The sequence is Equipment, Drainage, Soil Mix, Support and finally Watering.

If you do not have access to ground then you can grow vegetables and herbs in a container. As long as you have a sunny spot and are able to water the container, you will be able to harvest home grown food. Do not think that you have to use a proper pot which can be expensive. Any container that can hold moistened soil without falling apart will do. Old rubbish bins, largish paint containers, metal drums and even tyres are all good! Just check that the containers did not store poison of any sort and that they have holes in the bottom to allow the water to drain out of it.

All the materials for this project were found on site, apart from the bone meal and packets of seeds, which I bought from my local nursery. Everything else was found lying around the store room. The dropper poles had been left by a the previous owner and I would have preferred it if they were not creosoted, which is a wood preservative that is toxic to plants, animals and humans, but they have been sitting in the sun for over a year and so the creosote is pretty dry and I wore gloves when I handled them. But what I used is the following:

- An old and falling apart wine barrel, but with enough life in it for a crop or two of veggies.

- Some shade cloth that I found and which I have used to line the bottom of the container so that the holes do not block up with soil.

- A bucket of gravel which will go on top of the shade cloth to ensure good drainage. I grabbed it from the side of the road where the local municipality was doing road works but small stones, small bits of building rubble, broken crockery will also do. The whole idea is to crate a layer of chunky material between the soil and the bottom of the pot to allow water to get to the holes and drain away.

- I then filled the pot with good quality soil. Plain garden soil will do but it tends to go very hard in containers and so would suggest mixing it with some coarse sand (building sand is too fine) to improve the soils ability to drain. A good mix would be a 1/3 soil, a 1/3 course sand and a 1/3 good quality compost. Mix this well before putting it in the container. Remember if you use garden soil you will get some weeds popping up which will need to be pulled out when you can tell that they are not the veggie seeds you planted!

- I also added a big double handful of bone meal and some fertiliser I found in the store room. I only like to use organic fertilizers but if I find chemical fertilizers in the store room I will first use these up as I feel it is a waste to chuck them out where they will just go to the land fill. Rather use these up in a responsible way and then move to the organic ones. I use a double handful in big pots, a single handful in a medium sized pot and a table spoon in a small pot.

- I then put the poles in to the pot and tied them together to make an obelisk or teepee. You may want to take a broom handle and stamp the soil around the poles to make sure they are stable and will not fall over in a strong wind.

- I then planted three garden pea seeds around each pole (as JCW told me, one for me, one for the birds and one for the snails!) These will germinate and scramble up the pole. You will initially need to gently and loosely tie the little growing stem to the pole to get them on their way.

- I also had some parsley plants going spare and planted these around the edge of the pot.

- The whole exercise took me about an hour and with regular watering, lots of sunshine and some liquid feeding (I had some Seagrow lying around) I will be able to harvest my own peas in late spring/early summer and have lots of parsley for salads and cooking all through the winter.

- Because we are going into winter I have an old blanket in the store room which I will drape over the wooden obelisk if I think there will be a cold night with frost. I will remove the blanket each morning until the cold front has passed over.

- In summer you can plant beans in the same way and do not be scared to mix in some flowering annuals. In winter, petunias will happily spill over the side of the pot and in summer you can plant nasturtiums.

- Generally a good and thorough soaking, with water, three times a week will do. Once the plants are big their roots will fill the whole container and you may need to water every day if we have very hot weather in August and September. It is always best to water early in the day, rather than in the late afternoon or evening. This means the plants are well hydrated during the hot part of the day and are not wet during the cold nights. Even in summer I prefer to water in the early mornings as if the plants are wet at night there is a greater risk that they will pick up a fungus.

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