Growing your own food and growing organically.

So you want to grow your own food. Why? Isn't there enough in the supermarkets for you to buy every week?

Actually if there were ever a major problem in this country such as another fuel protest,   a terrorist strike or a major weather interruption that paralyses the road network how will the food get delivered?

The food supply would probably run out within 3 days, not one bean on the shelves of our favourite supermarket within 3 days. That is a frightening thought and can be backed up with hard facts but basically all of the big supermarkets are run on a “need it now” or “just in time” system.

This has come about because the tills are all computerised and they can tell the managers what stock they have left at any given moment so when it gets to a pre determined level that product is re ordered. Take for instance milk. That is ordered certainly every day if not more than once a day where as say tofu might not be ordered every week or even every month.

Other reasons for wanting to grow or rear your own food are:
1, To enjoy it
2, You know it's organic
3, It's there when you want it
4, it's not subjected to many, many food miles. If you grow your own fruit and veg they have food metres not miles or kilometres.

Obviously at the moment I cannot grow all my own fruit and veg but after 1 year I have been about 40% sufficient and we eat a lot of veg. In general we have a cooked meal approximately 5 times a week and at each meal there is at least 5 different veg with sometimes 7 different veg. All of these are seasonal so no air miles bringing me green beans from Zambia when I can go into the back garden and pick enough veg for a meal for how ever many people are at our home.

This was my first year in growing a lot of my veg and I just stuck in as many plants as I could in the available space to get as much produce out of the given soil area. I found out that this could be better planned for a number of reasons. Firstly weeding, I was on my hands and knees having to weed in between each plant, which is ok because once I was down I, was able to shuffle about but it would have been easier and faster if I had been able to use a hoe to weed. Secondly we had a massive wind and rainstorm one night and because all the onions were planted so close together the wind and rain pulled them all out of the ground. Consequently all had to be lifted and dried in the first week of July rather than the third week of August so the resulting crop was smaller onions.

Successional sowing

This is where you plant a few plants every few weeks to prolong the cropping season and not get a glut of produce in August. All year round Cauliflowers are an example of this although these are probably hybrid or F1 varieties you can essentially set a few seeds away today then in 7 days sew some more seeds then in 7 days after that sew some more and so on.

After about 6 weeks the first of the cauliflower plants should be ready for planting out in the ground, weather and frost permitting and then every week after that you plant the next lot. When the first lot are ready to eat the second lot of seeds that you had sewn will, in theory be ready the week after and the next the week after that.

If you think that you are going to get a glut of cauliflowers ready at the same time or close together then rather than sew new seeds every week do it every two weeks.

On these pages you will often see me refer to notes and taking notes. Please, please, please get a small notebook or make one from scrap paper (see tutorial section) and take notes. I haven’t got a good memory but even so I didn't take notes and because of this I didn't do the successional planting as well as I could have done.