Landshare

If you’re still on the search for your perfect patch, relax. You’ve still time to take the most important step of all: making your wishlist.

Growing magnifies what you do well and what you do less so. Get your wishlist right and you’re well on the way to armfuls of delicious produce, get it wrong and, even if everything grows well, you’ll be disappointed in the kitchen. So, get out your food books, after all the point is getting tasty food to the table and the plants are simply a means to that end.

There is no readymade wishlist for the ideal plot - all the best gardens express the grower’s personality, fit their life, their tastes, and reflect their inquisitiveness, so try to make sure yours does too. What you grow really is up to you, but deciding can be daunting. Here are a few pointers that may help:

Grow what you most like to eat
If your plot is providing you with the food you most enjoy it will justify the time spent out there with your hands in the soil. It may seem obvious, but many people grow what they think they should be growing rather than the food they most like to eat.

Prioritise plot-to-plate winners
Some harvests (such as asparagus, sweetcorn and peas) are delicate and will lose texture, vigour or (most distressingly) their sugars from the second they are detached from the plant. So grow your own and get them from plot to pot as soon as you can - hours are crucial, even minutes for some – and you’ll have the best that anyone can offer.

Prioritise the transformers
Garlic, chillis and herbs may be delicious in their own right, but their great gift is in offering other crops costumes to dress up in, transforming great veg into outstanding meals. Usually, the transformers are expensive to buy, yet easy to grow and take up very little of your precious space. So make room for all the transformers you can - they’ll multiply your kitchen possibilities endlessly.

Prioritise the most ‘expensive’ foods
Once you’ve factored in your time, growing your own may not be the most explosively rewarding economic activity, but that doesn’t mean it can’t knock a hole in your weekly shop or save you the expense of that gym membership. Check what you buy across all four seasons and identify the most expensive. Many are surprisingly easy to grow and are often expensive only because they are limited to a short period of production or are tricky to harvest on a commercial scale. Asparagus is a classic, commanding a high price, yet requiring little more than planting once and keeping reasonably free of weeds.

Challenge your tastebuds
Always grow something you’ve never eaten before. No matter how long you’ve been growing your own, no matter how gargantuan your appetite, there’ll always be something you’ve yet to munch on. You can reliably treat this as a veg patch law: if you haven’t eaten it before it is almost certainly amazing. If you’re new to them, try Jerusalem artichokes, salsify, kai lan and mizuna.

Your plot should also have at least one vegetable that you think you dislike. Homegrown, you’ll have the harvest as its perfect peak – which is often alarming dissimilar to its shop-bought brother. The broadcaster John Peel once said of The Fall that if they were to bring out an album that he didn’t like he’d feel it was somehow a failing in him: I’d urge you to think that way a little about food, and assume that you just haven’t found the way that it’s delicious yet.

Go for variety
A little of lots rather than lots of a little is what you’re after from your veg patch. Sow a broad range of veg and you’ll open up all sorts of kitchen possibilities. You’ll also find that there can be a huge difference between varieties of the same food – Edzell Blue and Pink Fir Apple potatoes for instance, not only look, cook and taste completely different, they are harvested months apart.

Cut down on food miles
Growing everything we eat may not be a realistic option for all of us, but putting a dent in your food-related carbon emissions may be easier than you think. Growing your food organically is the biggest step you can make. If you enjoy fruit normally sourced overseas (like peaches and apricots) climate change is making it easier to grow them here in the UK. In fact, much of the veg we import most frequently can be grown here with ease. Green beans and peas top the list. So, if you like them, grow them for yourself.

Grow something beautiful
A beautiful plot is undeniably more compelling to be in, and anything that ensures you spend time in your plot is worth encouraging. Make room for some flowers, some are edible and most will bring beneficial insects to your patch and encourage the biodiversity that should underpin any piece of the planet, however small. You’ll soon find your patch the place you most want to be for your morning coffee, to read to your Sunday paper, or to sip that early evening cider.

Grow through the seasons
Some gardeners treat their patch a little like their tent – happy to enjoy it in the sunnier months and even happier to pack it away as the nights draw in. There is absolutely nothing wrong with taking this approach, but do it consciously. Many is the allotmenter who tidies away the last bedraggled courgette and squash plants wondering what’s coming next to find themselves with nothing to follow. The harvests of the colder months – the purple sprouting broccoli, salsify and giant red mustard leaves are a match for the best of Summer, so I’d encourage you to plan and plant for the whole year.

Get some seed catalogues
Catalogues aren’t just the source of your seeds – they’re the inspiration for trying new foods, different varieties, and for stirring up anticipation through the colder months. They’re a kind of menu, the service just takes a little longer so get on the internet, phone suppliers for catalogues and nose around – they’re not all the same.