Start with a Sun Map, Not a Shopping List

Before you buy a single pot, spend a day watching your courtyard. Tiny spaces are deceptive: the corner that looks bright at breakfast may be in deep shade by two o'clock, while a south-facing brick wall can hold enough warmth to ripen tomatoes, chillies and even a small fig. Note where the sun lands at 9am, midday and 5pm, and check how that shifts between May and September. A thermometer left on the paving for an afternoon will also tell you whether you are gardening in a suntrap or a wind tunnel.

Once you know your light, divide the space into zones. Hot, sheltered walls suit Mediterranean herbs, tomatoes and peppers. Cooler, north-facing corners are made for salad leaves, mint, parsley and chard. Any spot that only catches a couple of hours of sun is best given to leafy crops rather than fruiting ones, which will sulk and crop poorly.

Send Your Garden Up the Walls and Fences

Walls, fences and railings are the largest untapped growing surface in any courtyard. A two-metre stretch of fence can hold as much compost as a decent raised bed, provided you fix things properly. The golden rule is simple: attach to solid timber posts or masonry, never to a flimsy fence panel, which will flex, rot and eventually give way under the weight of wet compost.

• Wall pockets and fabric planters are ideal for herbs, strawberries and salad. Group three or four on a sunny wall and water them slowly, as they dry out fast.
• Troughs on brackets give you a proper depth of compost. A 90cm trough holds around 20 litres, which can weigh 25kg when soaked, so use masonry anchors or bolt into fence posts.
• Guttering and drainpipe towers are cheap, light and brilliant for cut-and-come-again salad, rocket and spring onions. Drill drainage holes every 20cm along the base.
• Hanging baskets work far better in a large size. Choose 35cm or wider, line with a water-retaining liner and hang on a bracket fixed into brick rather than a fence.

Keep a watering can within easy reach and fit drip trays or saucers beneath everything. Your neighbours below the wall will thank you.

Stack and Tier Your Pots

Height is your friend. A single row of pots on paving wastes the vertical space above it, so build in layers. Put the tallest pots at the back against a wall or on the north side, then step down through medium pots to small ones at the front. Nothing gets shaded out and the whole arrangement looks deliberate rather than cluttered.

Strawberry towers, tiered herb planters and simple stacks of terracotta pots threaded onto a sturdy cane all earn their footprint. A two-tier staging bench is another good investment: sun-lovers on top, shade-tolerant salad and mint underneath. Stand every pot on feet so water drains freely and slugs have less cover, and group pots closely together, which creates a humid microclimate and cuts your watering by a surprising amount.

Train Climbers up Lightweight Trellis

You do not need heavy timber. Expanding willow or plastic trellis, tensioned galvanised wires and simple netting will all carry a serious crop without looking bulky. Run horizontal wires every 30cm between vine eyes fixed into mortar joints or brick, tensioning them properly with a turnbuckle so they do not sag.

Climbing French beans, mangetout, cucumbers and cordon tomatoes are the stars here, grown up canes, string or netting. Add sweet peas or climbing nasturtiums for colour and pollinators, and let a jasmine or a small clematis soften the wall behind. Be careful in a courtyard, though: these spaces funnel wind, and a fully clothed trellis acts like a sail. Leave gaps between plantings so air can pass through, and check fixings after every gale.

Choose Crops That Repay a Small Footprint

In a courtyard, every pot has to justify itself. These earn their space reliably:

• Cut-and-come-again salad – sow little and often in guttering or shallow troughs and harvest with scissors. Fast, productive and expensive to buy.
• Herbs – basil, parsley, chives, thyme and rosemary. Grow mint in its own pot or it will take over everything.
• Mangetout and climbing beans – huge crops from a tiny patch of ground when grown upwards.
• Cherry tomatoes and chillies – one cordon tomato in a 30cm pot against a warm wall will keep you in salads all summer.
• Chard and perpetual spinach – tolerant of partial shade and happy to be picked leaf by leaf for months.
• Strawberries – perfect for towers, pockets and hanging baskets, and far sweeter than supermarket fruit.

Skip maincrop potatoes, sweetcorn and big brassicas; they demand room you simply do not have. Radishes, spring onions and rocket make good fast fillers between slower crops.

Make Watering and Feeding Effortless

More container growing means more watering, so build a system before the July heat arrives. A simple drip irrigation kit on a timer is the single best investment for a small courtyard, especially if you work away from home. Failing that, use large saucers, mulch the surface of every pot with gravel or wool pellets, and water thoroughly in the morning until it runs out of the drainage holes.

Feed as well as water. Mix slow-release granules into the compost at planting for leafy crops, then switch to a high-potash tomato feed once flowers appear. Use peat-free multipurpose compost for a single season, but choose a loam-based mix for permanent plantings such as herbs, a small fig or a shrub. Each spring, scrape off the top 5cm of compost and replace it with fresh. Do that, and a courtyard barely three metres square can keep you in salad, herbs and tomatoes from May right through to October.