Garden

Right. Enough. I’m Going to Grow Food With What I Have

April 15, 2026•Traci Cornelius

Growing our own food has been on our minds for a long time. and by we I of course mean the ‘royal we’. Food costs continue to rise, there are increasing questions about what goes into the food we buy and like so many families, we are very dependent on simply being able to walk into a supermarket and find what we need.

The dream, of course, is more land. A bigger growing space, perhaps an allotment and eventually somewhere we can produce far more for ourselves.

But those are future possibilities…

What we have right now is just a garden.

It may be small, awkwardly laid out and already doing several different jobs but it is space. And rather than waiting for the perfect circumstances, we are going to see just how much we can do with it.

Because at some point, all the thinking, worrying and researching has to turn into actually doing something.

So that is exactly what we are going to do.

We are going to start growing more of our own food, using the space we already have. (Spoiler alert… it’s not a lot!)

This is what we’re starting with

Our back garden is not exactly a market gardener’s dream!

It measures approximately 5.44m by 5.80m and that space currently has to do rather a lot.

We need somewhere for:

Bikes
Bins.
Rabbits.

We currently have a small greenhouse, decking, gravel, existing planting and we still need to be able to walk through it all without performing some sort of vegetable-themed obstacle course.

Then there are the practical things I can’t just ignore for the sake of squeezing in another raised bed.

Retaining access around the house so beds aren’t pushed up against walls, (where they could cause problems with damp or make future repairs impossible). And the side path still needs to function as a path.

So no, I can’t just cover every available centimetre with potatoes – tempting though that may be!

The Mindset Shift

One of the things that had been holding us back was the idea that growing our own food belonged to some future version of our life.

The version where we had more space.
The version where we had an allotment.
The version where we finally had land and could do it “properly”.

And I suspect that is quite an easy trap to fall into.

It can feel as though there is little point starting unless you have enough room to make a real difference. Enough beds. Enough sunlight. Enough time. Enough knowledge. Enough space to grow everything you imagine a proper kitchen garden should contain.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that waiting for all of those things was simply another way of not starting.

We may not be able to grow everything our family eats here.

We are a family of seven most of the time, six of us at home and technically eight when our eldest daughter and her partner are here, with a little half-person currently on the way too! So no, I am under absolutely no illusion that a few raised beds are suddenly going to provide every potato, onion, carrot and tomato we need.

But perhaps that was never the right measure of success.

Growing some of our food is still growing our own food.

A handful of tomatoes we do not have to buy is something.
Fresh herbs outside the back door are something.
Beans, strawberries, salad, courgettes and onions are all something.

And once I stopped looking at the garden in terms of what it could not provide, I started seeing what it could.

That feels like the real shift.

One that does not have to begin with acres of land.

It can begin with just:

One bed.
One planter.
One packet of seeds.
One small space used better than it was before.

And perhaps the most valuable thing we grow this year will not even be the food itself.

It will be the knowledge.

The confidence to know what works.

The experience of getting something wrong and trying again. The understanding that we do not have to wait for the perfect circumstances to begin building the kind of life we want.

So how much food can I actually fit in here?

Now, that is the question.

And, naturally, once I’d decided this was happening, my brain immediately moved on to approximately 4,762 different possible garden layouts

The decking already has to go… one step nearly all the way through it made sure that decision was taken out of our hands! This gives us quite a bit of space and provides me with some very much needed material to lay out the garden going forward.

The Rabbit area also really needs to move, the size though… That stays so that provides a few more sticking points!

The greenhouse although very useful and currently acting more like an extended storage area has so many holes, brittle connections… we know that needs to go too.

Then where do the bikes go?

And where, exactly, is Mark going to stand when I announce that I’ve redesigned the entire garden around vegetables?

These are all currently unanswered questions.

But for the first time I am looking at the garden less as a fixed space and more as a puzzle.

Using what we already have

I don’t want this to become an enormously expensive project either, (well, truth-be-told, it can’t be, we just do not have the budget).

Though it does bring us full circle to that homesteading mindset by using what we already have.

There are two wooden herb planters that Mark and I made last year from recycled timber when we lived at Hillcrest. I absolutely love them, partly because we made them ourselves and partly because they were already a way for us to be growing our own food.

Though I’m thinking they may actually be better in the front garden, my first investigation is just how much light the front garden gets.

There is established planting that I’m not particularly keen on wanting to keep all of it but I also don’t want to rip out everything just because it isn’t edible.

And rather than seeing the existing garden as something that needs to be cleared before I can start, I want to see how much food I can weave into it.

There is no reason an edible garden has to look like rows of vegetables.

At least, I hope there isn’t, because rows are going to be rather difficult in here.

The front garden is fair game too

And then there is the front garden.

There is already a substantial raised brick bed out there and it gets good light.

That immediately makes it valuable growing space.

There is already a few herbs and of course I still want flowers. The garden needs to be beautiful as well as useful for bees and other pollinators too.

So, flowers and food don’t have to be an either/or decision.

If I can grow herbs, edible plants and vegetables amongst pollinators and flowers, I’m all for it.

Even the rain needs a job

I’ve also started looking at things I wouldn’t previously have given much thought to.

Like downpipes.

There is one at the back of the house that could potentially feed a water butt and another at the front although I think that maybe in the neighbours garden not ours.

If we’re going to grow more, we’re definitely going to need water.

So water collection is officially going onto the plan too.

I can feel this escalating 😂

So… What am I actually trying to achieve?

Not complete self-sufficiency.

Not yet, anyway 😂.

I think that’s important because it would be very easy to make the goal so enormous that I talk myself out of beginning.

What I want is to become less dependent.

I want to know how to grow food.
I want the girls to know how to grow food.
I want us to understand seasons, soil, sowing and harvesting because we’ve actually done it, not because we’ve watched someone else doing it.
I want to know what has been used on the food we’re eating.
I’d love to be able to walk outside and pick something for dinner.
Eventually I want to learn to preserve more of what we grow too, so that growing food isn’t simply something useful for a few weeks in summer.

And yes, I would quite like our food bill to benefit from all this as well.

Starting before we’re ready

I haven’t got the perfect garden plan.

I haven’t worked out where everything is going.

And of course, as we have established I don’t have acres of land.

There are still things in this garden I don’t even know what to do with yet.

But perhaps I’ve had this slightly backwards.

Maybe you don’t become someone who knows how to grow food and then start growing it.

Maybe you start.
You make mistakes.
You put something in the wrong place.
You discover that something gets far less sunshine than you thought.
You grow far too many of one thing and nowhere near enough of another.

And somewhere in amongst all of that, you learn.

So these photographs are my starting point.