Today being the first day of the new year, we sat down with the seed catalogues and planned what we’d plant in 2008.

We settled on carrots, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, beetroot, beans (French, runner and Borlotto), globe artichokes, strawberries, raspberries, chillies, sweetcorn and squash. As I thought we would, we’ve ruled out sprouts and broccoli for taking up too much space. We’ll be carrying over the olive tree from last year, and will grow herbs on the kitchen windowsills again.

So why those choices?

Well, the carrots are useful, and can be planted later this month to give us a head start on this year’s crop. A second batch can then be put in around May for an almost uninterrupted supply until well into autumn.

The strawberries are there because we can’t believe that we aren’t able to improve on last year’s lot of 24 fruits, and the raspberries because (a) they’re delicious and (b) they can be grown in pots on the patio.

The chillies look good, the squash tastes good (if it grows), the beans and tomatoes crop heavily and the globe artichokes will look great along a sunny wall interspersed with sunflowers.

Looking at it all logically, though, very little of it is actually going in the plot. We’re going to do the carrots in pots so that we can mix the soil with sand for better drainage. The tomatoes, olive and peppers will live in the greenhouse, and the chillies, raspberries and strawberries will live on the patio. The corn will be along one of the borders and we’ll probably use bags again for the potatoes.

So the plot will be home to what we hope will be a bumper crop of beans, a more successful stab at squash than we had last year and enough beetroot for pickling, boiling, freezing and baking into cakes. Everything will have a lot more room to breathe, and should be more productive with it.

Well, that’s the idea. Whether or not it happens remains to be seen.

Either way, we didn’t get into planting up the plot until the summer in 2007, so this year around we have a growing season twice as long. We plan to make use of it to the full.