Grow Your Own Fruit and Vegetables
In December I officially moved up to where I live now, which includes a garden. It’s been a hard job with our garden as it’s been highly neglected over the years and just had rubbish, bricks, bin bags etc. just dumped and covered in the ground. We’ve done a fair whack of work on it with spending as little as possible, afterall it’s not our garden. In the winter time my Dad gave us 6 raspberry canes to plant, then in April a few lettuces and some herbs. The lettuces have now been eaten (!) and I’m well on the way to growing a load more. The raspberries are starting to grow fruit, oh and he also gave us a strawberry pot which has a few green strawberries on as we speak.
However I’ve realised this year how easy it actually is to grow your own fruit and veg. Okay within reason here, but for example – we chucked a load of fruit and veg peelings and ‘gone off’ bits out into the ground below our herb garden, naively thinking they’d decompose in a few weeks! However a month later we had a plant growing that I realised wasn’t a weed but a potato plant. So that was dug up carefully and replanted. It’s now half a metre tall and going strong. So we decided to dig up another area and plant some old potatoes in there, and they’re all growing healthily. I don’t know how many potatoes we’ll get off each but we have 8 plants growing now so that should give us at least 2-3 months worth of potatoes. Not bad for something we’d have thrown out eh. The lettuces are even more of a bargain. You only need one seed to grow a lettuce, and there are a good hundred in a sachet! That’s like 10 years worth of lettuces!! We have some rocket, mixed leaves and baby gems on the go at the moment, 4 of each, sown every fortnight so that once they’re ready to pick we have a steady stream of them for a while.
Next week we’ll also be adding a tomatos, melons and peppers to the garden, again small plants started already by my dad (bless him) ready for us to continue with. I can now see why his garden is so full of fruit and veg (nectarines, figs, strawberries, raspberrys, gooseberrys, blackcurrents, runner beans, peas, potatoes, carrots, garlic, onions, lettuces, tomatoes, peppers, and more and more!). We’ve been spending out so much on fruit and veg which we could be growing for a fraction of the price. And the feeling you get when you eat your own home grown food is great, plus there’s more motivation to eat it as you made it!
So if nothing else, if you’ve got a garden then get an area dug over and throw some potatoes that are starting to sprout in. 6 inches deep, a foot apart, one potato per hole. Water once a night and nothing more!
- June 20th '06