Chapter One
GROW THE EASY HITS
“A few key vegetables provide the backbone of your food-growing, all year round.”
There are some veg that are so easy to grow that it’s a mystery to me why they’re still on the shelves (and usually at extortionate prices too). These are the self-sufficiency easy hits: the ones you can start growing right now, whether you garden on a windowsill or an allotment.
The best easy hits are with you all year round – the veg-growing equivalent of store-cupboard staples. Even windowsill growers need never be without fresh chillies, coriander (cilantro) and crisp baby-leaf salad to enjoy every day of the year. With a few square feet of outdoor garden, you can add succulent leafy chard and beefy kale as your veg for all seasons. That’s five things crossed off the grocery list already!
This chapter gives you the low-down on the key vegetables you can rely on as the backbone of your food-growing. I’ve given quantities for a typical family of four, but of course if you’re growing for smaller or larger numbers, scale up or down accordingly. All these easy veg are incredibly productive, and the ‘top five’ are always there when you need something to pick – winter or summer. Have these growing somewhere in your garden all the time, and you won’t go far wrong.
YEAR-ROUND PRODUCE
There are two important things to get right if you want to supply a vegetable year-round. The first is quantity: always grow more than you think you’ll need. Growing extras means you’re insured against the cat deciding to sunbathe in your salad-filled window boxes or the entire local slug population descending on your patch of chard seedlings. It also means you can really raid your supplies from time to time, say if you have friends round.
The second nut to crack is your winter supplies. Some leafy veg, like kale and chard (especially the white-stemmed varieties of chard), are resilient enough to keep doggedly growing whether it’s T-shirt weather or finger-numbing frost outside. All you need to do is remember to sow your overwintering crop before the end of the summer. Pop a cloche (row cover) over leafy veg through really foul weather, though: they’ll survive snow, gales and lashing rain, but left unprotected the leaves are often unappetizingly shredded.
Failing year-round hardiness, crops which store well make good staples. Dried chilli peppers, for example, add the same spiciness and flavour to a dish as fresh ones, and keep forever, so you can enjoy that mouth-blistering heat all year round. And there’s a whole range of other veg that are really good keepers, expanding your self-sufficiency repertoire to include almost-year-round staples. In particular, long-keeping winter squash like the ‘Hubbard’ varieties stay as fresh as the day you pick them for 6 months or more. Well-dried shallots store even better than onions, and if you pack root vegetables such as beetroot and turnips into boxes of damp sand, they’ll stay in a state of suspended animation, plump and ready to eat, for up to 3 months after you’ve pulled them.
THE TOP FIVE EASY HITS
These are the five veg I wouldn’t be without. They’re the ones I know I can rely on to keep putting up more leaves, flowers and fruit year-round, even while my attention is elsewhere for a while. All can be grown...
