THE LAST WORD
Since then, I’ve gone on to grow award-winning carrots, cabbages, potatoes, peas, and all sorts of other crops in between (eat your heart out Calum Clunie) and whenever I give a talk or lead a workshop on growing your own produce, I start with the five most important pieces of advice for new growers.
Start with growing one or two things in pots or bags, or inter-planted in between the flowers and shrubs in the borders. Don’t go creating big veg beds or taking on an allotment until you know you are going to enjoy growing edibles. It’s far better to start small, catch the growing bug and be bursting to expand, than go to all that trouble of creating dedicated space to find that you never sow a carrot seed or onion set again! If you don’t have much garden space, you can grow edibles on a balcony pot or even in a window box.
Don’t grow Brussels sprouts and kale if no one in your house will eat it. If you go through two onions and five carrots a week, then those are great crops with which to start.
If you want to encourage children or grandchildren to learn about growing food, sow or plant crops that are relatively quick like radishes, or easy, like potatoes.
If you’ve never used herbs in cooking, there’s no point in growing the equivalent of Scarborough Fair - although herbs do look very pretty in the garden. They can also be great for pollinators and look good in vases, so can be grown for reasons other than eating them!
It’s so easy to go and grab strawberries off the supermarket shelf in December but they have been grown indoors, with lots of heat, light, watering and feeding to manipulate the ideal growing conditions. Your fresh, home-grown strawberries will crop around June, so content yourself that this is when you will feast on the juiciest of red jewels, until late September when your tomatoes will be ripe for a mouth-watering pick.
Realistically, how much time each week will you have to tend to your veggies? Some plants will need more attention than others and there will be more to do in some weeks than in others. Tomatoes are heat-loving divas who demand pinching out, staking, feeding, and a lot of watering - not ideal if you have less than an hour a week to commit and a shady plot that gets no sun - you and your tomatoes will grow to hate each other.
The last thing you want is to wait and wait for months to enjoy your eagerly anticipated, mouth-wateringly tasty harvests, to find that everything is ready at once and you end up with a food mountain. The key here is to research how long crops will take to grow in your conditions and plan accordingly. I grow autumn-fruiting raspberries for example, so that they are not ready at the same time as the strawberries - there’s only so much fruit a girl can pop in her champagne flute!
Start small, eat well and enjoy the growing pleasure this year!
You can follow our Editor’s garden and gardening on her Instagram page to keep up with what she loves in the garden.