I don't even know how to hoe.

Lettuce begin!  We're starting out, there aren't even any seeds in the ground yet and I have NO IDEA what I'm doing.  This afternoon, while Jemima was having a 30 minute nap, I donned my wellies and gardening gloves, strapped the baby monitor to my waist and headed to the deepest, darkest depths of my garden.  In that time I dodged the thousands of dog poo land mines, moved the compost bin so we can start again with it, turned over a 5x5' piece of mud (to me, it's still mud, I currently don't know the difference between mud, soil, pete and compost) and hoed the turned over "mud".   Well, when I say I hoed the mud, I kind of stabbed at the big chunks to break them up, in a Hitchcock shower scene type of way.  How the blinkin' stinkin' do you hoe?

So first things first, the compost bin.  What do I add?  Do I need to start it off with a load of newspaper?  sand?  egg shells?  reindeer faeces? or just go ahead and add my vegetable-based kitchen waste?  I'm pretty sure we shouldn't add too much grass cuttings (when we start cutting the grass again) and no cooked foods (that's where I went wrong last time).  I'm going to research this funny little peelings-into-fertiliser phenomenon now, but if you have any top composting tips please do comment below.

I've heard the phrase "well drained soil" banded around a lot.  Let me tell you that this mud is not well drained soil.  But it's January.  Is it okay that it's quite wet?  I mean everything is quite wet at the moment, isn't it?  I do know that you need to know your acids from your alkalis to produce successful crops, but I've just learnt that it's acids and 'alkalis' and not 'alkalines' - I clearly have a very large mountain of knowledge to climb.  I'm going to pop to the garden centre to get a testing kit tomorrow (I assume mud testing kits exist?!) then we can decide what to plant.  A couple of grow bags would be handy too I think then we can start with some conservatory seeding trays.

Work in progress ...

Happy Thursday!