John & Maria's Garden Pages

Planning ahead for Summer harvests

It's damp and disgusting outside.  Yes. I've got a couple of camellias in flower and Helleborus corsicus has popped out the first flower of the winter but the rest of the garden is a bit bleak.  Just the weather for snuggling indoors thinking about the summer and possible harvests.

I used to have an allotment but age and some physical problems forced me to give it up.  But we missed the fresh flavour of home grown salad and vegetables.  So I looked at the small patio at the end of the rear garden and set up a container vegetable plot atop the bare slabs of a sitting area we hardly ever used.

It's not a large space.  Room for five 140L containers, various potato bags, some smaller 30L containers and a decorative herb bed.  Alongside is a narrow strip under my west garden wall and a 1 metre square raised bed.  We also have summer space for a few tomatoes and chilli peppers under the canopy outside the kitchen.

It's been worthwhile - and also quite decorative.  Take potatoes.  I only grow early and salad potatoes in my half dozen potato sacks.  We don't need a lot for the two of us.  Nothing beats the flavour of new potatoes in early summer or a good salad potato later in the year.  You know they are ready to begin harvesting once the flowers have faded but until then the flowers are actually an attraction.  Here's 'Maris Peer' a good second early:

Leafy greens are always a good bet in a small space, particularly if they can be harvested over a long period, a few leaves at a time.  A small container of lettuce perhaps...

..or a patch of mixed rocket and mizuna leaves in my small raised bed

Just enough to add fresh variety to sandwiches and salads.

On a larger scale black kale adapts well to container growing and is happy to tolerate successional leaf picking.  And it's certainly decorative.

Other suitable container crops require a longer term approach.  I grow garlic in one of my 140L tree tubs.  The cloves are planted in late October, overwinter happily and are ready to harvest in June, just in time for the space to be occupied by a quicker to harvest crop such as the salad leaves above.

Maria loves runner beans.  Picked when young and tender for preference I've not succeeded with them till last summer, young plants succumbing to my ever present slugs and snails.  This year I succeeded.  This is 'Enorma' growing up canes in a tree tub:

Easy to understand why this bean was first grown as decorative climber and only later used for food.

Has it been worthwhile?  Financially, probably not.  Containers aren't cheap though they'll last long.  Compost and fertiliser is quite expensive given the quantities needed to refresh the tubs.  But the convenience of picking absolutely fresh produce for instant use far outweighs the monetary hit.