Find room to GROW
Not all of us are lucky enough to have an allotment – but there are plenty of ways you can grow your own fruit and veg in the smallest spaces
Tomorrow marks the starts of National Allotment Week. You don’t need me to tell you how great allotments are, especially if you’re short of space in your garden or live in a flat.
But with them being in short supply there are many other clever ways of increasing growing space in your garden, patio or balcony.
HANGING BASKETS
Using pots, hanging baskets and window boxes is a great way to create space. Most people only consider ornamental plants as an option for containers, but there are several varieties of food plant that have been cultivated to do well in the conditions that containers provide.
‘Tumbler’ tomatoes, as the name suggests, are a trailing variety of this popular homegrown plant. Vigorous growers with delicious cherry tomato fruit, they are the perfect choice for hanging baskets.
Fantastically easy to grow, tumblers require no support or pinching out and when their stems are heavy with vibrant tomatoes, they also add an extra dimension of colour to your space. Allow one plant for every 35cm (14in) hanging basket for best results.
Strawberries are another, often overlooked, option for hanging baskets. The ‘Fragoo’ variety, with its delicate pink flowers and mouthwatering red fruits, is a wonderful choice if you want a two-for-one decorative plant with great tasting berries to boot.
Since their runners can be difficult to keep in check when planted in the garden, containers allow you to enjoy the upsides of these plants with none of the downsides. Again, one plant per basket is best.
CONTAINERS
Containers are another useful way of increasing space in a restricted area. And the humble potato is an ideal vegetable choice for growing in them.
If you have a two feet square bare sunny corner on your patio, this could be the crop for you!
The container needs to be deeper than a window box or hanging basket to give the tubers enough room to form, but it doesn’t have to be fancy. You could use a 40 litre patio bag or even an old dustbin—they’re not fussy. Research by the RHS showed the ‘Casablanca’ and ‘Golden Nugget’ are the best varieties of potato to grow in containers.
These cultivars provide a good crop of great-tasting tubers while being nicely resistant to pests and diseases. Growing potatoes in containers also makes for less of a guessing game come harvest time as you know where all the tubers are prior to digging them up.
WINDOW BOXES
If all you have is a sunny kitchen window sill to play with, growing your own herbs in a window box can be really rewarding. There’s nothing quite like a few sprigs of homegrown thyme on your grilled chicken or fresh basil leaves added to your homemade
‘Fragoo’ strawberries are a decorative plant with tasty red berries
tomato bruschetta. A huge number of herbs will grow well in a window box, so there’s something to suit everyone.
Choose anything from coriander to chives, mint to oregano. ‘Tumbler’ tomatoes and ‘Fragoo’ strawberries are an option for window boxes, too.
WALL GARDENS
If you’re already growing in every inch right up to your boundaries, you may think your space has nothing left to
give. However, you should think of your garden as a box from which you can unfold the sides by using the walls themselves as growing space. Lengths of deep plastic roof guttering secured in horizontal lines across your wall are an excellent, inexpensive way to grow salad leaves.
Place them at a slight angle on the wall and drainage won’t be an issue either. A south-facing wall is an ideal vertical planting space for ‘Salad Bowl’ Lettuce and ‘Palco’ Spinach, which don’t need great depths of soil.
Plants will get lots of sunlight during the day and the wall will radiate heat at night, helping them to crop heavily throughout summer.
If you have a sturdy fence or wall at the edge of a border which gets lots of light, then fan-trained fruit trees or espaliers make a superb choice.
While the branches of fan-trained trees spread out from a single point in a handheld fan pattern, espaliers have a central trunk from which parallel horizontal branches extend.
Apples and pears can be bought in either formation, while you can buy everything from almonds and apples to cherries and plums fan-trained and ready to go.
Plant one of these well now and your walls could be bearing fruit for years to come. Trees will need four to six metres of width to grow into and a fence or wall of at least two metres tall to lean against.
They also need to be well-watered while they establish themselves.
Use any of these tricks and you’ll be amazed at the amount of crops you can produce if you’re short of space in your own garden.