Choose and Grow Your Favourite Veg

More and more of us enjoy growing growing fruit and veg, whatever the size of our gardens. If you want to start growing your own, choose your favourite vegetables. This may seem pretty obvious, but I do know a couple who faithfully grow beetroot every year even though they don’t enjoy it, instead of putting in an extra row of carrots which they do like. We once had an after dinner game where everyone had to choose their favourite fruit and veg so we drew up a ‘top 10 Vegetables’. Grow these ones!

Some vegetables are best picked fresh

Then work out which of your ‘top 10’ are best picked fresh. We all know that fresh vegetables are tastiest. The best example is, of course, sweet corn where the cob must be harvested and thrust straight into a pan of boiling water. And unless you eat them quickly, salad and chard leaves will wilt almost before your eyes. Less obviously, other crops like cauliflowers and sprouts will soon lose their flavour. Once cut, all these vegetables, which are 90% water when harvested, will quickly transpire leading to wilted leaves and the plant sugars will turn to starch. The best survivors are root crops and onions, but even here, you can’t get a sweeter carrot than one straight out of the ground. So, it’s hardly surprising that ‘grow our own’ is so popular.

Some vegetables for a small garden

The size of your garden or yard will determine everything, but in even the smallest garden, a window sill or sunny corner of the patio can be put to good use. Herbs, like chives and parsley, can live in a pot placed close to the kitchen door. Depending on the kind of summer you have, outdoor tomatoes in a tub or growbag will be a delight to pick. A container-grown bay tree will certainly thrive in a sunny corner, and a 30 litre tub will accommodate a few sugar peas. These tender young pods can be chopped into a salad, and some even more unusual occupants of the tub could be parsley peas. This low growing variety has tendrils in the form of umbels. When finely cut up the leaves add a delicate pea flavour to a salad. A magnificent Swiss chard, Bright Lights, will thrive in a 43 litre pot, growing to a good 60cm / 2ft and producing a splendid display of red, yellow and green leaves. When space for veg growing is limited, I recommend choosing edibles that please both eye and palate.

With more space, you have greater choice

Many other vegetables, like carrots, beetroot and radishes will thrive in a container, but if space permits, you can grow many more vegetables. A stand of runner beans should produce a worthwhile crop, weather permitting, in a space 3 metres x 1 metre (9ft x 3ft), and a courgette or squash will cope with 1m¬≤ / 1yard¬≤. Lettuces, rocket and a block of dwarf beans don’t take up a lot of space but more elbow room will obviously increase your options even more.

Plants that take up lots of space

Unless you plan to dig up part of the shrubbery to grow veg, you will need a fair sized patch for brassicas – cabbage, caulis, sprouts and kale. Each plant usually needs 60cm¬≤ / 2ft¬≤. My sprout row is 1 metre x 7 metres / 3ft x 25ft and that is a lot of ground! Frankly unless you have that kind of area, strike brassicas off your wish list. For the same reason, forget about Maincrop potatoes and give onions a miss. Even peas and tall broad beans need a lot of space. For good succession over the season, my peas fill two 10 metre / 30ft long beds. Admittedly we like a good plateful – who wouldn’t? – and some are frozen for the winter, but don’t expect much from a single sowing unless it’s about 3 metres / 10ft long.

Don’t grow vegetables too closely together

It’s best to know at the beginning what crops you’ve space for – some people try to cram in too many plants in a small place and get very poor results.

• See Sowing Vegetable Seeds and Pricking Out Seedlings
• And Spring Planting in the Vegetable Garden