As anyone who pays attention to my occasional ramblings around here will know, Sam and I moved house four months ago to an older housing estate closer to the train line, moving from a two-bed terrace with a tiny (4m x 8m) garden to a three-bed semi-detached house with a much larger (15m x 8m) back garden and a front garden about the size of our old garden.

Version 1.0 (version 0.0 was a couple of window boxes and containers in the basement well of the city centre flat we  lived in previously) was crammed full of trees, shrubs and plants and a pond. The main mistake we made there was not leaving enough circulation space to move around in and to get to the plants, with the result that harvesting crops became difficult enough to be discouraging.

When we moved here, the back garden looked like this: a shed (with electrical power, helpfully), a patio in the south facing corner of the garden where the evening sun shines, and a lawn with a pathetic path of small stepping stones running to the shed. There were a couple of overgrown honeysuckles, a huge clematis, a big evergreen of some kind and an out of control pyracantha that we had to beat back on our first weekend as a courtesy to our neighbours and our own sanity. We've cut all of them back hard now that they've finished flowering.

We've made some changes since moving in: our excuse for treating the gardening as a matter of urgency was that we needed to give new plants a chance to establish themselves before the summer gets too hot for them. It's also more fun than painting.

As ever, we're attempting to balance the wish to produce a reasonable amount of high-value food against wanting a practical space to enjoy and relax in.

Our list of requirements was:

• A vegetable patch where we could grow some of annual vegetables and salads.

• A pond to move our goldfish to.

• Fruit trees and bushes.

• A greenhouse to increase our propagation options and to allow us extend the growing season for food plants.  

• Pretty flowers to nourish our minds.

• A decent bit of lawn for the dogs to run in.

• Space for wildlife - which means using native trees and woodland plants as much as possible and giving small fauna somewhere to live together with the use of permaculture/forest garden influenced techniques where possible.

• Enough circulation space and decent paths so that we can easily access everything year round.

• As few plants in containers as possible: containers are hard to look after and tend to make the garden cluttered, especially when you can't help yourself adding "just one more".

• The obvious utility stuff: a compost heap big enough to recycle the garden through, rainwater collection and storage, somewhere to keep the bins.

First, where to put the vegetable patch  and the greenhouse? Both need sun and the obvious thing to do was to steal some space from the patio for the greenhouse - I've got a 1.2m x 1.8m model two third built now (I'm waiting for a replacement component damaged in transit and the glass) and the patio is 2.1m x 5m roughly  so there's loads of space for a table as well - and to place the vegetable patch in the 1.2m x 3m space between the shed and the patio which gets quite a lot of sun. The shed wall will provide support for beans and we can fit a 60cm x 1.2m raised bed, a little path and a 1.2m x 1.2m raised bed into the space. We'll build 30cm wide raised beds around the outside of the greenhouse and along the  patio: some of the winter brassicas - brussels sprouts, cabbage and kale - can go into bedding elsewhere in the garden. Currently the vegetable beds have radish, lettuce, runner beans, sweetcorn, courgettes and marigolds in them. The marigolds are there for colour, to attract insects and seem to work as sacrifices to the slug and snails that have eaten them in preference to the food plants. We don't really have enough sweetcorn growing and I'll probably have to hand fertilise them to make sure of getting a decent crop but they're expensive, generally shipped great distances and really need to be eaten fresh in order to be worthwhile.

There are pumpkins, tomatoes and grapes in containers - the tomatoes and the grapes will go in the greenhouse to ripen when it's finished and next year we'll have two 120cm x 60cm raised greenhouse beds in place watered automatically from a water butt placed outside to catch the runoff from the roof.

The more permanent plants are in a J-shaped border that curves along the east-facing wall and in front of the shed, forming a nice south facing bed at the end. We put down some cardboard, covered it in locally produced planting mix and a layer of fine bark chippings as mulch. Working on forest garden principles (more or less) we've started with a tree layer of two minature apple trees - Cox's Pippin and Ergemont Russet - and a hawthorn (which isn't doing very well and may need replacing). The honeysuckle and clematis on the wall form part of that layer and are both pretty good for wildlife.

Into the shrub layer went whitecurrants, a gooseberry, a flowering quince (which should give enough small fruit for our purposes) and two yellow autumn raspberry plants (which have been fruiting for two months now).

Below that layer are two rhubarb plants and some land cress.

Since we started a bit late this season we have assorted bedding plants as ground cover at the moment. We'll put in a mix of bulbs, suitable forest style ground cover and any more small perenniel edibles I think I'll get away with. We'll poke the odd annual and bedding plant in to fill in gaps.

At the back of the bed is a bamboo fence that beans and peas are happily running up - it'll take them above the height of the shrub layer and the trees should be open enough to give them sufficient light.

The matching right-hand space, in front of the patio, has an alpine garden surrounding the pond - Sam likes alpines - with a blueberry in a tub, a greengage along the wall and lavender, thyme and rosemary planted along the edge of the patio. My small bog garden is in the corner behind the pond feasting on whatever insects it can find.

The rest of the right-hand wall has a flowering quince and a flower bed dominated by pansies and snapdragons - which are near enough to native and naturalise happily. There's a blackberry in the corner beside the compost heap to turn the run-off from the heap into fruit - its canes should run most of the ten foot along the wall once it settles in.

There are two 180cm x 60cm raised beds built on the huge patio outside the back of the house that house some flowers and some crops: I'm experimenting with growing the annuals according to the ideas of Square Foot Gardening where you mark your annual beds into 30cm x 30cm squares and plant single crops into those spaces. I think the extra constraints will simplify the planting decisions required and make it less work to keep things going. I need to work out plant guilds to go into squares though - mixes of plants that work together to help each other grow. A salad guild would be nice, and there are obvious possibilities for mixing dwarf peas in with some of the other crops. The vegetable patch will be arranged this way next season as will the greenhouse beds and those around the greenhouse. Thoughts? How's your garden doing this year?