Growing Your Own Food - How Hard Can It Be?

I’m sadly going to have to keep this post brief as well as I have a deadline this week which is taking up all of my time.

So it has been spring for about two weeks now and the weather is starting to warm up, in the UK at least. The growing season is starting and you don’t have to have a huge garden to be able to grow some of your own food.

I have already touched on the environmental costs it takes to be able to put food on the table, with transport and land clearance etc. I thought it might be a good time to remind everyone that you can always grow your own. The average family only needs half an acre of fertile land to be self-sufficient if they do it properly. However that also requires a lot of time and effort which the majority of people don’t have freely available, so there are a few ideas of plants which are tough, easy to grow and taste great.

Potatoes would be one of the first plants I suggest you grow, I mean if Matt Damon can grow them on Mars how hard can it be?  But seriously potatoes are a good crop to start with, which you can do so much with and a great healthy source of nutrition. To plant potatoes all you need is some space or a large bag of soil, try to remove most of the larger stones and place a potato which has developed eyes on it about 15cm below the surface. You should try to water them as regularly as possible and the muddier the better when it comes to potatoes, but you can easily get away with watering them twice a week if you can’t find the time. The final good thing about potatoes is that if you grow a large amount you only need to keep them in a cool dark place and this will keep them fresh for a long time.

Another easy type of plant to grow would be either runner beans or broad beans; these can even be grown in compost bags. All you

have to do is lay the bag on its side then cut a few holes in it and place some form of structure there which the plant stem can grow up. Again these are hardy plants that don’t necessarily need watering every day and a couple of times a week would be suitable.

The final easy plant to grow I would suggest is lettuce, they can be grown in small plant pots even on a kitchen window sill if you don’t have the space outside. They are great to have around as you can just picking a few leaves of at a time to put in your sandwiches or a salad.

Growing your own veg is a fun and an activity you can sharing with your children for instance, and you gain a real sense of achievement when you sit down to a meal eating something you’ve grown in your own back garden or window ledge, and anything you grow will not have create any pollutants to get to your table.

Hope you have a good time growing.

Thanks for reading!

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