The most important thing is to grow only the veg you like to eat - if you loathe Brussels sprouts or parsnips, don't waste time on them.
GROWING FOOD IS ONE of the most satisfying things that a person can do in the garden. Yet for many people the responsibility is terrifying. They become worried and wilted when faced with the prospect of a row of spinach or a teepee of runner beans. But these same individuals think nothing of planting a tree or sticking a shrub in the ground – operations that require a certain amount of expertise. The reason, I’m sure, is that when vegetable-growing ceased to be part of daily life, it took on the mantle of a mysterious and precise science. It was practised mainly by an older generation, who were not above adding a bit of gratuitous mystification to their stern instructions – and who predicted pests, fungal diseases and other catastrophic consequences if their advice was ignored.
Well, I’ve two things to say to that. The first: if you have the slightest urge to grow vegetables, just get out, do it, and don’t be afraid to make mistakes (much of the “old” stuff is obsolete now, anyway). And the second: there’s no shame in not knowing (or forgetting) how to grow something.
That's why there are books, carefully researched and written by easy-to-understand people who have devoted their entire lives to working out the best way for the rest of us to cultivate vegetables. I would be lost without Joy Larkcom's Grow Your Own Vegetables(Frances Lincoln, £9.99): I refer to it constantly, for everything. And lately I've acquired another expert advisor in Charles Dowding. These past couple of months his Organic Gardening: the Natural No-Dig Way and Salad Leaves for All Seasonshave been my constant companions (Green Books, £10.95 each). Of course, you can glean information from the web, and from articles such as this, but nothing takes the place of a book for portability and comprehensiveness.
Still, seeing as you’ve read this far, it would be rude of me to wander off and sow my tomato seeds and leave you to compile your book list. So, a few thoughts on growing food. The most important thing is simple: grow only what you like to eat. If you loathe Brussels sprouts or parsnips, don’t waste your time or space on them. A great deal of the “skill” in gardening is vigilance, and you’re unlikely to spend time communing in the garden with a despised vegetable that you’d rather not see on your plate.
If you are lucky enough to have a big garden, grow your vegetables as near to the house as possible. You’ll visit them more frequently, and be more inclined to run out and pick some things for dinner (while squishing a few aphids and sending the occasional snail to meet its maker). Almost all food crops require several hours of sunlight, so shady plots and positions under trees aren’t going to work.
In other words, your vegetables may want the best spot in your garden – or indeed, the only spot in your garden. Don’t be afraid to give in to them.
They can be wonderfully decorative: towering bean vines spotted with red blooms, crowds of leeks erupting in blue-green fountains, monstrous courgettes carpeting the ground with bristly leaves and taut fruits – and all (as you must remind yourself frequently) nurtured by your own hands.
I’m a great fan of raised beds, as they put manners on the most unruly of vegetable patches. If they are narrow enough, you need never walk on them, which means that the soil doesn’t get compacted. They may be simply built from wood such as scaffolding planks (which will decay after a few years).
Or they may be more permanent, and constructed from bricks, blocks, cut stone, pressure-treated “railway sleepers” (not real railway sleepers, which may contain toxins), or whatever takes your fancy. Each bed should be no wider than 1.2m (four feet), and, if you have space, the paths between should be broad enough to walk on comfortably. You can make the beds as long as you like, but remember that you probably won’t be able to reach across, so will have to walk around in order to get to the other side. Draw the design on paper first, and mark it out on the ground with pegs and string before you commit it to reality.
Individual beds also make it easy to rotate your crops. Rotation is a tedious, but essential idea, and there’s no interesting way to explain it quickly. If you grow the same crops on the same ground year after year they will fall prey to pests, diseases and – possibly – nutrient deficiencies.
Members of the onion, brassica and potato families (the latter includes tomatoes, peppers and aubergines) are especially vulnerable. There are complicated rotation methods, but the easiest is a three-year plan for each bed, where you grow brassicas (the cabbage clan) one year, potatoes and non-brassica roots (beetroot, carrot, parsnip) the next, and onions, legumes and everything else the third. Lettuces can usually be slotted in wherever there’s room. Having said all that, I don’t quite manage to follow this plan myself, but I do move things around in a well-meaning way.
Some vegetable gardeners are keen on digging over the ground every year, to let the frost break up the clods. I’m dead set against this, as I believe that it destroys the structure of the soil, and upsets the gazillions of beneficial creatures that live there. Instead, we pile a few centimetres of compost on top of the beds in autumn and let the worms do the work (“we”, I must tell you, usually means my friend, Grainne, who has helped me out since I acquired a dodgy ankle a couple of years ago). The worms bring the compost down, dig it in for us, and aerate the soil nicely with their tunnels.
If you’ve never grown vegetables before, start with something easy – not cauliflower or aubergine, unless you’re up for a challenge. Potatoes are generally trouble-free if you grow “first earlies” (which are ready to harvest before blight appears), or one of the new blight-resistant Hungarian Sarpo varieties. These also are undemanding: beetroot, chard, spinach (not for dry soil), turnips and swedes (harvest small while sweet and winsome), most salad crops (if you can protect them from slugs and snails) and runner beans (ditto, during the young and vulnerable stage).
Read the instructions on the seed packet, sow little and often, weed frequently, keep notes and keep off the soil. Grow well.
DIARY DATE
GARDEN DESIGN WORKSHOP WITH MARY REYNOLDS
Chelsea gold-medallist Mary Reynolds, who is known for her naturalistic and sculptural landscape designs, is offering a one-day workshop to 10 participants at Monart Destination Spa in Wexford (where she also designed the gardens, pictured above).
The event requires some preparatory work, and takes place on March 7th and 8th. It includes two nights accommodation and one dinner, and costs €555 (based on two people sharing). For details: 053-9238999; www.monart.ie