Grow your own

You can get a substantial amount of information from books, the internet e.g. BBC Gardening, Gardening pages, seed packets and other people.

What are the 5 Ps that I offer?

I will help you through the following stages to:

Plan, Prepare, Plant, Protect and Pick your own vegetables

Plan

• Why do you want to grow your own?
• What do you want to grow?
• When will you find the time for all the stages?
• Where will you grow, now and in the future?
• Who will be able to help you with each of the stages? (Top tip: arrange a ‘digging party’ where you invite friends and relatives to swop their labour for the day in return for your hospitality e.g. beer and barbecue)

Prepare

• Do you want to be fully organic?
• Has the plot been grown on before?
• What is your experience in growing anything?

Plant

I recommend starting simple, choosing from the following list of popular and easy-to-grow vegetables:

lettuce, leek, onion, cabbage, swede, potato, carrot, courgette, peas, spinach.

Once you have the confidence to grow all or some of these, you will be able to go on without any further help to experiment with other vegetables e.g. radish, spring onion, cauliflower, sprout, broccoli, white turnip, beetroot, parsnip, runner beans, broad beans, tomato, cucumber, aubergines, peppers, sweetcorn, squash.

Protect

You will need to look after and nurture your plants, from preparing the soil through to protecting your plants from:

• The weather
• Bugs and diseases
• Animals, birds and people
• Other plants

Pick

At first, this is the best bit, and I would include going back to the planning stage to ensure that your crops don’t all come on the same day, or run to seed when you are away on holiday, or give you too much to eat yourself. You will find that you can freeze, store and give away (or exchange) any surplus so don’t worry about this aspect of the process.

You need to spend some time thinking through your approach to all this, and then plan to book my time over a number of weeks and months as critical interventions in what you will be doing mostly by yourself.

I can guarantee that you will acquire horticultural knowledge and gardening skills and have a great time in the process and that the end product will be organic, wholesome, healthy and full of flavour.

I expect you to become converted for life, as I am.