Why DIY produce regime will really grow on you
GROWING your own is easier than you might 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 home produced – food tops the menu, so a well-stocked cook’s garden is the ultimate accessory.
Growing your own fruit and veg is incredibly rewarding and it’s fun for the whole family to do.
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. Growing pumpkins usually goes down well.
For very little extra trouble you can grow your own organically. So what are you waiting for? You don’t need a huge area for veg – and forget main crop spuds, carrots and onions. Concentrate on growing tasty, exciting gourmet kinds that go hand in glove with adventurous cookery.
Go for flavourful varieties of courgettes and French beans, delicate baby veg, posh lettuce and mixed salad leaves.
THE best way to grow them is to create a kitchen garden.A geometrical pattern of rectangular or square beds with neat gravel paths in between makes a kitchen garden to be proud of.Add a few herb beds or screens of cordontrained berries and it makes a brilliant edible display.
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 all your 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, including finger carrots, unusual kinds such as salsify or scorzonera, which are tasty luxuries, and trendy gourmet spuds or old heritage varieties, but use prepacked, stone-free top soil to fill the beds.
YOU might want one bed for greens such as sprouting broccoli, calabrese, black Tuscan kale and Swiss chard and another for legumes, which are 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).
Save one bed for exotic frosttending veg, such as outdoor tomatoes, courgettes and sweetcorn.And have a bed for perennial veg; globe artichokes and asparagus, which are probably the two most valuable crops of all.
Making your cook’s garden and preparing the soil will take you some time, so get cracking.Then, around mid-March, hoe off any weeds, sprinkle a dressing of general organic fertiliser over the ground and rake it in, and you are ready to start sowing and planting.
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.
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.The result is faster ground cover and less weeding.
Beds also make it easy to grow 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 special serrated-edged copper tape to prevent slugs and snails gaining access. Soil pests and diseases such as clubroot are easier to avoid as long as you move each group of veg round to the next bed each 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 long learning curve, but it’s great fun. So dig in and look forward to dishes from the garden.