I have finally managed to get a plan put together for autumn and winter. I will be growing only veg at this point, apart from the flowers that I have already started growing. I do have limited space unfortunately, so I have to be quite careful about numbers of plants on my patio area. Thankfully, I am on the ground floor so I have more space and the weight of my pots being limited by the abilities of a balcony to support the weight!

The veg that I will be sowing this year are as follows:

• Onions-‘Australian Brown’, ‘Bartletta’, ‘Cream Gold’, ‘Red Marksman’ and, of course, more spring onions
• Brussels sprouts-‘Red Rubine’ and ‘Long Island’
• Cauliflower
• Peas ‘Greenfeast’
• Broad beans-‘Aquadulchce’ and ‘Crimson Flowered’

For the Brussels sprouts, I will only be doing one more sowing of seeds as I have already got up to six of these plants on the go, with this third sowing just to extend the season a bit longer. For the peas and beans, I’ll be sowing fewer plants at a time but in three or four different sowing sessions, so that we can have a longer cropping period and avoid a sudden deluge of peas and beans that we don’t have much time to process. With both myself and my husband working either full time or close to full time and studying, we don’t have a lot of time to do things like preserving, pickling or anything like that, no matter how much I’d like to learn how to do so! With my onions and cauliflower, I’ll be doing a similar thing really. Little and often is the way to go.

I am looking forward to getting out in my garden a bit more frequently over the autumn and winter. I will have slightly more time than I do now, as my exams are next week, leaving me with only one module to complete in my studies before they are completely finished. I will start my autumn sowing in the first weekend of March and go from there.