Gardening – Easy Veg Growing

Continued on page 22 20 Use Locally - Partners with Invest Newark & Sherwood, the business arm of NSDC Use Locally - Issue 83 March 2020 This is a perfect time to get to grips with some ‘Grow Your Own’ and make growing your own vegetables easier than you might think! Start by deciding on what you’d like to eat, picked fresh from your garden over the coming year. Think salads, herbs and classic main meal vegetables because there is still time to grow just about anything you please. Some vegetables are best grown from seed – the classics are carrots; with those long, ¿HVK\URRWVWKH\VLPSO\KDWH being transplanted, so grab a packet of seed and as soon as the soil is not too wet sow a row or two. You can always choose interestingly coloured varieties such as ‘Purple Haze’ or ‘Purple Dragon’ if you want to ring the changes or persuade a less-than-eager family member to give carrots another chance. Salad leaves cost a fortune when sold in packets and are often none too fresh, so sow a few rows or pots of these too and within a few weeks they’ll be growing strongly enough IRU\RXWRKDUYHVW\RXU¾UVW delicious meal. If you make small sowings every two weeks or so you can ensure a pretty well continuous supply of salad throughout the summer and well into autumn. If you’ve got a warm, sunny spot in your garden, or, better still, a greenhouse or frame, WKHQLWµVGH¾QLWHO\ZRUWKJHWWLQJ some tomatoes. These too can be raised from seed but if you’re only after a few plants, and especially if you’d like to have a few different varieties, then it’s often better value (and a lot easier) to buy yourself some small gardenready plants. Make sure you get the right sort for the accommodation you’ve got to offer – catalogues or labels should clearly state if they’re for ‘greenhouse’ or ‘outdoor’ growing. You can grow cucumbers from seed, but the seeds are generally extremely pricey and not the easiest to germinate, so speed things up with a couple of chunky plants instead. For growing in the garden choose ‘ridge’ cucumbers, as these perform better outside. If time is short then vegetable plants are a great choice for most crops. You can send off for them now and then you’ve no need to do time-consuming potting on and pricking out. Get them in quantities to suit the size of your plot, and if they come in quantities too large for the space you have available, then share a pack or two with friends and save some cash too! Check what size of plant you’re buying if you choose mail order and go for gardenready sizes if possible – that way you’ll be able to plant them out straight away, or at most grow them on in pots for a couple of weeks. If you send off for vegetable plants make sure you unwrap them the moment they arrive; left in the packaging they’ll soon deteriorate. If you can’t plant them straight away, do so as soon as possible, but water the compost if necessary and pot each root ball into some compost after removing the packaging. At this time of year there is often a lot of rain and wet weather so the soil is really wet. Try covering the soil Easy Veg Growing

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with a polythene sheet or a polythene covered pull-out tunnel for a couple of weeks before your plants are due to arrive, then remove it just before planting out. Similarly, if you are sowing your vegetables from seed then the soil may be too wet for the seed to germinate and they may rot instead. By covering the area where you want to sow, you keep off excessive rain and allow the soil to warm up a little beforehand. When small plants arrive or if you buy them from garden centres and local nurseries they can often still be a little Continued from page 20

Use Locally - Issue 83 March 2020 tender. Make sure that frosts are past before you plant the more tender crops out, and give them a chance to gradually acclimatise to their new surroundings by covering WKHPZLWKFORFKHVRU¿HHFHIRU a few days. If you’ve ever struggled to grow your own vegetables from seed or from plants bought in the garden centre, I’ve got a great solution: ‘Grow Your Own with Pippa Greenwood’ is perfect for anyone who needs a bit of help and advice. Visit my website www.pippagreenwood. com and you can choose from a good selection of great quality and UK-grown gardenready vegetable plants. Once the plants have been delivered you’ll get weekly emails from me telling you just what you need to do to prepare the ground and how best to plant and look after your growing vegetables. The at-yourelbow-advice emails will be full of timely reminders, hints and tips, and will only be about the crops you have bought. This saves you time, and makes it much easier to get a good and seriously tasty crop from your plants.

By Pippa Gre enwood

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