growing your own gourmet foods

Garden planning for 2011

January 26th, 2011 by Penny Golightly

There isn’t much to do, garden-wise in January. Mostly you just wait for the season to change, and make plans for the year ahead.

I’ll be growing as many veggies and herbs as I can again this year. Flavour is the most important factor, but I’m also looking at getting as much value for money as possible and keeping the whole thing within budget.

This year’s food gardening budget is being set at a total of £40. That’s £10 for seeds, £20 for new compost and £10 for everything else. A budget’s definitely necessary as you can easily get carried away and spend a small fortune in garden centres or online shops, ask any gardener what happens when they start looking at those tempting catalogues filled with new-season packs of seeds…

The available growing space currently isn’t big enough to completely supply the household with veggies and salad all year round, so I’ve decided not to grow potatoes, maize and onions this year. They take up too much room (or compost) and they’re pretty cheap to buy, so the space is being given to other ingredients that give a higher yield and/or cost more in the shops.

I think I’ll get the best value this year from:

Herbs: parsley, coriander, mint, Italian and Thai basil, wild garlic, chives, chervil, lemongrass and a few others
Salad veg: lettuce, rocket, spring onions, radicchio, land cress, radishes, cucumbers, tomatoes etc
Greens: pak choi, mizuna, mini cabbages, kale, kohl rabi
Legumes: sugar snap peas, early/late peas, French beans, borlotto beans
Others: mini carrots and parsnips, Florence fennel, chillis, sweet peppers, green and yellow courgettes, winter squash

The seeds budget has pretty much been spent, but if I can get hold of some runner beans for free then I’ll grow them as well. Got me some tomato and sweetcorn seeds to swap, so let’s see.

Last year had a real element of trial and error, but the experience has helped me to learn more about the microclimate and other limitations of gardening in this spot. I’ll be taking action against some pests and diseases so that I can still grow most of my favourite things, but it’s also time to admit defeat against some problems. Garden pests and diseases are many and varied, so I’ll write about them another time.

For the moment, let’s just say that it’s not viable to grow the following on the tiny plot, for reasons of space, cost, or susceptibility to local pests/diseases:

Most root vegetables
Broad beans
Calabrese
Maincrop spinach and chard
Permanent plants (asparagus, rhubarb, globe artichokes)
Most slow growing plants (cauliflower, big brassicas)
Fruit trees and bushes

But that still leaves a lot of sowing and growing to be getting on with once the weather starts to warm up.

Are you growing your own this year? What are you planning to grow?

Tags: British garden kitchen, grow your own salad, grow your own veg, growing vegetables cheaply, growing your own gourmet foods, planning your garden for the year, small gardens, urban garden
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More tales from the windowsill garden

November 14th, 2010 by Penny Golightly

By rights, there shouldn’t really be anything much happening on the windowsill in the middle of November, but there’s an interesting mixture of greenhouse transfers, new sowings and late cropping going on.

I picked these today, some ready to eat now and a few to ripen on for later:

There are still two plum tomato plants growing, along with sweet Genovese basil, purple spicy basil and Greek pot basil from summer sowings. One is on its last legs (roots?) and the other is almost certainly going to make it to the end of November. We might get six or seven more fruits from them before they go, not bad at all.

I moved the cayenne chili plant in from the greenhouse about two weeks ago and it seems so much happier indoors, happy to the point of producing another 30 or so flowers. Potentially a lot more of the hot stuff on the way, so I’ve misted the open blooms with a tiny amount of warm water to help them make fruits. The two lemongrass plants came indoors at the same time, and they’re doing better too with lots of new green shoots.

There are also some new sowings: baby salad leaves, land cress, peas (for shoots), parsley, coriander, spinach and giant red mustard. Nice to have a few salady ingredients within easy reach to chuck into sandwiches and side salads.

I’ve scrubbed down and sterilised the mini-greenhouse, and it’s now home to a completely new set of sowings, including leaf beet, Arctic King and Tom Thumb lettuces, Italian chicory, White Lisbon spring onions, lamb’s lettuce, golden purslane, lots of rocket, dwarf kale and more herbs. Will be interesting to see which ones grow the best.

Outside in the garden at the moment there are: Shimonita onions/leeks, spring cabbage, curly kale, mustard greens, mizuna, sorrel, the last few carrots, purple and white sprouting broccoli, and a couple of Brussels sprout plants. On the herb front we have the hardier plants such as sage, thyme, rosemary and chives, plus some surviving mint, chervil and oregano.

If I have time this week then there are a few more bits of preparation for the winter that need doing, mainly sowing some pak choi and a few other oriental leaves, tidying the beds up, sowing green manures and washing out any remaining empty planters.

Are you still getting crops from your summer sowings? Have you planted anything for the winter or early spring this year? Please let me know how you’re getting on, or what varieties you’ve had lots of luck with.

Tags: grow chilli peppers indoors, grow salad indoors, growing food indoors, growing your own food in winter, growing your own gourmet foods, growing your own pea shoots, kitchen windowsill gardening, windowsill herbs, windowsill kitchen garden
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Kitchen garden catch up

July 5th, 2010 by Penny Golightly

Here’s a quick catch up for what happened with the windowsill kitchen garden last month. First of all, the cherry and plum tomatoes set their first trusses and gave us some tiny toms. The cherry tomatoes ripened quickly and lived up to their tasty reputation, giving us about 14 tomatoes between two plants with more still to come.

The plum romas are not quite there yet, so I can’t tell you if they’re as good as people say. We’re still getting 2 or 3 French beans each week from the dwarf bean plant, and the cut and come again salad pot containing land cress, rocket and baby leaf spinach is on its third round. I’m also sowing sequentially in little pots to make sure we have fresh supplies of parsley and basil.

The cucumber plant went outside. It is very healthy and has given us three chunky cucumbers during June. Here’s what it looked like last month:

People say you should peel outdoor cucumbers to remove the tiny spines, but I’ve found that giving it a scrub with an ordinary pot scrubber does the trick perfectly and with the minimum of waste – the skins are completely edible that way. The baby lettuce round the bottom of the pot helps to retain water, and the peas seem to be helping the cucumber and lettuce grow stronger too. Three crops in one pot, quite handy for a small garden with almost no topsoil.

The courgette not only got too big for the windowsill, it outgrew the mini greenhouse too. Here’s what it looked like in June, when it started giving us two green courgettes per week. It hasn’t stopped since. The small flowerpot is sunk into the compost, which sends water straight to the roots on hot days, rather than evaporating off. We should be OK if the proposed hosepipe ban happens at least.

I did originally say that I wasn’t going to grow potatoes because it’s very hard to make it cost effective – it’s my first year here and there’s no home made compost, and the combination of large container, bought compost and seed potatoes usually works out as more expensive than buying the spuds in a shop. Fortunately I was given some free seed potatoes and a potato grow bag by Beau’s Mum, who had a spare set after a bulk buy:

This is what they looked like directly after their final ‘earth up’. I’m looking forward to a bumper crop of Charlotte salad potatoes some time during July, and there’s also a way to recycle this year’s compost by sowing enriching plants in it during the Autumn and letting it overwinter, so there should be very little waste.

Quite a lot of people have given me free seeds or done swaps with me, so there’s plenty to try out this year, including a pot of borlotto and runner beans, and some rocket. Here they are as baby plants:

I’m also making good use of the things that we find, Womble-stylee, things that the previous folks left behind. This includes a shed full of pots, planks, perspex sheets, plastic window boxes and hanging baskets. The window boxes turned out to be good for lettuces, rocket, radishes, round carrots, pak choi and mini cabbages. Not sure how the turnips and beetroot are going to turn out, we’ll see at the end of July.

All the hanging baskets needed was a water reservoir and a £1 pack of gel retainer liners and hey presto, salad bowl hanging baskets with lettuce, chicory, spring onions, and edible marigolds and trailing nasturtiums: