I don’t envisage going hungry until next year, but it is pertinent to plan what you are going to grow and how you are going to grow it. And for many of us it involves a lot more than simply buying seeds and setting off.
First work out what you have
The major part of the growing of food is how on earth you are going to do it! You see it is one thing saying that you eat as a family 5 Kilos (10 lbs) of potatoes a week, but if you haven’t room enough for about 60 potato plants, what you going to do?
Let us suggest you have to somehow get some more space. But this could take a whole year, or longer - especially if you are going to try for an allotment, and another year in many cases to get it ship shape enough for growing quantities of food.
That doesn’t mean you cannot grow food! Even if all you have is a balcony, you can grow salad stuff, tomatoes in a window box, spring onions in a window box, that kind of thing. For me it has meant taking over the garden into beds for different crops, but more than anything, making all kinds of ingenious ways of keeping the army of magpies, pigeons, crows and rooks, hedge sparrows, rats and rabbits off the crops, not to mention the slugs!
For me, having a small garden, in a woodland situation, I only have 5 beds to work with, plus a wall of the house and a greenhouse on one side of the property and an overgrown wilderness on the other, which has been allowed to get as bad as it is due to ill health, but will now start to get the food treatment - after all, if weeds grow in the dark, there must be some crops that will too!
Planning for Next
Year's Crops