Growing vegetables to save money
21.08.2023 - 12:00
/ theunconventionalgardener.com
/ Emma Doughty
If you’ve just decided to grow your own vegetables to save money, then where do you start? A visit to the garden centre, or a quick flick through the seed catalogue, can be daunting – especially if you don’t have a lot of space for your vegetable patch. What’s going to give you the most bang for your buck?
Salads
Salad leaves are one of the easiest crops to grow, don’t take up much space and can provide a big return on your initial investment. For the price of one of those bags of packed salad in the supermarket, you can buy a packet of lettuce seeds that will keep you in lettuce all summer – or even longer. And if you want a more exciting salad you can buy salad seed mixes. The best varieties to go for are the ones described as ‘cut and come again’, which means that you can harvest leaves as and when you need them over several weeks, rather than having to pull up a whole lettuce at once. Salad leaves do well in containers, too, as long as you water them regularly.
Stir-fries
Another leafy crop that’s easy to grow and does well in small spaces is leaves for stir-fries. Again, you could grow a single crop like spinach or pak choi, or a ready-made mix. If you can sow a few seeds every couple of weeks then you’ll have fresh supplies throughout the summer and right into the autumn.
Tomatoes
If summer wouldn’t be summer without juicy, ripe tomatoes, then trying growing your own. Cherry tomatoes are sweet and tasty and very easy to grow. The plants are bushy, ideal for containers and crop earlier and for longer than plants with larger fruits. They’re also bushy, which means you don’t have to worry about supporting them or pinching out the side shoots to keep them under control. A packet of seeds will last you for several years,
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