Creating an amazing vegetable garden involves different priorities to other parts of the garden. The gardener will be less concerned with aesthetics and colour and more focused on yield and taste. Having said that there are now people who want to combine their vegetable growing exploits in amongst the rest of the garden, so rather than having a distinct vegetable plot, they will intermingle certain vegetables and herbs in amongst the normal border planting. In that case, looks may be more important than is normal, but for most vegetable gardeners, an attractive vegetable garden is one bursting with healthy plants that are creating a bumper harvest to be enjoyed by everyone at the dinner table.
So here we come to another consideration. If members of the household are to enjoy the output of the vegetable garden, they want to be tasting varieties they actually enjoy eating.
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Cultivating your own vegetables isn’t just a matter of digging over some of your garden, adding some nutrients to the soil and then sowing your seeds. Many crops need to be started in the greenhouse or on a windowsill in seed compost trays.You may wish to try out a few odd and new varieties, after all home grown vegetables typically taste much better than commercially grown offerings. So even if you’ve never liked beetroot from the supermarket for example, you may be pleasantly surprised by your own efforts to grow it at home.
It’s also important to look at the cost of buying verses growing your own vegetables. With food prices on the increase it is now possible to make significant savings by growing your own food. Some will aim to become entirely self-sufficient when it comes to vegetables, but to achieve that all year round will require a degree of experience and some means of growing vegetables indoors during the winter months. A heated greenhouse is not something everyone can aspire too, or even have space for, so we will consider outdoor grown vegetables for the moment.
Almost all the varieties that can grow in the UK climate will be suitable for the home vegetable garden but some will be easier to grow than others. Also the choice of varieties can be important in terms of success rates and of course taste. Let’s look at a few of the more popular vegetables and some of the choices to consider.
Firstly the potato, which many consider to be an essential in any English vegetable garden. The good news here is that potatoes are one of the easiest varieties to grow at home, come in all kind of varieties and will almost always taste significantly better than any bought potatoes. There known to be hundreds of potato varieties that can be cultivated in the UK, so gardeners can enjoy trying something different to the usual King Edward or Maris Piper. When growing your own why not try Osprey, Rooster, Saxon, Romano or Carlingford. To give your potatoes the best chance, purchase your seed potatoes from a good source such as a good garden centre or specialist supplier (you won’t be able to use your shop-bought potatoes as they will have been treated to inhibit sprouting) and make sure your ground has plenty of organic matter such as manure as potatoes one of the very hungriest of vegetables.
Onions are another vegetable that is perfectly at home in an English vegetable garden and makes sense from a practical perspective as it is both easy to grow and store. Again there is a large range to choose from with standard onions of differing strengths, plus shallots, which keep easily, and spring onions for summer salads.
In a future article we will look at other varieties that can be easily become part your vegetable garden including beans, peas, carrots, and cabbage. Planting vegetables and seeing them turn into edible crops is fun, but the real fun and pleasure comes from enjoying the wonderful output of your own vegetable garden.
Starting a home vegetable garden isn’t as simple as picking up your tools, digging and planting some seeds. If you want to have a good harvest at the end of the season, it’s important to do some careful planning before actually growing your vegetables. A vital component in your planning should be the layout for your vegetable garden.
Whether you want to grow a vegetable garden for the cost savings or the health benefits, gardening can be very rewarding. The easiest type of garden bed to start with is a raised bed. It can be made of many different things. My personal favorite are railroad beams. They are a nice height, very workable, and look nice too, but you can make your raised bed out of other things as well as long as they can hold the dirt.