Oaktree Home and Garden

Few of us have been unaffected by the recession, many are looking for ways to save the odd few pence where they can.

Food is often uppermost on our minds, not just eating it but the price of it and ultimately the taste of the cooked product.

Faced with the choice of shopping at the large supermarket chains or driving miles out into the country in the hope of finding a roadside stall advertising home grown produce accompanied inevitably by an empty honesty box, we tend to choose the supermarket and put up with the bland taste and regular shaped fruit and veg that has travelled many miles across land and sea to tempt our gastric juices.

There is an alternative, Grow Your Own, the Queen is doing it, or at least her gardeners I suspect are the main labour force involved, Mrs Obama is reputed to be growing for the White House and even Gordon Brown is rumoured to have removed his suit and started digging, that may be his escape plan rather than digging for victory.

As a gardener all my life it is a regular job in the garden, preparing the vegetable plot, growing the plants, a few at a time, there are only so many lettuce leaves you can consume in a week, planting them out, pruning the fruit trees and bushes for optimum cropping and enjoying the mature produce during the summer and autumn months. It does not have to end in the autumn, there are plenty of vegetables that can be grown and harvested in the Winter and early Spring.

There is nothing more rewarding than harvesting Brussels Sprouts early on Christmas morning in readiness for the feast ahead and surely there is a place on the table for some of the small fruits preserved in the autumn and made into jelly, jam and pies.

A large garden is not necessarily a requirement for growing your own produce. A small fee to the local council will enable you to rent an allotment, either half size or full size, the latter usually being too big for many people to manage. In recent months applications for allotments have been tremendous so get your application in quickly.

Even those without gardens or who do not want the bother of an allotment can grow vegetables, fruit and herbs. A container with some potting compost and a packet of seeds will take up little room on the balcony of a flat and the great thing is you don’t have to walk very far to harvest your product.

Most of the pound shops that have appeared on our High Streets stock the containers in various shapes and sizes. I recommend a long trough for planting a variety of herbs in, again this takes up minimum space and can even be sited on a wall by using two brackets.

Similarly a hanging basket, which again only requires a bracket, can be planted with the tumbling tomato varieties which will produce masses of small cherry tomatoes that hang from the basket like bunches of grapes. Three plants will suffice around the edge of a standard 12″ or 14″ basket, the centre of the basket can be planted with herbs such as parsley or sage giving the basket character as well as a practical use.

There are many space saving items for growing your own crops, two more that come to mind are the potato tubs and strawberry planters.

With the information above why not give it a go and join the ever growing band of self sufficient food producers.

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Posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 16:44 in Help and Advice in the Garden, Hints and Tips, In the Garden, Seasonal Summer. Tagged: allotment, brussels sprouts, fruit, fruit trees, Gordon Brown, grow your own, hanging basket, harvest, herbs, home grown, jam, jelly, lettuce, local council, Mrs Obama, parsley, potato tubs, Queen, recession, sage, strawberry planter, supermarket, trough, vegetable plot, vegetables Subscribe to comments RSS 2.0 feed. Respond, or trackback.