Growing THE GOOD LIFE

If you've always wanted your own mini farm, let urban smallholder Sara Ward show you how

I love January - it's the season of fresh starts. We can forget the failures of last year and look ahead with faith that this growing year will find us gathering in bountiful harvests of all our favourite food.

Here, in our little corner of West London, we have transformed our home into an urban smallholding with fruit and nut trees, a small kitchen garden, lots of hens and three hives of honeybees. We log all the food that we harvest and delight in seeing not only how much money we've saved, but also how much we've reduced our impact on the environment. In 2023, we harvested £4,200 worth of food and saved nearly 340kg of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere compared to relying on commercial intensive farming.

My happy place is my riverside allotment. I've only had it for a few years and my initial intention was to use it for fruit trees and honeybees, but once I cleared the brambles I saw that I could designate areas for a wide range of vegetable and berry beds, too. It's all in the planning - and January is the perfect time to start!

Planning ahead

While January days can be short, there's still opportunity to plan your sowing to start the year as you mean to go on. Buying a new pack of tomato seeds, or finding that envelope of seeds saved from a special variety last year, can be the first task to get the ball rolling. At the end of the month or in February, I sow the tomato seeds, two at a time in modules of peat-free seed compost, taking care to label them with the name of the variety - as I can't tell the difference between yellow cherries and big Green Tiger tomatoes from those early leaves. Ensuring everything is well labelled helps later in the year when planting out.

A real favourite is 'Gardener's Delight', which is happy to grow outside and produces good quantities of reliable fruit just larger than a standard cherry tomato, with a lovely concentrated flavour.