so good with peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, and the mini chili plant:

Finally, the radish tops were so delicious that I’m probably going to grow them all year round as microgreens. The variety I used was Cherry Belle, if you’d like to give it a go too. The flavour was sweet and mild, and you get fairly big fast-growing dark green leaves with red stems.

Have also sowed small pots of chervil and spring onions, but they are supposed to take a long time to germinate, so no pics of empty containers here. If there’s time at the weekend, will start off some land cress and baby leaf spinach too, to see how they get on.

So far the winners here are: pea shoots, common (curled) cress, mustard greens, parsley and radish tops. It might change as we go into Spring and Summer, who knows?

Are you growing any windowsill food? What are you having the most luck with so far?

Then I heard about a second method that was supposed to be faster, so I tried that way too last weekend. You soak the seed peas overnight in a shallow dish of lukewarm water, then drain and rinse them in the morning, before adding them back to the dish and soaking in fresh lukewarm water for the rest of the day. After two soaks, all your peas should have tiny sprouts starting to form on them. (If not, give them one more drain, rinse and 8-hour soak for luck).

Then you take the sprouting peas and pop them in a pot on top of some compost, keeping the peas one layer thick rather than piling them up on top of each other. Water gently, place some damp kitchen paper over the top of the pot, and then cover tightly with kitchen foil to keep the light out. Leave the peas in a warm place, like the top of the fridge or a shelf over a radiator for 3 to 4 days, watering a little each day. After that, remove the foil and paper and put the pot on the windowsill for 3 to 4 days. After about 8 days (probably less in warmer weather) your pea shoots are ready to harvest.

Look at the difference between method 1 (traditional) on the left, and method 2 (pre-soaking and using warmth) on the right.

In this pic the second batch had just been moved to the windowsill, and was a week behind the first batch. There was a 100% germination rate in the second batch, but as you can see less than half the peas in the first batch sprouted. They’re all getting cropped tomorrow for a fancy salad, but from now on I’ll be sticking to method 2 because it’s so much quicker and there’s a lot less waste.

The final pics:

Other windowsill happenings: the parsley’s growing very well, and there are now two tiny chili seedlings to pot up as soon as they’re a little bigger. The mint and the basil are still being a bit feeble, but that’s probably because it’s been so cold and grey for the last two weeks, and the salad leaves are looking like overgrown cress and not doing very much. Things will probably improve as we head further into Spring and the weather warms up.

How’s everyone’s windowsill gardening coming along so far?

EDITED TO ADD: We now have a little online club for windowsill growers to swap tips, ideas and bargains. 100% free to use and non-profit. It’s right here on the Penny Golightly forum – anyone can read the comments, and it’s really easy to sign up if you’d like to join us and make your own posts and ask questions. Please feel free to have a look.