Ready, steady, grow...
PREP YOUR KITCHEN GARDEN NOW TO ENJOY A HARVEST IN THE MONTHS TO COME... YOU’LL SOON SEE GROWING YOUR OWN IS EASIER THAN YOU THINK
AFTER a long day’s work, it’s very relaxing to settle down in the kitchen with a glass of wine, a pile of cookery books and a selection of mouthwatering ingredients. Fresh, natural, wholesome – and ideally homeproduced – food tops the menu, so a well-stocked cook’s garden is the ultimate kitchen accessory.
Growing your own fruit and veg is incredibly rewarding – not in terms of money perhaps, but it’s fun for the whole family.
Kids who normally turn up their noses at veg are more likely to eat something they’ve helped to grow, especially if you give them a project of their own. For very little extra trouble you can grow your own organically, plus the exercise does you good. So what are you waiting for? Try concentrating on growing tasty, exciting gourmet veg that goes hand in hand with adventurous cooking.
Think flavourful varieties of courgettes and French beans, delicate baby veg, posh lettuce and mixed salad leaves. They taste much better fresh from the garden.
The best way to grow them is to create a kitchen garden – a pattern of rectangular or square beds with neat gravel paths in between works best.
Start any time now by digging the area over, then mark out the beds. Hammer short posts in at the corners and nail horizontal boards to make dwarf walls, then fill your bed with suitable soil.
Make one bed for salads and include red, oak-leaved and frilly lettuce, rocket and baby spinach leaves. Being fast-growing, they’ll want very rich soil containing lots of organic matter. In fact, you could fill your salad bed with pure compost.
Have one bed for roots, such as finger carrots and unusual kinds such as salsify or scorzonera. Add trendy gourmet spuds or old heritage varieties.
Use pre-packed, stone-free top soil to fill the bed. Rich or stony soil tends to make root crops grow into forked shapes, so they are impossible to peel, and too much organic matter encourages slugs.
You might want one bed for greens such as sprouting broccoli, calabrese, black Tuscan kale and Swiss chard and another for legumes, which are part of the pea and bean family. If you want to grow peas, go for mangetout and sugar snaps, which make the best use of time and space since there’s no shelling involved.
Save one bed for exotic veg, for example outdoor tomatoes, courgettes and sweetcorn. And have a bed for perennial veg, such as globe artichokes and asparagus. They like their soil very generously enriched with compost. Making your cook’s garden and preparing the soil will take you some time, so get cracking as soon as you can. Then around mid-March, hoe off any weeds, sprinkle general organic fertiliser over the ground and rake it in, and you are ready to start sowing and planting.
Well-stocked veggie beds look good but their great beauty is that they save such a lot of routine work. You can say goodbye to weeding once crops cover the soil because germinating weed seedlings are simply smothered out. And because beds have paths in between them, there’s no need to walk between rows of veg, so you can plant them closer together than usual.
The result is faster ground cover and less weeding, plus more food from a limited space.
Beds also make it easy to grow
Once your new veggie crops cover the surface they’ll choke out weeds
organic. Instead of using pesticides, cover susceptible crops such as salads, carrots and brassicas with sheets of fine, insect-proof netting and pin it down to the wooden edges of your beds. Then surround the woodwork with a strip of serrated-edged copper tape to keep out slugs and snails.
Soil pests and diseases such as clubroot are easy to avoid as long as you rotate your beds the next spring, so nothing is grown in the same place again for several years.
If you want to extend your veg gardening season, you can pin down sheets of spun horticultural fleece over early or late crops of baby carrots, peas or salads.
During your first year you’ll be on a steep learning curve, but it’s great fun. So dig in and look forward to delicious dishes from the garden.