But you don’t need an allotment to grow veg

IN the hope of gaining some extra space for growing vegetables and cut flowers, I checked out the waiting list at my local allotments.

It turns out that there are 30 plots and 40 people ahead of me on the list.

It was much the same at my last address where there was a 10-year waiting list.

The Scottish Allotments and Gardens Society does very good work in supporting groups who are campaigning for new plots and I’ve seen some of the great new allotment sites that have been created in the last few years.

However, there are still far more people in search of growing spaces than there are plots to accommodate them.

If you live in the Edinburgh area and you are looking for somewhere to grow plants, then Edinburgh Garden Partners might be able to help.

They match garden owners, some of whom are elderly or disabled, with people who want to garden. It’s a simple idea, but one that deserves to be rolled out across the country.

Of course you don’t have to be part of an organised scheme to do something similar.

You could try just knocking on a neighbour’s door and asking if they want someone to cut their grass and do the weeding in exchange for space to grow vegetables.

Every time I complain to friends or family about lack of space in my garden, they suggest that I take on theirs.

In fact there’s no shortage of people willing to hand over their gardens to me, but most of them live so far away that I’d spend more time driving than I would digging, which would defeat all my green principles.

So I continue to squeeze lettuces and peas amongst the flowers and grow potatoes in pots.

In many ways this is not a bad thing as, grown like this, dotted amongst fragrant roses and waving grasses, it is harder for the pests to find them.

If you prefer the ordered rows of a traditional vegetable plot then you can confuse aphids by growing flowers as an edging.

African marigolds emit a smell that is repellent to greenfly and blackfly. Sage can deter carrot fly and nasturtiums attract black aphids, effectively keeping them away from broad beans. Just cut off the leaves that are worst affected and consign them to the compost heap and, in a stroke, you’ll have wiped out thousands of aphids that would otherwise suck the life out of your crop.

I grow nasturtiums every year, sowing them in the garden and popping seeds into hanging baskets where they spill over the sides in a waterfall of green leaves and bright flowers.

Because they self-seed so readily they also turn up in all sorts of unexpected places and I let them get on with it, though I pick a few leaves of the variegated kinds to spice up summer salads.