It’s a bit of a waste, and it doesn’t help you to get much variety into what you’re growing, and variety is half the fun. To partly counteract this, I sometimes swap a few seeds and bulbs with other small gardeners via websites here and there, although it’s a rather piecemeal process. It got me thinking about how great it would be to get all my swaps done in one go next year so I could get straight on with the sowing and growing, and how other urban gardeners were probably in the same position.

So I’ve decided to arrange a swap shop for urban gardeners in early 2012, before the growing season starts. I’ve picked Sunday the 5th of February, the weekend before Valentine’s Day, which will give growers enough time to start off the earliest seedlings. The location isn’t decided yet, but it will be a central London location where people can drop in after lunch to chat and swap. Probably a cafe or a pub where we can book a booth or table.

Who’s invited? Anyone who wants to grow edible plants:

• On a windowsill (even if it’s only a couple of pots of herbs)
• In window boxes
• In pots on a patio or fire escape
• In a small garden
• On an urban allotment

If you’re an experienced gardener, why not stick around for a chat and a drink or two, and pass on your tips and skills to the newer gardeners. I’ll bring along a few small envelopes too, in case people want to split up larger packets between several swappers.

There will be more announcements nearer the time about location and the plants on offer, but for the time being can I get a rough idea of how many people might be interested in joining in? Leave a quick message in the comments below or drop me a quick email at penny @ pennygolightly dotcom.

Since it’s only February I’m not getting ahead of myself, and am mostly growing plants that are likely to stay on the sill throughout the summer. This includes:

• Sweet peppers (traffic light mix from last year)
• Aubergines (Black Beauty from last year, and some free mini-aubergine seeds kindly donated by @Amberlaw via the magic of twitter)
• Chilis (Cayenne and Hungarian Hot wax saved from last year, Serrano seeds pilfered from Wahaca at the weekend, and early Jalapenos where I went kerrrazy and bought some new seeds)

Apart from the Jalapeno seeds there’s been no real outlay. I mixed some leftover peat-free compost with sand to make potting compost, and I have pots and propagators to re-use from last year. Very thrifty so far.

Tomatoes can wait until next month, as the sunlight isn’t strong enough yet and I don’t want to end up with a load of spindly, leggy plants. There will probably be enough room for two of the cordon types if I rig up some canes and cables for them to grow up, and if they get too big for their boots then it’ll be easy enough to pinch out the ends of the vines.

The end effect is going to be like a mini greenhouse by the summer. Can’t wait.

Are you growing any food on your windowsill this Spring? Tell me all about it please.

First up, there’s one stick of Brussels left. That’s about six helpings of sprouts (nice halved and added to stir fries), and a full sprout top to cook as spinach/cabbage.

Next, we have the monstrous sprouting broccoli, purple and white varieties. It’s still a little early for them to start making their tasty bits, but I’ll start cutting them off as soon as they appear so the plants start to make more.

There’s also a little Spring cabbage and curly kale, and a few straggly Spring onions…

This growbag contains some unusual winter-variety carrots. I was given a free packet of these seeds in the Autumn and they’ve grown quietly and slowly over the winter. We’ve eaten some of the thinnings already, and the proper carrots should be ready in a few weeks. Quite good timing to fill the ‘hungry gap’ in the middle of Spring.

The mini greenhouse contains some winter sowings of chard, spinach, Arctic King and Tom Thumb lettuce, parsley, coriander, chicory and a few others. With hindsight I should have got these going as soon as I cleared out the greenhouse in the Autumn, to get the seedlings more established before the winter hit. They will be ready in a few weeks, it’ll just take a while longer for them to get going.

The surviving herbs (pic above) are thyme, sage, rosemary, chives, chervil, oregano and peppermint. There is some cold damage but I think it’ll be OK. They just need some dead leaves removing.

On the windowsill indoors we have winter sowings of parsley and coriander, plus a very healthy Sweet Genovese basil that’s survived since last Summer. The cat ate most of my baby lemongrass plant last week, but I hope it might somehow revive itself. Once again, bad kitty, bad.

And last of all we have a cayenne pepper plant, still making me hot chillis. One day M-Cat is going to eat one of these by accident, and I don’t think I’ll be entirely sympathetic when it happens.

In the next few days I’ll be writing about dealing with garden pests on a budget (and/or organically), and working out my wish list for this year’s planting plan. My seeds and new plants budget is strictly capped at £10, but that should be plenty I reckon. Let’s see.

Do you have any kitchen garden plants growing? Has anything survived the harsh winter where you live? Plant-saving tips and any garden gossip welcome!

I picked these today, some ready to eat now and a few to ripen on for later:

There are still two plum tomato plants growing, along with sweet Genovese basil, purple spicy basil and Greek pot basil from summer sowings. One is on its last legs (roots?) and the other is almost certainly going to make it to the end of November. We might get six or seven more fruits from them before they go, not bad at all.

I moved the cayenne chili plant in from the greenhouse about two weeks ago and it seems so much happier indoors, happy to the point of producing another 30 or so flowers. Potentially a lot more of the hot stuff on the way, so I’ve misted the open blooms with a tiny amount of warm water to help them make fruits. The two lemongrass plants came indoors at the same time, and they’re doing better too with lots of new green shoots.

There are also some new sowings: baby salad leaves, land cress, peas (for shoots), parsley, coriander, spinach and giant red mustard. Nice to have a few salady ingredients within easy reach to chuck into sandwiches and side salads.

I’ve scrubbed down and sterilised the mini-greenhouse, and it’s now home to a completely new set of sowings, including leaf beet, Arctic King and Tom Thumb lettuces, Italian chicory, White Lisbon spring onions, lamb’s lettuce, golden purslane, lots of rocket, dwarf kale and more herbs. Will be interesting to see which ones grow the best.

Outside in the garden at the moment there are: Shimonita onions/leeks, spring cabbage, curly kale, mustard greens, mizuna, sorrel, the last few carrots, purple and white sprouting broccoli, and a couple of Brussels sprout plants. On the herb front we have the hardier plants such as sage, thyme, rosemary and chives, plus some surviving mint, chervil and oregano.

If I have time this week then there are a few more bits of preparation for the winter that need doing, mainly sowing some pak choi and a few other oriental leaves, tidying the beds up, sowing green manures and washing out any remaining empty planters.

Are you still getting crops from your summer sowings? Have you planted anything for the winter or early spring this year? Please let me know how you’re getting on, or what varieties you’ve had lots of luck with.

The cherry tomatoes are finished, so I’ve cut them all down and composted them.

This year I’m trying out different seeds for ‘green manures’, to see whether they will partially or fully revive the compost in the planters, and stop weed growth and nutrient loss in the bare patches of ground. It’s a bit late to sow most types of these seeds after the unusually long growing season, but I have some ‘grazing peas’  which are OK to plant in October and November, so fingers crossed.

Canes have been pulled up and cleaned, small pots have been emptied, washed and rinsed out with scalding water, and dead leaves have been raked and swept up. But that doesn’t mean that the garden is shutting down for winter. Far from it…. The big brassicas are only just getting going. The white sprouting broccoli has started its growth spurt, and is already monstrously big like Audrey 2 from Little Shop of Horrors,  (shown here with gigantic cat nearby for scale):

And the brussels sprouts should be ready for December. The stems have buttons on them already. Here they are before I took away the dead leaves and gave them a bit of mulch:

The mini-greenhouse is still giving us sweet peppers and chillies, but I’ll bring them back inside to the sunny warm windowsill at the end of the month. Then I’ll plant out my remaining dwarf kale and purple sprouting broccoli seedlings and give the greenhouse a good scrub out with detergent. I’m hoping I can keep a few herbs and hardy salads growing under cover though the colder months, but will write about that later.

Meanwhile, here’s what I brought in at lunchtime: chillies, green sweet pepper, tomatoes to ripen indoors, salad burnet, French beans, fennel, spring onions and radishes. Not bad for the middle of October.

Are you growing any herbs or vegetables at the moment? What have you been doing to get things ready for winter?

We still have lots of cherry and plum tomatoes on the go (luckily no blight round here this year), along with cucumbers, courgettes, French and runner beans, chicory, spring onions, mizuna, rocket and cabbages, and plenty more. The mini greenhouse is home to some very happy cayenne and Hungarian hot wax chillies and Traffic Light sweet peppers, and some Thai lemongrass grown from seed.

Although there’s still a lot to come from what’s already been planted, I’ve found myself looking at this month as the last window for getting some key sowing and planting done. It includes:

• Last sequential sowings of rocket, lettuce,  radishes etc
• Autumn sowings such as Spring cabbage, oriental greens, winter varieties of carrot
• Winter-hardy salad and things that might be happy growing in the greenhouse

Since I can’t grow spinach and chard outside thanks to virulent local leaf miner infestations, the indoor windowsill has come to my rescue. There’s baby leaf spinach, rainbow chard and leaf beet growing away happily indoors, along with more tomatoes, dwarf beans, chives, parsley, basil and American land cress. Once the tomatoes have finished for the year, there will be room for lots more microgreens on the windowsill, and the chillies from the greenhouse can come in for the winter too.

I’ve also cleared the gone-over sweetcorn, added new compost and planted out a couple of small purple sprouting broccoli plants in their place. Again, not the most efficient use of space in a small garden, but it’s one of my favourite veggies and tastes best freshly cut. They should grow away quietly over the winter and give a crop in March or April, hopefully.

It’s also the start of the season for planting next year’s fruit bushes and trees, and I’m looking into the tastiest and most cost-effective options at the moment, along with non-edible plants to sow as ‘green manures’ to revive and protect the compost in some of my larger containers when they become vacant in October.

There hasn’t been a glut of anything yet, but I suspect that if we’re in for weeks of rainy, unsettled weather then there’ll be lots of green tomatoes left at the end of September. If that happens, I might get a little W.I. on you and make some spicy green tomato chutney. I draw the line at jam, but chillies and onions and a bunch of spice are right up my street… Does anybody have any nice recipes?

How’s your garden growing? Are you growing any food outdoors, in pots or on a windowsill?

There’s still a lot growing on the windowsills, including cherry (Garden Pearl) and plum tomatoes, sweet Genovese basil, baby leaf spinach, rocket and land cress. I was told that all the tomatoes would ripen at the same time with these varieties, but instead we’ve had plenty of fruits each week and there are still flowers here and there as well. That’s much better for a kitchen garden, as it’s better to try for a continuous supply of fresh produce rather than a glut that needs using up or preserving.

I think next year I’ll be less lazy with what I grow and have some cordon type toms, instead of the bushy types. Longer growing seasons and higher yields should make better use of the limited space, even if they aren’t the sort of plants you can chuck in a pot and forget about.

The windowsill is warm, sunny and pest free, which is handy for most plants. The garden has had lots of problems with beet leaf miners which have ruined most of the outdoor spinach, leaf beet and chard, but baby leaf spinach is just fine on the sill. The dwarf beans are happy here too, away from this year’s swarms of greenfly, and still flowering and making full sized french beans every few days.

The windowsill herbs here are mint and parsley, and they’re doing fine. No need to spend stupid amounts of money for very little at the supermarket…

Most of the pots had to be moved outside in the end. There’s almost no topsoil here, but they’re doing OK on the decking. Here we have different types of basil, lemon balm, marjoram, a cucumber plant, autumn sprouting calabrese, thyme and some toms with an incredible amount of fruit on them. There are some mixed wild flowers in there too, to get bees to pollinate the plants, and to attract hoverflies to eat garden pests.

I’m experimenting with some more unusual foodie flavours I’ve never grown before, including giant red mustard, sorrel, russian tarragon, salad burnet and golden purslane. To keep a regular supply of the things we eat the most, I’ve also been sowing a few seeds of parsley, radishes, stubby carrots, coriander and spring onions every couple of weeks in small pots. Very easy to throw together and it really keeps the grocery bills down because you don’t run out of your favourites.

This looks like a raised bed, but it’s just more knackered decking with the wood taken off the top and the rubble removed, plus some cheap compost chucked in. This monster below is white sprouting broccoli, and it’s basically the only thing that the cat hasn’t dug up (I suspect it secretly threatens to eat the cat when I’m not listening). Thanks to my be-clawed ‘little helper’, the almost-raised bed hasn’t been much of a success and the only way it’s going to work is if I plant things in it that are already pretty large. I’ve been growing a few things in modules in the mini-greenhouse so let’s see how the next batch of plants get on.

The front of the decking has an older cucumber plant with some salad leaves at the base, the non-stop courgette plant and some almost-ready salad potatoes. They have all done me proud and been very easy to grow with hardly any care needed.

The back of the decking is where I got a little over-confident, with some sweetcorn, a butternut squash plant and all kinds of beans growing up the trellis (which saved on buying canes). Take it from me, sweetcorn and Hunter squash are not ideal for most small gardens – they’re nutrient hungry and low yield, and thirsty. Don’t try this at home. But the seeds were free and if it all goes to plan they will probably be delicious. To get the best yield from sweetcorn you have to plant it in clumps rather than rows, there are 12 in this picture.

The sweetcorn variety is a new one that grows about 4 to 6 mini sweetcorn per plant, but if you miss the baby corn stage, unlike some others, it goes on to give you a couple of nice fat corn cobs per plant as well. Sounds too good to be true, and it is – to get the baby sweetcorn out you practically have to rip the plants to pieces so although they were tasty I am letting the rest of them become full sized cobs.

Hardly any beans so far - a late frost got half of the first lot and karate kitty got the second lot. Thanks kitty. The borlotto beans are the only variety outdoors to produce anything edible to date. Fingers crossed for the rest of them, which were a late sowing.

There are a few crappy old windowboxes left behind by the previous owners, and these are now filled with herbs, various salad leaves, beetroot, mini-cabbages, fennel, and a few other goodies. There are also some marigolds to cheer the place up and bring in the bees/scare off pests.

The hanging salad baskets have grown a lot of food from very little compost, including red and green salad bowl lettuce, herbs, radiccio, juicy spring onions, and Tom Thumb lettuces. This one also has edible flowers which allegedly double up as pest control (marigold and nasturtium) but I like the splash of colour as well.

That’s all from the garden for the time being. What have you been growing? Any success stories?

The plum romas are not quite there yet, so I can’t tell you if they’re as good as people say. We’re still getting 2 or 3 French beans each week from the dwarf bean plant, and the cut and come again salad pot containing land cress, rocket and baby leaf spinach is on its third round. I’m also sowing sequentially in little pots to make sure we have fresh supplies of parsley and basil.

The cucumber plant went outside. It is very healthy and has given us three chunky cucumbers during June. Here’s what it looked like last month:

People say you should peel outdoor cucumbers to remove the tiny spines, but I’ve found that giving it a scrub with an ordinary pot scrubber does the trick perfectly and with the minimum of waste – the skins are completely edible that way. The baby lettuce round the bottom of the pot helps to retain water, and the peas seem to be helping the cucumber and lettuce grow stronger too. Three crops in one pot, quite handy for a small garden with almost no topsoil.

The courgette not only got too big for the windowsill, it outgrew the mini greenhouse too. Here’s what it looked like in June, when it started giving us two green courgettes per week. It hasn’t stopped since. The small flowerpot is sunk into the compost, which sends water straight to the roots on hot days, rather than evaporating off. We should be OK if the proposed hosepipe ban happens at least.

I did originally say that I wasn’t going to grow potatoes because it’s very hard to make it cost effective – it’s my first year here and there’s no home made compost, and the combination of large container, bought compost and seed potatoes usually works out as more expensive than buying the spuds in a shop. Fortunately I was given some free seed potatoes and a potato grow bag by Beau’s Mum, who had a spare set after a bulk buy:

This is what they looked like directly after their final ‘earth up’. I’m looking forward to a bumper crop of Charlotte salad potatoes some time during July, and there’s also a way to recycle this year’s compost by sowing enriching plants in it during the Autumn and letting it overwinter, so there should be very little waste.

Quite a lot of people have given me free seeds or done swaps with me, so there’s plenty to try out this year, including a pot of borlotto and runner beans, and some rocket. Here they are as baby plants:

I’m also making good use of the things that we find, Womble-stylee, things that the previous folks left behind. This includes a shed full of pots, planks, perspex sheets, plastic window boxes and hanging baskets. The window boxes turned out to be good for lettuces, rocket, radishes, round carrots, pak choi and mini cabbages. Not sure how the turnips and beetroot are going to turn out, we’ll see at the end of July.

All the hanging baskets needed was a water reservoir and a £1 pack of gel retainer liners and hey presto, salad bowl hanging baskets with lettuce, chicory, spring onions, and edible marigolds and trailing nasturtiums:

So that’s what happened in June, and I’ll sort out a July update next week. What have you been growing?

Fruit: bilberries, blueberries, cherries, currants (black, red and white), elderflowers, gooseberries, loganberries, raspberries, strawberries and wild strawberries. Possibly also some last sticks of summer rhubarb. Imported apricots, figs, melons, nectarines, pinapples, watermelon.

Vegetables: aubergines, basil, baby turnips, baby beetroot, broad beans (finishing soon), broccoli (summer calabrese), celery, chard (baby leaf for salads), chives, coriander, courgettes and courgette flowers, cucumbers, dill, fennel, fresh garlic, globe artichokes, green beans, horseradish, kohlrabi, lamb’s lettuce, lettuce, mint, new potatoes, parsley, peas, peppers, radishes, rocket, samphire, sorrel, spinach, spring onions, summer cabbage, summer squash, tomatoes, watercress. Technically the asparagus season ended last week at the summer solstice, but you may find a few last spears of the British good stuff if you look.

Fish and shellfish: black bream, brown crab (hen), brown and rainbow trout, cuttlefish, early plaice and sole, herring, lobster, mackerel, Mediterranean sardines, prawns, pike, pilchards, pollack, scallops, Scottish squid, sea bass, sea trout, shrimps, signal crayfish, spider crab, young salmon (grilse). Some say this is the peak time for crab, lobster, mackerel, prawns and shrimps.

Meat, poultry and game: Not a special month for any particular meat or game.

Cheeses: Stinking Bishop, British goats’ cheese. Crottin de Chavignol, Saint Remy, Tomme Vaudoise, Valencay. Buffalo mozzarella.

The windowsill garden got somewhat too big for its boots and some of it had to be moved outdoors and into bigger pots. In the last couple of days we’ve had home grown cherry tomatoes, baby leaf spinach and chard, early peas, broad beans, cucumber, courgette, mixed baby leaf lettuce, spring onions, radishes, parsley, coriander, spicy purple basil, and broccoli leaves (eaten as cabbage). I’m getting the hang of cut and come again and sequential sowing now, so hopefully we’ll have a fresh meal for two people out of the garden on most days for the rest of the summer. Not bad for a back yard with no top soil, and a slightly lazy gardener!

We’ve mostly been having salads, or huge helpings of veg with our dinners, but Beau’s also cooked up some lovely fruity puddings as well with bought fruit.

Have you been growing your own fruit or veggies? How’s it going? Even if you haven’t been gardening, you can still have a little trip to the market at the weekend. 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?