Starting a Vegetable Garden

Hey everyone !

I feel like the food shortage in supermarkets at the moment has triggered the doomsday prepper in me so I’ve decided to start growing veg. Having fresh produce in my garden sounds like a good idea, hopefully it’ll force me to eat more vegetables and maybe even have enough to share with friends. It’s also a great way to change my day, since I don’t have much reason to spend time in the garden at the moment as most of my projects involve doing stuff inside.

I’m starting off with bell peppers and french beans today since I love both of them and apparently they’re fairly easy to grow.

My dad’s working on some chilli plants (see pic below) but I don’t like spicy food that much so they won’t be that useful to me.

The only things you need for this are; compost, seeds, and little pots. As the plants grow, they’ll eventually need to be transferred into bigger pots, but its easier to keep them warm and watered in smaller pots so I’m starting off with these.

I ordered my seeds from King Seeds, they were fairly cheap and arrived quickly. I feel like ordering directly from specialised seed and plant companies is a little more reliable than ordering from somewhere like amazon, where the quality of the seeds can vary a lot. King seeds have a bunch of different types of seed, feel free to pick something different like carrots, tomatoes or courgette if you like.

This seed compost is just a basic one that was ordered online. It works for my dad’s chillis so hopefully it should be fine for my beans and peppers.

I started off by filling the smaller pots with some wet compost for the peppers. I filled them to about 2/3rds full, and then placed a seed in each. Next, I covered each seed with about 1cm of compost. Be careful not to bury these seeds too deep, otherwise the seedlings will have a tough time reaching the surface when they sprout, and won’t be able to get enough sunlight.

For the french beans, I went with larger pots because these need to be buried 5cm deep and need more space to grow. The seeds look a little bit like tictacs. I used the same compost, filling each pot a little first and then placing a seed in and filling up with a further 5cm of compost.

I left all my seeds in a warm sunny place indoors. Once these seeds have germinated, they should grow into seedlings which can be transplanted to larger pots outside. For the moment it’s a little too cold to plant the seeds directly outside, but if you’re planting in late April or May then it’s fine to start outside straight away.

I also planted some bean seeds in some slightly bigger individual round pots (see below) just to experiment and see if they work better.

I’ll check back in next week or the week after to let you know if any of my seeds germinate successfully. I’m a total beginner at this and I really don’t know how to maintain temperature or make sure my seeds get enough water and light so it’s possible that zero seeds will actually be successful. I also have my Rocket seeds to plant once I find suitable tray ! So stay tuned gang.