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!