Well, hello! Thanks for taking the time to visit my site as it takes its first tentative steps in the world. You probably guessed it from the name but I might as well make it really clear: this is a site about vegetables. It's all dedicated to growing, buying, cooking and eating the delicious little blighters.

For at least a couple of years I've had this site brewing in the back of my head. I was standing in my local greengrocer's one late summer afternoon mesmerised by the teetering piles of plump aubergines and peppers and ripe-to-bursting tomatoes and I just wanted to jump up and down and shout out "wow, aren't veg brilliant!?". I didn't of course. But I did realise that I needed to find a way to share my enthusiasm for vegetables that didn't result in embarrassing public outbursts or boring my partner to death.

What's finally got me off my backside with this project is recently moving to the country, acquiring a garden and starting a vegetable patch. I'm not much of a gardener so this is quite a challenge for me. I've got a lot to learn, so I thought it would be quite interesting to document my first fumbling forays. Maybe I'll give you a few laughs at my ineptitude, and maybe you'll give me some sage advice in return. Or perhaps you are just setting out on your own horticultural adventure and we can learn from each others' mistakes.

Hey, you at the back there! Stop snoring! It's alright, I'm not just going to write about gardening. You can ignore those bits if you want to. There will be culinary experimentation and vegetables of the month and a recipe database and book and restaurant reviews. I'll be jotting things down in the journal as I go along then refining the best stuff for other bits of the site. There may be the odd article about vegetarianism or food politics, for what is a blog without a dash of controversy? But for the most part the veg will be the stars of the show.

The veg patch: stripping turf in the spring (facing west)

I tried to get the vegetable patch started in the spring. When we moved in last November, I had hoped to run it along the fence at the north of the garden, as this area gets the most sun. When I started prodding around, though, I found that the soil was only a few inches thick. It looked like I would have to buy some soil to make raised beds, which we couldn't afford at that time. I assumed that the soil would be about the same depth over the entire garden but in the spring I decided to have a poke around and found an area where it was deeper, which meant I could start growing my veggies after all. The only problem is that this area is a little close to some trees and the house so it won't get sunshine all day, but I reckon it's worth having a go.

I read that if you want to start a vegetable bed in the spring, you should take the turf off and put it aside to rot into compost which can be used the following year. I found the turf-stripping really hard going and didn't manage to get the bed ready in time for spring planting. I pretty much ignored it for most of the summer but I've just started digging again. Now I don't need to strip the turf off. It can be turned into the soil to rot as I'm not aiming to get anything planted this year. I am giving it a good double dig then leaving it for the winter so the earth is broken up even more by the frost before I stick anything in it.

The method I'm using is as follows: divide the area into small rectangles, dig a spade's depth of earth out of each rectangle and turn it turf-side down into the previously dug-out rectangle then fork over the exposed soil beneath. I'm a bit concerned that the soil beneath that first spade's depth is quite stony and I can't get my fork very far into it. I seem to be able to dig a bit deeper as I work my way westwards, though, so hopefully only one end of the patch will end up not being properly double dug.

Saturday was the Autumn Food Fair at Loch Arthur, near Dumfries. Loch Arthur is a community where people with learning disabilities and mental health problems live and work alongside others on an organic farm. They sell organic meat, cheese and veg at their farm shop and apparently visitors to the creamery can see cheese-making in action. Just follow that link up there if you want to know more.

I wish I had taken my camera so I could show you the fine specimen of a veg stall they had there. It really brought home just how artificial our identikit supermarket vegetables are. There were crates of lovely mucky carrots and potatoes, bushy leeks and beetroots as big as a baby's head. As big as a five year old's head, even. There were gnarly, rooty swedes bigger than anybody's head. I bought carrots, leeks, onions, broccoli, a savoy cabbage, a rather large beetroot and some jerusalem artichokes. I have never eaten jerusalem artichokes before so you can expect to see a report on my experimentation with that vegetable soon. I thought I would be paying through the nose for this organic haul, but the bill was certainly no larger than I would expect at my usual greengrocer's, perhaps less.

Loch Arthur is probably best known for its dairy products, which are available throughout Dumfries and Galloway. I am not sure whether they are available elsewhere in the UK but I would recommend snapping up some of their cheese if you see it. I believe I have seen it on sale in Glasgow. While not technically a vegetable, all Loch Arthur cheese is made with vegetarian rennet so I think it merits a mention. With artisan cheese it can be difficult to tell whether or not it's suitable for vegetarians and you can usually assume it isn't, so this is great news. We took home a large chunk of wonderfully sock-flavoured mature farmhouse cheese, some super creamy cream cheese with rocket, a piece of Criffel, the stronger-flavoured of two traditional washed-rind cheeses made at Loch Arthur, and a pot of dense yellow organic yoghurt, which bears no resemblance to any yoghurt I've eaten.

The Carnivore and I have agreed to make Loch Arthur a regular part of our diet. True, it will mean travelling a little further for our shopping, on top of the twenty miles we already have to go to get to the supermarket. But we will be getting our veg straight from the source. The vegetables we would otherwise buy from the supermarket or greengrocers have travelled much further than the extra few miles we're talking about here. Plus, we don't normally stretch to organic veg in the supermarket as it is significantly more expensive than non-organic, whereas there is no middle man skimming off the profits from Loch Arthur's produce. So I think on balance a few more miles in the car should not weigh too heavy on my conscience.