For most the garden is a place for the kids to play, entertaining friends and family, to sit and enjoy the wildlife along with finding some peace and quiet. However a garden can also be functional in another way.
Growing your own vegetables is becoming increasingly more popular for a number of reasons. For example it is more sustainable, can benefit your health and you know where it has come from! Furthermore you don’t have to have a large garden to create a ‘veg patch’.
You can create a purpose built patch by building sleeper beds. These can be whatever size fits into your garden and save you from bending and kneeling on the ground when you tend to them. They can also be used for seating when you have a well-earned cup of tea.
There are a variety of receptacles that you can use to grow your vegetables. For example my children wanted to grow their own potatoes and I had some old tyres that I need to dispose of. We have stacked them up, filled the bottom with some stone for drainage and the rest with soil and hey presto, a couple of potato planters, by upcycling.
Hanging baskets are also another way you can grow your own. For example Cherry Cascade tomatoes will grow happily in hanging baskets and produce an abundance of tomatoes. These would also be a good fruit to grown on a vertical wall. If you really are short of space then a vertical wall planter would be ideal. It is a wall with pockets along it that you fill with soil and your desired plants. It enables you to grow an abundance of plants without using a huge amount of space.
When you are growing in a small space you do have to select your crops carefully. Some require more space than others and so you need to make sure that what you are going to grow with thrive in a smaller compact area. Furthermore try to pick crops that will be high value to maximise your garden’s overall productivity. For example tomatoes will give lots of fruit over the summer, while chard can be cut repeatedly over a long period to give several harvests. Runner beans and courgettes are also prolific and radishes are prefect for growing between slow growing crops as they grow quickly and can be harvested early.
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