The snow has finally melted in my garden. It has revealed seven by five metres of uneven, scuffed lawn, a bare border, an empty patio, and a small, shabby greenhouse with broken panes of glass. The snowfall made the garden a perfect white, blank canvas.

My challenge this year is to start at the beginning with this canvas. I am at the very beginning of gardening. I am renting this house until I get married in September, so my aim is to grow vegetables that I can harvest before then, or use planters that I can transport to my new place. I would like to leave the garden looking prettier than it does now (not too difficult), but can’t afford to invest too many pennies on plants that I can’t take with me.

I have done plenty of writing about vegetables, thinking about them, and goodness knows how much eating them. But after leaving student-dom in September, blinking in the bright light of the real world, this is my real first opportunity to grow them. I would love to have my own flower garden one day. But by starting to grow vegetables I will finally be practising what I preach: fresh, in season, local, organic, 5-a-day, and all those other buzzwords that roll off the tongue so easily nowadays. Time to kick my good intentions into gear.

I suppose I am at the same stage as Isabel was with her garden about year and half ago, and if I have achieved half as much as her with my plot in the next year and a half, I will be so proud my socks will probably fall clean off.

My posts will probably strike a different note to the rest of the Fennel and Fern family bloggers; I will be the enthusiastic, inexperienced young Labrador – eager to please, yet easily distracted and liable to roll in the mud. And I warn you now, I may well head off on tangents about soup. After all, vegetables fulfil both of William Morris’ criteria for a ‘good’ possession: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” The thought of producing my own beautiful, useful vegetables makes me very happy.

I shall leave it at that. I am off to ‘thickly mulch’, as Isabel advises with such authority in her January job list. Actually, it’s dark and cold, so I’m not going to thickly mulch right this minute. But thickly mulching is such a brilliant phrase that I’m making the most of it. I’ll definitely thickly mulch tomorrow.

Do you have any tips for Sarah as she starts growing her own vegetables for the first time?