Hello fellow veggie growers

Hi,
I am very new to this so bear with me while I get to grips with it :-) Basically, I am a soon-to-be mum who has a few months of peace and quiet left in her life and is enjoying the Australian spring time, putting some TLC into our little courtyard and hoping to get some good organic crops in the process. We have a large garden but that is the playgroud of our 2 very active dogs (a kelpie cross and a saluki cross) so there's no way anything would survive out there. Next to that though is a gated courtyard (in which I have built an outdoor cat run for our 3 cats but the rest is free!...getting to understand the vet side of me, huh?)
Anyway, the courtyard was bare when we moved in a year ago, just a few border plants which were getting pretty much ignored. I LOVE citrus trees and was given a lemon tree as a housewarming gift so this instantly went into a large pot in the courtyard...I couldn't bear to plant my tree in the ground in case we move house (I am a bit of a nomad) so all my precious trees go into pots. So, it started with a eureka lemon tree a year ago...the big pots now include a tangelo tree, tahitian lime, goldmine nectarine, pomegranate, stella cherry (self pollinating), primetime plum (needs cross-pollinator) and santa rosa plum (self pollinating).
This year, we went back to the UK for a close friend's wedding and to visit family (my husband and I are both from the UK, we moved to Australia just 3 years ago), and I was inspired by my friend's tiny vegetable garden which was providing garlic, chillies and potatoes for them. So when we got back and I found myself newly jobless and bored for 9 months (I am a very 'busy' person and was working in a single vet clinic when I happily found I was pregnant and so had to quit that job due to radiation/anaesthetic etc risks) I put my energy into clearing the tiny border flower beds in the courtyard and starting a veggie garden (I'll get some photos on soon, but the whole courtyard space is only about 3mx4m and the beds are only about 30cm deep and only along 2 egdes).

Planted so far: beetroot, potatoes (growing in a dustbin - I'll post how to do this soon), snowpeas, passionfruit, raspberries, blackberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants, gooseberries, rhubarb, rocket lettuce, iceberg lettuce, herbs (rosemary, basil & coriander- mainly as insect deterents), garlic, red onions, chillies, and carrots.

Seedlings getting ready to go outside: roma and cherry tomatoes, red/green and multicoloured capsicum, cucumber, watermelon. There were more lettuce seedlings but they got too hot and leggy and failed :-(

Problems so far that have needed an organic hand instead of chemicals: aphids (they completely attacked and destroyed this year's nectarine crop while I was away for a weekend!), ants, slugs and snails.

So, I'll post soon about the organic pest control & companion planting used so far and the techniques I've found useful (either by trial and error or by hours and hours of internet research) out there. Hopefully it'll be of some use/interest to some fellow organic gardeners out there - it really does pay to go organic and homegrown, not just for the pleasure and money savings, but the taste of everything you grow is a million times better than anything form the supermarket!