PLANT FOR COLOUR AND FLAVOUR
THERE’S AS MUCH pleasure to be had in making your edible garden beautiful as there is in making it productive. Done with a formal touch, you’re edging into potager territory; keep it relaxed and you’re in the home-grown cottage garden zone where fruit, vegetables, herbs and flowers combine to create an informal, sometimes riotous kitchen garden. Here are eight tricks to raise the general gorgeousness of your plot.
1 Make fruit trees your garden’s backbone. Use stepover apples to edge beds, or plant a standard quince on a dwarfing rootstock and enjoy its exquisite, cupped pink flowers.
2 Focus on flowers… Runner beans were first grown for their ornamental value, and the flowers and pods of colourful mangetout peas, such as yellow ‘Golden Sweet’ and purple ‘Shiraz’, make them almost too pretty to pick.
3 …But don’t forget foliage. Handsome leaves are plentiful in the productive garden – think inky-leaved kales, clumps of chives, bright lipstick shades of Swiss chard and silver globe artichokes.
4 Make the most of gaps. Grow crops in short rows to avoid large areas of bare soil once a crop is cleared. If you have a greenhouse, succession-sow the next crop in modules so they’re ready to plant out as soon as the previous crop is harvested.
5 Encourage a signature self-sower. A bit of unplanned loveliness helps relax a garden. Opium poppies are a very attractive addition.
6 Grow plants up arches and wigwams. Position a run of them at intervals over a path, then train pumpkins to grow up them. The bright tangerine mini pumpkin ‘Munchkin’ looks delightful.
7 Grow flowers and veg together. Sow cut flowers through your vegetable plot to encourage useful pollinators as well as boost its appeal. Dill is as attractive as a cut flower as it is a useful herb.
8 Leave plants to flower and set seed. You’ll bring height and colour to the garden, plus you can reap the reward of saving your own seed. Parsnips grow into statuesque yellow umbellifers in their second year – if you can bear to leave a couple in the ground.