Recession Gardens, Urban Farm, Allotments, Vegetable Patch, Urban gardening, call them what you will but when times get tough people instinctive resort to the earth to become more self sufficient and reduce costs from their food bill.

Getting Started

By reading this hub you are starting already, simple isn't it. The next step is to find the plot of land in which you can cultivate on, some things to watch out for are

• Drainage problems
• Excessive shade, from trees or buildings.
• Exposure to wind

The next step is preparing the land, one word of advice, Don't try to take on too much at once. The first year for any plot is hard work to get ready.

Cut all the weeds down, and start your compost heap. This is essential if you want to maintain as much goodness in the land. The next step is prepare one or two beds at a time by digging the land over and removing as much of the weeds and roots as you can. Put these on the compost heap.

Choose your crops - Begin Simple

• A good cropper is potatoes (random fact, Humans can subsist healthily on a just diet of potatoes and milk)
• Choose a selection of the easier and more resistant vegetables - peas, broad and French beans, beetroot, parsnips, onion and shallot sets, and leeks.

Growing Healthy Soil

Now to learn about the idea of crop rotation, typically you break the land into blocks each hosting plants of one family. Growing the same crop in the same area year after year, causes two problems

• an ideal environment in which the pests and diseases for that vegetable will thrive. Continuous planting of one crop type in the same area over many years promotes the buildup of disease agents in the soil
• The crop makes the same demands on the same specific nutrients it needs, so the yield decreases.

Rotate plants to different areas of the garden to help reduce the losses due to soil-borne disease. Avoid successive planting within crop types such as crucifers (cabbage, broccoli, turnip, radish, etc.), cucurbits (melon, cucumber, squash, etc.), solanaceous (tomato, eggplant, potato, pepper), grasses (sweet corn, cover crops such as rye), legumes (bean, pea), and root crops (carrot, beet, onion).

Growing Healthy Plants

This next section we will concern ourselves about maintaining healthy plants, so taking knowledge from the saying "From a small acorn, a mighty oak tree grows" We gain the understanding that it might not be the best idea planting acorns in the middle of our vegetable patch. Therefore, when planting seeds we need to maintain the correct spacing for plants otherwise too close, they compete with each other for nutrients and light. Additionally with high humidity and moisture ensures the ideal environment development of diseases. Allowing enough room for plants to grow and space for air to circulate around mature plants reduces the humidity and promotes rapid drying of plant surfaces. This in turn helps reduce disease incidence.

In order for the plants to remain healthy, like us they need sunlight, water and food. The most essential three nutrients for the plants are

• Nitrogen (N) – this encourages goof leafy growth
• Phosphorus (P) – this is needed for root growth
• Potassium (K) – this ensures healthy fruits and flowers

Now we are getting to the dreaded W word (weeds). These compete with your vegetable plants for light, nutrients and water. They also act as ideal hosts to pests which eat, weaken your plants, as well as carry viruses. For example, the cucumber mosaic virus leads to the mottling of leaves and reduced vitality of the plant is spread by greenfly.To tackle pests, there are two main approaches, chemical or biological warfare. For example on the biological warfare, the larvae of the ladybird is a killer machine toward aphids. In the case of slugs with no adverse effect on other types of animal is the microscopic nematode or eelwom that is watered into the soil. The nematodes  enter slugs' bodies and infect them with bacteria that cause a fatal disease.

On the finaly note about growing your own fruit and vegetables is that if it is good enough for the US First Lady Michelle Obama to plant an organic kitchen garden on a 1,100 sq ft patch of the south lawn to grow produce then you can on yours.