Grow a tiny edible garden
There are plenty of delicious crops you can grow in pots, writes Chris Collins, Garden Organic’s head of horticulture.
Limited space shouldn’t limit your ability to grow things to eat. On my balcony, I harvest all kinds of organic greens, herbs and sun-kissed vegetables - and there’s nothing better than picking them super fresh.
A trough filled with cut-and-come-again salads, spinach, rocket and spring onions is an easy place to start. Fill a 25cm-by25cm trough with peat-free compost, and sow thickly in drills 20cm (8in) apart. I like to inter-sow with fresh drills every three to four weeks to ensure a constant supply.
Potatoes also grow easily in hessian sacks. Fill a quarter of the sack with compost and place four seed potatoes (preferably chitted) into the compost. As the plants grow, add more fresh compost to cover the growing shoots until you reach the top. They’ll be ready in eight to 10 weeks, depending on conditions.
You can grow vertically too, with hanging baskets of strawberries and nasturtium (great for bees and salads - see Barbara Segall’s article on p36). Plant in the top and through the sides for a bumper crop. Strawberries grow nicely in recycled pallets, dustbins and buckets too.
If you have a slightly bigger garden or a patio, you could build a 1m x 1m (3ft x 3ft) square raised bed from old pallet wood, ensuring it’s 30cm (12in) deep for root crops. Divide it into 12 sections and plant up each small section with a different crop such as flowering herbs, radish, carrots, lettuce, beetroot and spring onion. This will allow you to create a full, delicious organic veg garden in miniature!