Grow Your Own Vegetables, Fruit, Herbs & Nuts

There are all sorts of reasons to grow 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.

Grow Your Own – A Collection of Brassicas Fresh from the Plot

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

Grow Your Own for Taste

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 incomparable. 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 sweet yellow Sungold tomatoes from the plant and fresh picked 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 when you grow your own.

Tomatoes with thin skins that would never make it to the supermarket in saleable condition will easily make it home from the vegetable plot.

Articles to Help You Grow Your Own

Garden Advice by Month

This series of monthly guides will help you know what to do now on your plot and what should have been done and is to do. Monthly Gardening, Fruit & Vegetable Growing Advice I'm often asked 'what should I be doing now on the plot and in the...

Vegetable Growing

Vegetable growing - how to grow vegetables, guides & advice, articles. These vegetable growing guides are designed to introduce you to the main facts needed when growing the individual vegetables. In turn the articles lead to further articles...

Fruit Growing

These fruit growing guides are designed to introduce you to the main facts needed when growing the individual fruits. They also link through to other relevant pages on the site. For example - there is a guide on peaches and that leads to an in-depth...

Herb Growing

These articles on herb growing should give you basic guidance to enable you to grow your own culinary and medicinal herbs. For thousands of years people have used herbs to add flavour to foods. Those herbs could be found easily growing wild for...

Nut Growing

Brief Guides to Growing Your Own Nuts These quick guides are designed to introduce you to the main facts needed when nut growing. They also link through to other relevant pages on the site. Growing nuts is not a short term proposition. Often it can...

Vegetable Show Growing

Once you've got the basics of vegetable growing under your belt, you might fancy growing for show. Vegetable show growing is a great hobby. Sometimes it's just a bit of fun competition on the allotment site or at a village show where the top prize...

Container Growing

Most gardeners grow in containers, a hanging basket or a pot on a patio is container gardening. Indoor herb growing in containers is common as well but vegetable growing in containers is not so common. Yet if you don't have enough space for a...

Greenhouse Growing

Greenhouse Gardening & Growing, Glasshouses, Hothouses and Coldframes Once you have a greenhouse, you wonder how you ever grew without it. They enable you to extend the growing season for outdoor crops and to grow crops that are too tender to survive...

Polytunnel Growing

Polytunnel Growing is a great alternative to greenhouse growing where funds are limited. If you have the room and money for both a greenhouse and a polytunnel then you can really motor in the garden. Extend the growing season, produce salad crops throughout...