The past four to six weeks have been rather busy for me as I have obviously been back at work after my holiday-being summer here in Sydney means that work is really, really busy (therefore really tired at the end of the day too). I’m also in the middle of studying which takes up a lot of my time outside of work. Family, chores and general life have also still been keeping me busy too so my little garden hasn’t had much attention recently.

Some of my garden does look sorry for itself if I’m honest! I still have a bit of powdery mildew about on my tomatoes and the cabbages have a bit of something eating them too! We have been getting some tomatoes to eat though, which is good.

Over the next few weeks, as we are now in autumn, I like to sow a few seeds of the following:

• Cabbage
• Broccoli
• Brussels sprouts
• Broad beans
• Onions
• Poppies
• Cornflowers
• Sweet peas

As usual, my criteria for anything I want to grow. For food, I want things to be tasty and to be useful in many different meals as possible. If I have too much of one crop to eat fresh or cook straight away, the produce needs to be freezable, pickled or otherwise preserved so it doesn’t get wasted.

For flowers, they have to look pretty, smell nice and put a smile on my face. I also like being able to watch things like bees and butterflies do their thing in my garden so anything that comes because of the flowers is welcome.

When I have the time, there are several things that I want to look into as I am wanting to have less waste in my gardening. I want to be able to eventually have no plastic in my garden at all. This means no plastic pots, so I’ll be researching the ins and outs of alternatives to this option, ready for when my current pots need replacing. As I live in an apartment, I garden in pots exclusively, which means I use growing media that comes in plastic bags. I really want to get to the point where I don’t have to use anything that comes in a plastic bag-another thing that needs a bit of research to work out how to do this.

I also want to compare the costs associated with growing my own veg and buying it from the supermarket. This includes the cost of tools and growing media, water, fertiliser and seeds (and factor in the expected lifetime of all of these things), how much I grow of each different crop and also taste test, etc.

Another area I want to look at is how environmentally friendly gardening on a balcony is overall. It isn’t just about growing something green. Whatever I buy for my garden has an impact somewhere, from being transported long distances to being made where workers have few rights to damage being caused to the environment elsewhere-I want to reduce my impact in this way.

The main thing that I want to do is to continue to enjoy gardening well into the future. This is important to me as I do find it rather relaxing, most of the time!