Grow your first vegetable bed

If you have a sunny patch of ground or a raised bed and want to grow your own food, this course walks you through everything from first principles to a producing vegetable garden. You start by learning what vegetable farming actually is, how it grew out of horticulture and cultivation, and how older methods like the three sisters method connect to newer ones such as raised beds, cultivation under glass and hydroponic farming. You'll also see the different ways growers sell what they grow, from market gardens and farmer's markets to pick-your-own operations and wholesalers.

From there, the course moves into planning your own garden. You'll work out your list of priorities before you start, think about whether you're growing a hobby garden for produce, an herb garden, or a flower and cutting garden for entertaining.

A major part of the course is building and keeping healthy soil using no dig methods, inspired by organic market gardening practice. You'll learn why digging and hoeing are kept to a minimum, how crop rotation, weeding, mulch and manure fit in, and how compost and humus support soil life, including arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and the glomalin they produce.

You'll then learn how to start and support your plants: working with loam and silt-loam soils, thinning seedlings, using preculture to get a head start, and understanding germination and light freezing. The course covers feeding needs, like recognising a moderate feeder that doesn't need fresh manure, and root growth, including taproots and branching. You'll learn to build supports for climbing plants, including:

• Trellis netting and mesh sizes for different vegetable families
• Horizontal tutoring and raffia systems for cucurbits, solanaceae and legumes
• Net fastening, intermediate supports and tension string or twine for a vegetable trellis
• Large mesh tutoring nets laid horizontally for plants like tomatoes

You'll also learn to manage problems without sprays, using cover crops and mulching to reduce issues like powdery mildew.

Once the basics are covered, the course goes deeper with two full growing projects. First, you'll grow salsify, also called the oyster plant or goatsbeard, learning its botany from bracts and ligules to ray flowers, its biennial life cycle and vegetative parts, cultivars like Mammoth Sandwich Island bred for bolt resistance, how to store roots in clamps, and how to deal with white rust and chlorotic spotting. You'll even learn how baking soda softens a tough root and how flowering shoots can be eaten like asparagus.

Second, you'll explore mushroom growing as a garden crop, covering mushroom beds, substrates, mycelium, ventilation, hydration levels, temperature control and thermostats, so you can put together a small growing setup of your own.

By the end, you'll be able to build fertile soil, plan and sow a bed for the season, water, feed and manage pests without chemical sprays, and keep harvesting from a bed you understand from the ground up.