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Grow Your Own

Guides to Growing Vegetables, Fruit and Herbs

See the individual pages for :

Growing Your Own Vegetables
Growing Your Own Fruit
Growing Your Own Herbs
Growing Your Own Nuts

There are all sorts of reasons for growing your own vegetables, fruit and herbs. The economical amongst us save money by home growing, others worry about the provenance of their food and, by joining the grow your own movement, ensure they know exactly what has gone into and onto the food they grow.

Whatever your reason for growing, you'll enjoy great taste and the satisfaction of looking at a meal thinking "I grew that!"

One area in which shop-bought food, organic or not, cannot compete with home grown is freshness and taste. The taste of sweetcorn picked and cooked just minutes later is incompa- rable. The moment the cob is picked, the sugars start to change to starch and the sweetness is being lost. Freshly picked new potatoes are a delight to the tastebuds, not just a filler on the plate. I've seen children, who normally treat vegetables as if they were poison on their plate, happily eat tomatoes from the plant and peas from the pod.

When a farmer chooses what variety to grow, he looks at a number of factors:

Yield
Suitability for his soil and micro- climate
Regular shape to fit into the supermarket specifications
Whether the crop will ripen at the same time to make harvest easier
How long it can be stored
How easily it will stand up to being transported
Finally, if at all, taste.

When you grow your own, you can choose varieties that farmers would not grow. Not just varieties that taste well but varieties that you personally prefer the taste of. Varieties that mature over a longer period and so provide fresh crops over a period of time.

No longer limited to red or white potatoes or Jersey Royals, you can pick from over four hundred varieties of the humble potato. Tomatoes with thin skins that would never make it to the supermarket in saleable condition will easily make it home from the vegetable plot.