Home-Grown Flavor for Every Season

Rob Smith’s Expert Advice for Growing What You Eat

Interview by Sasha Frate | Introduction by Ainsley SchoppeL

Based near Sheffield, UK, Rob Smith is a passionate fruit and vegetable gardener and columnist for several national gardening magazines. He has also made television and radio appearances, sharing gardening advice from sowing and planting to pickling and preserving crops. With Video Grow Guides on his prolific website, Rob also shares seasonal and plant-specific advice for both new and experienced gardeners. With month-by-month steps to show you what you should be doing for your indoor and outdoor plants, Rob ensures you’ll be ready to grow and harvest your crops at the right time. And, with delicious fruits and vegetables at your fingertips, Rob also provides free downloadable recipe cards to help you savor all your hard work. A true guru of all things home-garden, Face the Current was thrilled to speak with Rob about choosing the best fruit and vegetable varieties, including heirloom options; the importance of knowing when to harvest; learning about and experimenting with crop preservation methods; and how to find the balance between helpful and harmful garden insects.

From your inspirational childhood helping your granddad to where you are today, how did your passion for gardening and devotion to sharing your experience with others evolve?

To be honest, I think I’ve always been interested in how people grow differently and share experiences. From multi-sowing beetroot seeds in modules and growing peas closely together in a tray to plant out as bare root plants, there are so many ways to grow— it just depends on what works for you. I think when you grow on an allotment or community garden, it allows you to just have a chat about what you are doing, then this leads to sharing knowledge over the garden fence.

Running your whole growing operation is a feat in itself that demands a lot of time. What led you to want to take the extra time to share with others all of your efforts, tips, and garden advice?

I love to see people succeed in gardening as there’s nothing worse than spending all season growing something for it to fail—that’s why I always like to share nuggets of information that can help people get the most from what they grow. In return, I learn so much back from people, especially on social media— when you share an idea, you get so much back from the gardening community.

For people interested in growing more of their own food but concerned about the time involved, what are some of your tips for experiencing this lifestyle while making it doable for those who don’t have a lot of spare time?

Consider gardening with a friend or family member—this makes the whole experience more social and enjoyable. After all, you want to enjoy your time with nature, growing organic, sustainable food; it shouldn’t feel like a job and you shouldn’t dread tending your plants. If you want to garden alone and have little time, consider easy-to-grow plants that take little care, such as fruit trees and perennial vegetables–they are planted once and will crop for decades. Grow what you eat, not what you think you should be growing. The idea is to grow-to-eat, so if you love spicy food, grow a selection of chillies on the windowsill. You need to enjoy what and how you grow, and that will encourage you to grow more.

Some of your self-descriptors include “kitchen gardener” with a “love garden lifestyle”. What do you consider a kitchen gardener to be, and how would you describe this “love garden” lifestyle?

To me, a kitchen gardener is someone who predominantly grows food for consumption, with a few flowers thrown in there for good measure. I’m inspired by the old Victorian walled gardens of yesteryear, where vegetables and fruit were beautifully grown together with flowering plants, not the giant monocultures we see today where there are fields upon fields of the same crop. To me that goes hand-in-hand with the garden lifestyle, because I love to be outside! No matter the weather, you will find me doing something in the garden and connecting with nature, from leaving old bits of string outside for birds to use as nest material in spring, to making sure I leave the spent sunflower heads in the ground in autumn for the birds and squirrels to eat. Don’t get me wrong, you’ll also find me barbequing in the garden every night during the summer, and enjoying a glass or two of wine while planning what I need to do the next day. It’s all about loving and living in your space.

This notion of “grow your own” food has become increasingly important even in the simple sense of how our food systems have made us lose touch with where our food comes from, and how it was grown. When in control of your own garden and food, you can even impact the nutrient density of your food, harvesting, consuming, and preserving it at its pique ripeness while caring for the soil throughout the entire process. What are some of your tips for this aspect?

To me, a kitchen gardener is someone who predominantly grows food for consumption, with a few flowers thrown in there for good measure. I’m inspired by the old Victorian walled gardens of yesteryear, where vegetables and fruit were beautifully grown together with flowering plants, not the giant monocultures we see today where there are fields upon fields of the same crop.

Harvesting your crops at the right time is key to getting the most from them. Take sweetcorn for example: if harvested and not eaten quickly, most will start to turn starchy and lose their sweetness, showing how vital it is to harvest and eat or cook your crops as quickly as possible. The same goes for fresh peas: they are as sweet as sugar when you pick them, but become bland and starchy a day or two later.

In addition to nutrient density improving from growing your own food and/or sourcing from local farms, the ability to access more heirloom varieties is also a plus! What are some heirlooms you grow and what do you love about them compared to their “mainstream” counterparts?

Flavours, colours, and shapes all play a part in what I grow in the garden, so what’s not to love about some of the amazingly coloured tomatoes and carrots, or the flavour of some squash and pumpkins? Honeyboat squash are a particular favourite of mine, as they taste and have the texture of a sweet potato, yet are easier to grow and crop more for us here in the UK. Plus, I love the fact you can bake them and eat the skin like a baked potato! Tomatoes are another favourite of mine, with so many small breeders specializing in heirloom varieties that will blow your socks off! Gargamel is a great tomato with a beautiful flavour, plus it looks amazing with its orange and black-flecked skin, bursting with anthocyanin and flavour. Rosella is a smaller, brown/purple-skinned cherry tomato that has a compact habit, making it easier to grow in a small greenhouse. It has a deep, rich flavour that’s almost like blackberries!

Bugs are often thought of as pests, and in fact many can be in the garden!

You welcome beneficial insects into your garden with your handcrafted insect hotel, using things such as sticks, twigs and leaves, cracked plant pots, bits of wood with holes drilled in them, canes, pine cones, bee bricks, and a bee bar. Can you share how this works and helps in the garden?

Bug hotels are just a fancy way of saying you provide an environment for insects to find shelter and breed, plus somewhere for them to feed, stay out of the elements and stay away from predators. By encouraging as many insects to the garden as possible, your mini ecosystem will find its own balance, so you won’t be overrun with aphids as you’ve provided an environment to encourage predatory insects like ladybirds and hoverflies. It’s all about finding balance and working with nature, rather than trying to bend it to your will or steamroller over everything you don’t like. Speaking of variety, you have such an incredible array of colors, shapes, and sizes of so many different foods! What was your process for curating such a wide variety, and do you tend to keep growing the same selection each year? tastes better than what I grew last year. If something doesn’t grow well for me, I’ll give it a second chance if I really want to try it, but if not, I’ll try something different. There are so many varieties of vegetables out there to grow, you couldn’t get through them all in a hundred years!

You write for several national gardening magazines and have featured on TV! What are some of your favorite topics to write and speak about?

I love to grow as many different colours and flavours as I can, after all you eat with your eyes and I want people to leave my garden and my table, thinking, “That looked as good as it tasted.” There are the odd things I like to grow each year, such as the Honeybot squash and the jumbo cloved Elephant garlic, but everything else is up for change if I find something I think looks or

I love to talk about growing what you eat. You shouldn’t feel you need to grow certain crops just because someone else is, or the fact you’ve read you should. If you only like strawberries, grow strawberries; after all, there are hundreds of varieties you could try. I also like to let people know you don’t have to do it all at once, especially if you’re new to gardening. Start with a small patch, get it cultivated and have veg growing before you start weeding the next patch, otherwise you’ll spend weeks clearing an entire plot without any return, which in turn is disheartening and encourages you to give up. Break your space into different patches and move from one to the next, and if you don’t have the time, you don’t need to grow in them all, just throw some wildflower seeds on the areas you aren’t using and allow nature to use that patch.

Some might almost consider food preservation a “lost art” with so few people knowing how to pickle, ferment, dry, or preserve foods. The convenience of the supermarket carrying non-seasonal foods year round has facilitated this transition away from such an important practice. If more people were to readopt this practice, perhaps even sourcing straight from growers and farmers, what would you recommend as some of the top foods to harvest or buy in-season and preserve in bulk?

Tomatoes have to be number one for flavour: they can be canned, turned into soup, sauces, dried, or stored in oil, all giving you a flavour explosion and reminder of summer, even in the depths of winter.

Fruit is great to preserve, be it as a jam, jelly, sauce or juice—they all work well and are bursting with goodness.

When it comes to preserving, I would say I wouldn’t be without my dehydrator—it’s working twenty-four hours a day in the summer, drying fruits and veg to store through the winter and I wouldn’t be without it.

While it varies depending on the climate and region one lives in, for those living with cold winters like yours in the UK, you offer advice on how to keep growing food even in winter months. What are some of your go-to things to grow year round?

You don’t need a greenhouse to grow year round, but it does help! Outside I love to grow brassicas, and if you’re clever about which varieties you grow, you can harvest almost every day of the year. I’m a huge fan of perennial kales, these larger plants aren’t just less affected by insects, they crop three-hundred and sixty- five days a year and last for years; Daubenton’s is my favourite. Oriental leaves and mustard leaves can be a struggle to grow in the height of summer, but early or later in the year they come into their own and will keep cropping for months, even if they get frozen solid they bounce back and are delicious added to soups or winter salads. You really need to look at what grows when, as there are huge variations between varieties and where/when they will grow. If in doubt, ask friends, neighbours, or local Facebook groups what will grow in your area. ymore info: www.robsallotment.com

You do a wonderful job of being really responsive to those who follow you for advice; a true testament to your dedication to sharing your passion and wisdom! Do you currently have, or do you plan to offer any virtual or in-person courses, workshops, or “camps”?

I would love to run courses for people to learn about gardening and growing their own food, however I have so many projects on the go, there just aren’t enough hours in the day. Plus, I find the more you talk about gardening, the less time you actually have to appreciate your growing space and spend time gardening. It’s all about the work/life balance. That said, I do have a couple of top-secret and very exciting projects under way, so watch this space for updates!

IG: @robsallotment