Growing your own food

Following on from the success of our GYO event, we have created some tips for how to make the most of your outdoor space. Growing your own fruit and vegetables, as well as being fun, is cost effective and better for the environment. And you don’t need a vast area to do it! Fruit and vegetables can be grown in a number of different settings – a patio, windowsill, back gardens, allotment or community gardens.

Keep it simple

We’re often asked by customers if it’s difficult to start but actually you can keep it really simple;

• Choose the sunniest spot you can find.
• Pick just five crops to get started.
• Sow in straight lines according to the seed packet and label and date each sowing.
• Be careful not to sow too deep (no more than twice the depth of the seed itself). You can mark out your eventual vegetable row with a twine string line and make a shallow drill along its length, using the point of a hoe or the prong of a fork.
• Grow the things that you love to eat or cook regularly
• If you have children, get them involved! It’s fun for them to be able to pick and eat food straight from the plant – think strawberries, carrots, peas and apples.
• Grow crops that give you a multiple harvest such as raspberries, courgettes, purple sprouting broccoli, spinach, cut and come again salads
• If you have limited space, plant a selection of herbs; they’re easy to grow, need minimal space as well as being great for wildlife.
• If you are growing indoors, you can also try sprouting seeds and pulses too.

How to sow

• Make sure the soil is warm enough before you sow: if it is too cold, at best the seeds will take longer to germinate and at worst they will just sit there and rot. You can use horticultural fleece both to warm the soil before sowing, and then to protect the newly sown area afterwards.
• Prepare the soil well, digging it over thoroughly and removing any stones and lumps that might prevent the emerging seedlings from pushing through – the phrase that is often used is ‘a fine tilth’. In practice this means that the texture of the soil should be rather like fine breadcrumbs, although this is much easier said than done.
• Sow sparingly – remember, you will need to thin the emerging seedlings regularly in order to allow some of them to develop to maturity.
• Cover the seeds with soil, and water in well.

As your confidence grows, you can then increase the number of things you grow or even start to extend your growing season using cloches.

Work out the weeds

It can be hard to know what are and aren’t weeds! If you are unsure if it’s a weed or a seedling, remember – weeds DON’T grow in straight lines.

Then sit back and watch the fruits of your labour grow!