Hello there. June is pounding by and here in the piedmont of North Carolina we are having a stretch of hot, humid and rain-sparse weather. This presents challenges in the garden and I am having to water with my temperamental hose. Like me, it's old and cranky and needs a kick to get to work. Still, the plants continue to grow; the photo to the left is of a cucumber flower. Pretty little things, I think. The bees are busy in the vegetable plot - I can work in there and they're supremely disinterested in me. But then again, I don't have brightly coloured petals and a tantalising fragrance. (My own bodily aroma, though, freely attracts mosquitos and other biting insects. Typical, innit?) I will shortly be planting pumpkin seeds, hopefully to have them ready for Hallowe'en. No idea if I'll manage to grow any, let alone of a decent size, but we'll seee.

I promised a selection of resources I've been using, so here's a few. This is the Old Farmer's Almanac site . I've found it very useful,particularly the planting calendar - you can enter your location (only in the US, but if you're in another country you can probably find a US location not dissimilar in climate to your own home. Amazingly there are places in the US that resemble, for instance, a UK climate. Gasp! Amazement!) There's lots of resources across the site and information.

Three Season Gardening A site talking about a the different growing seasons in North Carolina. I include it here as it could be applied to other places - but mainly to illustrate that there are tons of resources tailored to different locations. Search for gartdening in your own home/country/location etc and the chances are you'll find information about growing conditions and tips pertinent to you.

Gardening Know How is another site like Almanac with a range of resources. This particular page contains good tips for suburban gardening. That's just three sites. There are literally thousands and thousands of sites out there, as well as facebook pages, twitter users, forums, communities, you name it. Loads and loads of stuff written by people getting their hands dirty in their own gardens.

As for books, I'm corrently consulting a couple: 'The Vegetable Gardener's Bible' by Edward Smith which talks a lot about the deep, wide beds I mentioned previously and 'The American Horticultural Society Encyclopedia of Gardening'. This last one I got lucky with - the local library was selling old books and I grabbed this monster tome for the princely sum of ten cents. It covers every type of garden and plant and is stuffed with useful info.

When I started planting I took a piece of wood and used it to make a furrow of the appropriate depth in the ground, put the seeds in and covered them. That was that. Of course I read about other techniques once I'd already taken the plunge. Yep, the Amateur Idiot Gardner looked before leaping yet again. I began to read, after the event, about deep, wide beds. This is basically a variety of methods for creating beds that are, surprise surprise, deep! And wide!

Why are they a good thing? Well, by piling up the beds you provide plants with more loose soil to push young roots through. You create a better environment for the plants to grow, basically. Not only is the soil looser but I've also found that during torrential downpours - and we get our share in North Carolina - the beds aren't flooded - the walkways in between are. The beds themselves retain moisture very well I've found. We had a recent succession of downpours here and after everty one, the beds I'd created were wet, but not sodden. There were puddles in the 'valleys' between. This siuted the plants much better than the earlier rows which were planted in the plat soil.

There are many gardening publications and sites - which I'll list in an upcoming entry - which go into greater and wider detail about raised, deep, and wide beds. For this entry I'll limit it to my experiences so far. Primarily. so far (apart from my experiences with hard rainfall) creating the beds. I'd seen a few different types. Some are very raised and have planks of wood to contain and structure them. This might be sometihng I attempt in the future, but as I'm srarting out I was looking for an easier (and cheaper) method. I ended up following the 'rake it up' method - simply ise your rake to draw earth across from either side and gradually pile your earth up that way. The rake can also be used to flatten the top off prior to planting.

The photo at the top of this entry shows one of my beds - it's hard to see the actual depth but it's about five inches higher than the walkway either side.

I could have made it higher, probablyh will in future but for now it was an improvement on my earlier methods. I've planted cucumbers and squashes (spaghetti, butternut and crooked yellow) and the growth rates have been fantasitc. Within days tiny plants began sprouting from the earth, tiny plants that are rapidly growing. Therefore, early evidence is that raised beds are indeed the way to go. As I've promised, next time I will list websites and books I've found useful. Comments on all my entries are welcoms as I have a lot to learn.

Thanks!

When I started out gardening all I really had to fall back on was my childhood memories of helping dad out. Therefore I went to the library, took some books out and hit t'internet to do some research. One of the first things I realised was that the climate I am gardening in is very different to that of 1970s/1980s North West England. North Carolina is much hotter and much more humid. This influences choice of crops, planting times and cultivation hugely, more so than I initially realised.

I also realised that, seeing as I'm on a very limited budget and have very few tools, there would be a lot of hard work in simply preparing. I had to create a vegetable patch free of grass. I read up and discovered a few ways of doing this. For example, covering the ground with tarpaulin of similar and waiting a few months for the vegetation underneath to die (and rot into the soil, fertilising it.) I didn't have a few months, nor did I have access to tilling machinery. What I did have was a spade and a pair of hands.

I used string and stakes to mark out the area of my vegetable patch and started digging. I used the spade to cut out and dig up roughly square pieces of turf. I say turf; in reality, it's grass mixed with clover, dandelions and God knows what else. In short, it wasn't turf I could carefully knock the soil out of and roll up to be used elsewhere. It was clumps of grass and weed that I banged the soil out of and threw onto my budding compost heap. Back-breaking doesn't begin to describe it. I would start early to avoid the worst of the North Carolinian sun and heat and each day clear a strip a couple of yards wide.

It was satisfying, especially after all that hard graft, to see the bare earth emerge. I. naturally, couldn't wait to get planting so I dived in straight away with a schoolboy mistake. I planted carrots and beetroot which, I was to rapidly discover, should have been planted months earlier, given the local climate. It was a mistake but one I've hopefully learned from - indeed, this whole furst year is really about me teaching myself with the aid of a huge amount of gardening literature and websites. I'm making plenty of mistakes but that's all part of it.

Anyway, back to my choice of crops. I consulted my sources as well as my father in law and settled on a few things. Corn was on my wish list; we'd tried to grow it when I was little and it didn't go too well. The climate we had wasn't that conducive to growing corn and though we got some cobs they weren't that big. That shouldn't be a problem here in North Carolina so into the ground it went. Tomatoes were a must, forming as big a part of our diets as they do. Green beans too; I love green beans so I planted a row of them. I read about planting things next to one another that complemented one another; beans, corn and squash. This is a Native American practice that I decided to try out. I planted a row of beans, then a row of corn and next to that a row of spaghetti squash.

I also planted cucumbers, butternut squash and yellow squash. Yeah, that's a lot of squash but it grows well in summer here and i like the different varieties. Besides. I didn't want too great a variety of things in my first year. I've heard that over-ambition in the garden kills many a new gardener's enthusiasm stone dead. I have all kinds of ideas for other things to gtow. Some of these ideas will put into practice later in the year when the stifling summer heat is behind us and I can plant cooler weather crops.

Next time I'll talk about my initial planting, the rain storms that flooded the patch and my discovery of raised beds. Ta-ta!