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Start with the Light You Already Have

Before you buy a single seed packet, spend a week watching your patch. Note where the sun lands at 9am and again at 4pm, and how that shifts between March and September. Most fruiting crops — tomatoes, courgettes, beans, peppers — need six hours or more of direct sun. If your space is shaded, lean towards leaves: chard, spinach, rocket and parsley will all manage on four. A south or west-facing wall is a genuine asset, holding warmth into the evening and buying you two or three extra weeks at either end of the season. Measure what you have in metres and sketch it on a sheet of A4. You will almost certainly find more usable space than you expect, especially along boundaries and above head height.

Grow Upwards, Not Outwards

Vertical growing is the single biggest yield-per-square-metre win available to a small garden. Think in layers and use the fence, the wall, the side of a shed.

• Runner beans and climbing French beans on a wigwam of eight canes, planted in a 45cm pot, will crop from July to October.
• Cordon tomatoes and cucumbers trained up strings against a warm wall give you a season's worth from a strip 30cm wide.
• Wall-mounted troughs at chest height suit herbs, cut-and-come-again salad and strawberries.
• A basic shelving unit against a shady wall holds seed trays, then later lettuce and chard.

Fix brackets into masonry or solid timber rather than hanging weight off fence panels, which bow and rot. Anything above knee height should be reachable without a ladder, so keep heavy crops low and lightweight leaves high. Hanging baskets are best reserved for tumbling tomatoes and trailing herbs — they dry out fast, so line them with old compost bags and water daily in summer.

Sow Little and Often for Repeat Crops

The commonest mistake in a small plot is sowing a whole packet at once, then drowning in a fortnight of lettuce followed by nothing. Treat the garden as a production line instead. Sow a pinch of salad leaves, rocket or spinach every two to three weeks from March to August and you will have a continuous supply rather than a glut. Radishes are ready three to four weeks from sowing, so a short row every fortnight keeps them coming. Spring onions, beetroot and turnips work the same way.

Look for cut-and-come-again varieties that regrow after harvesting, and treat chard and perpetual spinach as plants to pick leaf by leaf for months rather than crops to pull up. When a row finishes, don't leave the ground bare: drop in a quick crop of salad or a few hardy leaves. From late August, sow kale, winter purslane and land cress for picking through the colder months, and cover with a cloche or fleece once the frosts begin.

Buy Tools Once and Look After Them

Cheap tools are expensive. A forged carbon steel hoe with a wooden handle, sharpened once a month, will clear weeds in minutes and last decades. A stainless steel spade and a decent hand trowel will see you through years of container work. Beyond those you need very little: a sturdy watering can with a fine rose, a soil sieve, a sharp knife and a ball of twine. Skip the novelty gadgets.

Look after what you buy. Clean soil off blades, dry them, and wipe metal with an oily rag before hanging tools in a dry shed. Wooden handles benefit from a rub of linseed oil once a year. Second-hand tools from car boot sales are often better made than new ones, and a file will restore an edge in five minutes.

Feed the Soil, Not Just the Plants

Container compost is expensive, so stretch it. A small compost bin in a corner, fed with kitchen peelings, torn cardboard and garden waste, will give you a barrowful of crumbly material each year. Leaf mould in a black bag takes longer but costs nothing. Mulch pots and beds with a 2cm layer of compost each spring, and refresh the top third of container compost rather than replacing the lot. A bucket of comfrey or nettle leaves steeped in water for three weeks makes a free liquid feed — dilute it to the colour of weak tea before use. If you buy in manure, make sure it is well rotted before it goes anywhere near roots.

Plan the Year Before You Plant It

Sketch a rough rotation: hungry crops such as tomatoes and courgettes in the sunniest spots, leaves in the shade, and a permanent corner for herbs and strawberries. Keep a notebook of what worked and what bolted. In a small garden, a handful of well-chosen, well-tended plants will always out-perform a crowded, hopeful scatter of seeds. Aim for a steady trickle of harvests from April to November, and you will have a kitchen garden that feels far bigger than its measurements suggest.