Sussed girls everywhere are already savvy to the benefits of growing their own vegetables – knowing how exactly your food's been grown, the minimal food miles, and the just-picked freshness all make it a no-brainer – but with so many of us living in cramped city apartments or terraced housing, who has the space to grow anything? Reader, I bring you: the window-ledge gardener.
I won't lie to you. Most plants prefer to be outside, where they can get fresh air and get their roots out endlessly. There are some plants (garlic, for example, or Brussels sprouts) which actually taste better after they've lived through a ground frost, something they can't get if they're indoors.
But, you shouldn't allow these minor considerations to stop you growing your own in whatever limited space you have. The joy of gardening can be yours, regardless of whether you live in 17 acres of grounds at Kewstoke, or a back-to-back terraced house in Bradford.
If you're stuck for space, what you really want are things that grow upwards, producing lots of fruit or veg from a single stem. In this article, I'm going to concentrate mainly on growing potatoes, which grow downwards rather than up, and can be planted in a fairly small space. If you've very little space – only a doorstep's worth or less – it's worth thinking about planting seeds for things like purple sprouting broccoli or Brussels sprouts in a seed tray on a window ledge.
If you haven't got any outdoor space, tomatoes and chillies can be entirely grown indoors, and can be started in seed trays now. The tail end of spring and the beginning of summer (early-April to mid-May in the UK) is the best time for planting potatoes, because the risk of frost has passed. You do need a bit of outdoor space for them, but only something big enough for an old dustbin or potato sack, nothing more.
The time-stretched among you will be pleased to find out that they need very little looking after, and that they will grow almost anywhere providing that they have fresh air and sunshine. To start off, you need to 'chit' certified seed potatoes (available in garden centres), in an old egg box. (see picture). Put your seed potatoes in a fairly light place, somewhere indoors, with their 'eyes' facing upwards, and before too long they'll start to sprout little legs. This should take about a week or two.
After you've done this, find some sort of receptacle, like an old hessian sack, or an old dustbin or wheelie bin (see picture). If you're enviably handy, you can fashion a box yourself out of wood. The key things you need in a potato planter are a depth of over 80cm, and good drainage, so that your potatoes don't get drowned in standing water. If your planter is something solid, like a plastic bin, you can drill holes in the bottom to improve drainage, or failing that, smash a load of old crockery or tiles with a hammer and put a couple of inches of the resulting detritus in the bottom.
Potatoes need to be under about 50 centimetres of earth, about 30 centimetres apart. Fill your planter with compost, plant your seed potatoes at a depth of about 50 cm, place in a spot where they'll get a few hours of sunlight a day, and you're good to go. After a couple of months, you'll start to see 'potato flowers' sprouting up. As they grow, make sure that the potatoes underneath are well covered by earth, adding a bit more compost if you need to. If you don't do this, they'll go all green and you won't be able to eat them, and who wants that? Other than that, you really don't need to do much other than watering them every couple of days.
When the potato flowers turn yellow and start to droop over, your potatoes are ready to harvest! Be careful getting them out, because it's all too easy to impale spuds with a spade or trowel – if you can get them out with your hands, so much the better.
Different potatoes mature at different times depending on whether you've chosen an 'early' potato (salad potatoes like Jersey Royal, for example, which mature in July) or a 'late maincrop' variety (which tend to be roasters and bakers like King Edwards or Desiree, and which are ready in late August and early September). One thing is assured, regardless of the variety you choose: you'll be bowled over by how much more potatoey they taste than anything you have ever bought or consumed from a shop. Serious!
Next time I'll be writing about growing tomatoes and chillies indoors, and how to look after your brutes when things go wrong. Until then, happy gardening!