growing my own food/getting rid of weeds/best timber.

duckcfc

When spring comes around it will be my first year growing my own veg and hoping to get a few tips from you lot here on boards. I have a lovely place for it right at the side of my house, in fact I have a few nice place but thought I'd pick the sloping hill seeing as I'll be building a garage on the other spot and the rest is for a lawn.

The site i have chosen is a sloping hill thats west facing. I'm going to build in some raised beds with old untreated timber I have lying about. The hill is about 50m long by 5m wide (with slope)
I can get my hands on some free railway sleepers but have been advised not to use these as they are treated with unwanted chemicals if one is growing near them then its a no-no.

Im wanting to know should I be doing anything now to have it prepared for spring as in getting rid of weeds/getting in better soil.

How much are seeds and what's best growing in our Irish climate and esp here on the west coast.

Anyother tips you can think off, please add.

vistafinder

Ya keep away from the sleepers.

Seeds are fairly cheap any local hardware shop and garden centre will have them.

The list is long of what you can grow all the usuals onions,lettuce,cabbage,beetroot potatoes are all fairly easy to grow.

Carrots and parsnips need deep earth and if you can dig the full lenght of a garden fork and remove any big stones they should be no problem. No fresh manure for the carrots.

Peas need some sort of support to grow on.

At the moment you can do a lot or a little. If you can get your hands on at least a year old farm manure you could try the no dig method. lots of info out there about it.

Or you could cut any grass and pull the weeds build your frames then cover the ground with a light excluding plastic or something similar for a few months to kill off any grass and weeds and do the usual way of turning over the soil with manure mixed in next spring time.

What condition do you think the soil is in?

macraignil

I started a new vegetable patch a few years back on a west facing slope. I found that it is a bit exposed when we get stormy weather and some more delicate vegetables have not been much success. I'm not sure about your new garden but in my case I should have put in more trees on the west side of the patch when I was starting to grow vegetables there. The winter is a good time for planting trees and shrubs that might offer more shelter to delicate vegetables. I have found bramley apple trees have established well and I have got good fruit crops from a row of black currants and goose berry that I planted to give some shelter to my vegetable plot. Since I did not plant trees and fruit bushes straight away I think my vegetable plot is still a few years away from being good to grow delicate vegetables. I hope your vegetable patch is less exposed but I just wanted to mention that its good to consider perenial fruit bushes and trees at the start of a new garden project.

I also found the soil on a slope drys out much faster than the last vegetable plot I had which was almost flat. Some crops do not like this and have gone to seed sooner than I expected. It might be worth considering irrigation of your vegetable plot. Barrels can be used to collect rain water from roof guttering and hose pipes are not very expensive if you have an outside tap. I have found drip feeding pipe very usefull but it is better to have this set in place before planting as moving hose and irrigation pipe can damage small plants.