The solution to our fruit problem

An exciting new development has meant that we can now hope to have a plentiful supply of fruit as well as vegetables, after previously resigning to the latter alone due to the British climate not quite being suited to growing bananas and oranges. One of the garden centres in Norwich is open late on a thursday evening so we headed over after dinner for a browse and to pick up some free pots as they have a box outside where you can recycle old pots. We saw that they had a 3 for 2 deal on all seeds so we decided to get some courgette and leek seeds to add to our collection. The third pack of seeds was the cause of our excitement...we discovered that there is a variety of melon that can be grown in the UK! Also managed to bag a stack of pots that looked hardly used from the box outside.

Matt also discovered a small nursery, called Woodgate Nusery (http://www.woodgatenursery.co.uk/) near work selling individual plants ready to be planted out into bigger pots or soil, including berries, a variety of vegetables and plenty of flowers. This is great because in the bigger garden centres we found that you could only get trays of 6-12 plants rather than individual ones, especially as Matt came home on Friday with three strawberry plants and two garlic plants!

Today we went back out to the nursery so that we could both have a look round and having done some research decided to buy a couple of blueberry plants (bluecrop and chandler) to add to our fruit collection. The man running the place was really helpful and even gave us a couple of bigger pots for free to replant the blueberries in. We also had to get some ericacious soil for them which is more acidic than normal compost. Back at the ranch we got to work replanting the blueberry, strawberry and garlic plants and sowing the melon, courgette and leeks in small individual pots. The melon and courgette are being added to the various seedlings on windowsills inside and the rest are outside. The tomato count is now up to 15 and we are starting to see some sweet pea shoots poking through the compost so along with the fruit plants our garden should be looking colourful in no time.

Finally, we have decided to keep track of seed prices, dates of sowing, the first shoots appearing and planting out, and the yields we get so that we can calculate the costs compared with buying from a supermarket or greengrocers.