Why grow your own?
One of the best things you can do for the environment is to shorten the distance your food travels from soil to plate. Most of the fruit and veg we buy has been grown hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles away. Then transported by road, sea, and air before it ever reaches your supermarket shelf. All of that journey has a carbon cost. The most effective way to cut those food miles to zero? Grow it yourself.
But if you’ve never grown anything before, the hardest part is often just knowing where to start. So here are five brilliant first-time grows. All easy, all rewarding, and all a great place to begin. So pick your faveorite from the three we’ve chosen below and give it a try!
Herbs – Basil, Mint, Coriander
The easiest and most immediately useful thing you can grow, whatever your space. Here’s the thing about those little herb pots you see by the supermarket checkout, they’re not actually one plant. They’re dozens of tiny seedlings all crammed into one small pot, competing for space, water and nutrients. But here’s the trick: split them up. Tip the whole root ball out, gently pull it apart into three or four smaller clumps and pot each one into its own pot (or toilet roll tubes) with fresh compost. Water them in, put them on a sunny windowsill, and watch them transform. Click here for a video which takes you through the process of turning your doomed super market herbs into a money and planet saving crop!
Spring Onions
A kitchen staple that’s incredibly easy to grow in even the smallest space. Sow seeds in a pot, an old tin, or from june onwards, directly into the ground. Scatter thinly, cover lightly with compost and water regularly. They need very little room and very little attention. Why they’re great: Ready to harvest in around eight weeks, spring onions are one of those grows that make you feel brilliant because they just work. Great for salads, stir fries, and everything in between. Click here for a video on growing spring onions!
Courgettes
Courgettes are maybe one of the most generous and satisfying vegetables you can grow and the best part is, they’re super easy! Push a seed into a small pot of compost on its side and keep it on a warm windowsill. Once it has a couple of leaves, move it outside to a sunny spot. The seeds are best started in april – may but can also be planted in june for a slightly later harvest. Alternativley you can get a young courgete plant from a garden centre. Once you have a young plant, put the it large pot on a patio or straight into the ground both work brilliantly. From August onwards one plant will produce more courgettes than you can keep up with. The more you pick, the more it will produce!
Ready to get started?
The most important thing is just to start. Pick one thing from this list, whichever one excites you most or feels most manageable, and give it a go. Don’t worry about doing it perfectly. Plants are more forgiving than you think, and even the odd failure is part of the process. Every experienced grower has killed a plant or two along the way. But here’s what we know for sure. Once you’ve grown something yourself, harvested it, and eaten it, something changes. It builds a connection with the natural world that’s hard to put into words. And soon one plant becomes two, becomes a windowsill full of herbs, becomes a raised bed, becomes a way of life and that becomes a healtheir planet.
