Gardening

Hi V. I am planting pumpkins. I am a fair weather gardener and am starting small. Good luck with your gardening. xx

I'd suggest doing a search on Permaculture. 

This chap has some good advice https://www.thepermaculturestudent.com/

Hiya mate

Good on you for gardening, nothing wrong with that.  Best thing for you, being outside, fresh air and exercise, grow your own food, organic, etc....  Keeps you grounded, good for autism...

Never give up buddy.  Work the soil.  Read about it, see what it needs to improve it.  Maybe buy a small petrol cultivator when you can afford it.  Turn the soil over.  Keep working it.  Add some well rotted manure, make friends with the local horse yards!

Plus...look into raised beds.  Amazing what you can grow just in a small square raised bed.  There is an excellent book on Amazon...

Veg in One Bed New Edition: How to Grow an Abundance of Food in One Raised Bed, Month by Month
Richards, Huw

Yeah, so good for you, having plans, looking forward in life.  You can do whatever you set your mind to.

Good luck

Strawberries are easy to grow, you can do them in a window box, just buy 3 or 4 and some potting compost, plant them, water them and put them in a sunny place and don't forget to water them and after about a month when the nutrients in the compost are used up, give them a liquid feed with something like liquid seaweed every week with their normal water and you should be fine.

You could grow yourself some pizza herbs, get a large pot or tub, some horticultural grit, (it needs to be clean) and some compost, a thyme plant, a basil plant and an oregano or marjoram plant. Put some crocks, (bits of old broken pots crockery etc) in the bottom of the pot to stop the soil falling out and keep the drainaige holes open. Mix up the compost in a ratio of three scoops of compost to one scoop of grit, fill the pot to the level of the bottom of the pots the plants come in, remove the plants from the pots they come in and place them on the compost in your bigger pot, it dosen't matter if they're a bit squeezed, and fill in around the edges and middle of the pot press it down so as the new compost isn't loose as you dont' want air pockets, put another scoop of gravel around the plants and give them a good water, put in a sunny place and water every few days. Putting a layer of gravel on top of the compost, around the plants will help keep them clean from being splashed with soil when raining or watering and help deter slugs as well as looking nice.

I find that mowing an area remorselessly for a couple of years means that only grass tends to survive & thrive.

In our garden when it's getting a bit threadbare looking, I let an area that has the best grass grow to seed, then I collect a bag of seed and sprinkle it where it's most needed. I tend to start my mowing late so that the bluebells and other spring flowers have a bit of a chance to do their thing, so my first mow is LONG grass and therefore I also needed a strimmer both to do the edges and also to hack down the long stuff, before first mow.

Strimmers and mowers do require a fair bit of faffing about with TBF, and it really does NOT HURT to learn a bit about the infernal combustion engine, if you want to run them cheaply and reliably. 

Today I learned (from you tube) why my strimmer line keeps breaking ridiculously easily and that strimmer line can dry out and become brittle in storage (who knew that? It's plastic!) and that soaking it for a period (Unspecified in the video but one commeneter said he did four days.) I have such a box of line (in a remote location) and will be testing that out later next week when I get it back here. I also learned the correct way to tilt a rotary mower for cleaning the bottom so as the fuel and oil don't run out.

I wil confess I have very little clue, and even may be misadvising you in my ignorance, but what I do does seem to work well, for making an area of nice lively grass. 

Next up, I will be attempting to grow some food... 

There's lot of books in libraries, there magazines like Kitchen Garden, there are lots of schemes that help people with autism and other problems learn how to garden. Does you local college have a horticulture course? Are there any gardens you volunteer at, like national trust or something?