Super Veg 2017 Ornamental Kale

Is growing veg easy? There’s a big trend in the gardening media at the moment promoting growing your own vegetables as easy, or simple. The prevailing wisdom seems to be that, unless you promote something as ‘easy’, people aren’t going to try it. There’s a flip-side to that, of course; if you say something is easy and people try and fail, then they’re not going to want to try it again. Or maybe it’s just because the people writing the articles have been gardening for so long that everything they do has become routine.

Later this year, when the XROOTS experiment comes to an end, NASA’s Veggie growing system will be starting a new challenge. VEG-05 is a long-awaited trial of whether we can grow tomatoes in space – in this case, the dwarf variety Red Robin.

Jill Edmondson, University of Sheffield and Jonathan Leake, University of Sheffield

The last of my root vegetables and Leeks are now consumed and a distant gastronomic memory. New baby salad leaves have been available but I do not take enough care to be able to binge on them until later in the season. Rhubarb once again is prolific and abundant so that I and the neighbours are enjoying the fruit of my labours literally.

There are many families, species and varieties of grass suitable for ornamental purposes. Wether you want a prairie grass-scape, a potted plant or a focal point in a formal garden then there is a grass to suit. Grasses are well suited to a range of landscaping projects.

‘Organic Fruit and Vegetable Gardeners Year, The A Seasonal Guide to Growing What You Eat’ by Graham Clarke

Suttons and Dobies

Think before you allow poppies to proliferate. Poppies rob a lot of goodness from your soil.

After salad crop failures in Spain and shortages of courgettes, broccoli and other ‘long distance’ vegetables gardeners could to worse than focus on traditional and non-traditional root crops.

This is one of the many books in my collection but the only one to focus on growing big, bigger and biggest vegetables. If you want to grow giant vegetable for exhibition or to get large crops then there are many pointers in ‘How to Grow Giant Vegetables’ by Bernard Lavery and below.

You can grow fresh relatively clean vegetables in containers. This is useful for gardeners with restricted space or where you want vegetables close to the kitchen door.

There are as many different vegetable plots as there are gardeners and everyone has its place. My default position is clear, I seek good yield or output from lower effort and less space than in  previous decades.