There are few things more satisfying than preparing a meal with food grown by your own hand. Preparing, pruning, weeding, and waiting for something edible to emerge, ripen and be picked for the table is a joy.
If you love the thought of growing your own ingredients for a vegetable soup, curry or stir fry but are not sure where to begin, here are a few tips to get you started. Your garden designer can help you plan the structure and arrangement of your garden to identify good spots for edibles. Ideal conditions are sunny with a well draining soil – but we do not all have this luxury! My home grown adventure has to work with a small north facing garden, reliant on raised beds and pots.
There is a vast spectrum of opportunity when deciding what to grow, from starting simply with herbs and fruit trees to more ambitious planting of brassicas and root vegetables. There’s no need for fancy tools or equipment, your usual rake, trowel and hoe would suffice, with canes to make holes for seeds and support plants as they grow.
Pots and Planters
If you have limited space for setting out a kitchen garden, or would like to grow edible plants that must be kept indoors during frosts, using pots is a great choice.
Herbs and salad leaves can be grown in containers as small as you like and kept either indoors or outdoors in places that receive a lot of light such as window sills and patios. Ensure water will drain through easily by placing items like a few pieces of broken crockery in the bottom of pots because water logged soil can rot the delicate roots of your plants. Good starter plants that don’t mind small containers are lettuce, parsley and salad onions. When you cut your lettuce or salad onions leave the base in the soil and they will grow new leaves.
Larger scale plants like tomatoes, root vegetables and even trees can thrive in pots and planters as long as they are deep and wide enough. Potatoes are especially easy to grow in bags too. There are ‘dwarf’ root balled species of fruit and nut trees available from figs to apples, and keeping them portable allows you to move your plants around your garden and turn them to face the sun to grow evenly. In very tight spaces, like front gardens can be, trees in pots can allow you to enjoy blossoms and fruits without the risk of roots damaging building foundations and walls, and without permanently blocking light from windows.
Once potted, warmth loving species such as citrus fruits can be brought inside to overwinter, but even figs can survive outside in a sheltered spot. It’s really important to water potted plants regularly, ensure they don’t dry out and that air can circulate freely around them to keep them clean and fresh.
Pots kept indoors can help you get started growing varieties in January that would not be able to be planted outside until much later into spring or summer. Try peas, cauliflower, onion, garlic and even broad beans together with winter salad leaves, spinach, leeks and radish. These can be planted out when the weather warms up, but don’t need to be. Grow them from seed and harvest directly from your pots.
Cold Frames and Greenhouses
For those who would like to get started early with planting, introducing warmer spaces to grow in the garden will help. A greenhouse can buy you an extra month or two for growing and a cold frame about half that. They are a good place to get seedlings started in March and April before planting them out once the frosts have definitely passed and the ground begins to warm up to receive them. Try brussels sprouts, sprouting broccoli, kohlrabi and globe artichokes and move on to celery, marrows, chicory, celeriac, french beans, pumpkins and kale as the summer approaches.
Cardboard seed pots are widely available for planting seeds in, and it’s easy to re-use yogurt pots and egg cartons for the purpose too. The cardboard will biodegrade so plants can be transplanted into beds without taking them out. Plastic pots can be reused many times, helpful to replenish salad stocks through the summer.
Raised Beds
It is always preferable to plant straight into the ground to help replenish and support healthy soil, but raised beds have their advantages too. They take time and money to construct but the soil in them can warm up quicker and drain better. There is also the added benefit of being kinder to knees and backs with no kneeling or bending to work them. They can help with controlling pests and weeds as they are easier to reach and burrowing animals can be kept at bay by placing a light metal mesh at the surface of the soil.
From March onwards, many seeds can begin to be grown outdoors in your raised beds, including parsnips, leeks, cabbages, beans and asparagus, which you can buy as ready to grow rootstocks called ‘crowns’. You can also sow beetroot, carrots, cucumbers, lettuces, rocket, salad leaves and turnips in March and April, but these should remain under cover until the weather reliably warms up. Use cloches or halve plastic water bottles to place over them.
I enjoy raised planters because they bring plants up closer to eye level. I had two constructed into the edge of timber decking when it had to be replaced last summer and began by filling them with the remains of frost damaged pots, which will allow water to drain through plus wood from cuttings and a broken fence that will also help absorb water from the soil. I topped the planters with a good quality peat free compost enriched with seaweed for additional nutrients. First up, I have planted some bee and butterfly attracting lavender and edible flowers like violets to create a beautifully scented colourful backdrop to the table and chairs on the decking.
Do take care to plan the location and size of raised beds because they will become a permanent structure in your garden and it would be a shame for them to be in the way of easeful movement or sight lines. An ideal opportunity to incorporate them is when having your garden redesigned.
Kitchen Gardens
A kitchen garden is a food growers dream! The options are endless, and there is scope for you to choose different approaches to bringing your vegetables to fruition. Planting in traditional rows needs weeds and pests to be regularly removed, but permaculture methods, where complementary plants are grouped together, is less maintenance intensive. For example, add edible marigolds and nasturtiums in amongst your vegetables to help repel aphids and white flies and attract pollinators. read about how to set out your vegetable garden in Sarah’s blog post: The basics of planning a vegetable garden.
Kitchen gardens provide the opportunity to combine different scales of planting, like beans on a growing frame and larger fruit shrubs such as gooseberries, blackberries and redcurrants together with more low lying root vegetables. Brassicas can be protected by netting, though I have seen some determined pigeons make it under mine on the allotment!
There may be more space for using polytunnels and cloches to protect plants too, and you can place old carpet, cardboard or tarpaulin on to the soil to warm it up and keep weeds from growing to enable you to get your seedbeds ready for sowing by late April and May. Rake and level the soil creating a fine tilth, where the soil is broken into small, even grains. You can then sow your seeds, watering the soil if it is very dry outside or using a thin layer of sand to prevent seeds getting waterlogged if the soil is already very wet.
By May, you will be able to plant out any seedlings you have been nurturing including aubergines, chillies, sweetcorn, peppers, fennel and peas. Keep your seedlings indoors or under cover if the nights are still very cold. Gooseberries, cranberries and strawberries can also be planted straight outdoors once the weather warms. From June onwards, you will be able to harvest early planted cauliflowers, broad beans, asparagus, beetroot and spinach. Don’t despair if you missed the window – planting seeds for these in late spring and early summer can still provide you with a harvest from October to December.
Fruit trees can be planted out all year round and can be beautifully espaliered, planted to spread out against garden walls and fences on a frame. Ensure roots are planted about half a metre away from the base of any masonry boundary wall and lean the tree trunk and branches in towards the wall to keep the roots from being directly under the structure. I would personally avoid planting a small tree within 3-5m of a wall for a building such as a house or outbuilding, because the roots can absorb the moisture from the ground, shifting the soil and causing walls to crack. Larger trees should be planted much further away. A general rule of thumb is that the roots of a tree will be as wide as the canopy spreads, but fruit trees can have wider, laterally spreading root systems. Ask your garden designer to advise you on the correct species to choose for your particular space.
Whatever size of space you have, welcome to join in the world of home grown food – you won’t look back.
Feeling inspired to incorporate space for edibles into your garden design, contact us and get started
Further reading:
The Edible Gardener by Annabel, North Leeds Garden Design
Edible Flowers The Royal Horticultural Society
How to grow vegetables in pots Gardeners’ World