A few friends of mine have liked some of the things I have created in my garden, here are a few practical ideas to get your garden ticking along nicely whether you want to plant vegetables or flowers these few ideas have helped my garden work better.

Raised beds - Are a great way of ensuring that you have a decent weed free patch of ground to work in if the land that you have are about to start growing in is full of rubble and weeds. How I would start the bed would be to place plastic sheeting along its base to stop weeds coming up through into your beautiful new plants (I would ensure that you spike holes into the plastic to allow for drainage). Then I would lay cardboard over the top of this to ensure that the roots don't dry out follow this with some weed free soil use a coarse garden sieve to take out bits of weed and then finally use some top soil mixed with a decent amount of compost.

Pots - If you don't have a lot of space use differing heights of pots to give you space ready for your vegetables, herbs or flowers. Pots are brilliant because each one has weed free compost and can be moved around reasonable easily depending on weight into the sunshine. It seems to have become quite fashionable to use walls to hang pots from so that you are also utilising vertical space.

Old windows - If you can get your hands on some old window frames, they can quite easily be made into mini greenhouses for your developing plants to keep the warmth in, earlier in the season. Cold frames are often along the edge of a south facing building where the plants can get the most benefit from the sun, just make sure you keep them watered.

Compost bin - For all of your uncooked vegetable scraps in the kitchen and lawn trimmings find a corner in the garden where you can either set up a ready made compost bin from your garden center or make up something for it to break down in leaving you with copious amounts of lovely home made compost.

Water butt - As most of us have our water metered its worth making the most out of the free rain we get a large amount of for most of the year. Water barrels are a great way of storing water, they are normally connected to the down pipe thats comes off the roof.

Window sills - If you live in a flat you can still get the most out of using pots by getting a guard made up and placing them on the windowsill. Herbs are great for this allowing you to have fresh products at hand when you are working in the kitchen.

Sunlight - Most importantly make sure that your plants are in the sunniest area of the house (obviously use a bit of common sense here and check out what it is that the plant you are growing likes best). The south side of a house is the best for most plants so see if you can get whatever you want to grow into that side of the house. (Dont get me wrong most plants will grow wherever you put them, they normally just do better the more sunshine they get.)

I hope you will find these ideas useful, they have worked well in my garden. Its nice getting stuck into this kind of work and at the end you can sit back on a nice bit of resin weave garden furniture and enjoy your hard work.