Welcome to the City Smallholder: a blog about vegetable gardening in a city, allotment recipes and attempts to become self-sufficient against all odds.
We hope you enjoy these pages and invite you to follow our journey as we endeavour to chart the difficulties met when seeking a self-sufficient lifestyle in an urban environment.
Our journey began in the summer of 2009 with the smallest of plots – approximately 30 square metres of land running along the side of the bungalow we are renovating. The ground had suffered years of abuse by the “concrete it over” mentality of the previous owner and our early gardening sessions involved hour upon hour with a sledge-hammer, wheelbarrow, and skip before there was any hope of the crops shown below.
But the success we felt by turning our tiny urban corner into usable growing space spurred us on to our much larger “grow your own” plans. Bit by bit we have gradually transformed most of the gardens that surround our bungalow into a vegetable garden. This includes the front garden, which some people find weird, but takes our total growing space up to approximately 100 square metres.
Now that 2011 is upon us, we hope to use this space as efficiently as possible to feed ourselves all year round. It’s easy to want more. This blog is about making do with what you have. After all, not everyone can have the 2 acre dream – there just isn’t enough land available. But we can all do our best to use what we have. This is what we call City Smallholding.
Thank you for taking the time to read our pages. We hope you stop by again to follow our story.
I’ve been reading some of your blog entries and like very much what you are doing. I got to your blog via GoY and am glad I did.
I have never done any gardening and will mostly be growing flowers, plants, salad veg. and herbs in our garden space which we are just beginning to develop.
I will be following your 2011 garden with interest.
Hi Jacquie,
Thank you for taking the time to read our blog and leave a comment. This year, we hope to post more frequently than previous years and your feedback is greatly appreciated.
Good luck with your garden this year. We’d recommend spinach for your salad veg since we’ve found it to be easy to grow and very versatile. There a few posts and recipes on this site for this crop. We’re a huge fan of edible flowers too, since these can brighten up a salad and turn it into something extra special. Nasturtiums are easy to grow and have a delicate peppery taste. You can also pickle to seeds (known as capers) which are great around Christmas-time. This year we’re hoping the chives will bring an abundance of edible flowers to our table. This is a very easy herb to grow from seed.
I stumbled across your blog via your facebook page as I was updating mine. Brilliant blog, it’s great to ‘meet’ others doing the same thing. Have a fantastic growing year, I will pop back again to read how your doing.
Hi Karen, we’ve been reading your blog for a while and find it very inspiring, especially the posts about the hens since we’ll hopefully adopt a few for our garden one day. We’re itching to get going with the garden this year. The sun is shining here in the Midlands and we plan to take a few hours off work later to spend some time outdoors.
I jusy wanted to give you a heads up, so you don’t mistakenly think you lost a suscriber. Im phasing out this email address so I unsuscribed in order to resuscribe using a different email. Cheers
Hi, Sara… You’re so thoughtful, thank you.