What kinds of food should you grow?

In the UK, we are extremely lucky: these days, our climate supports a wide variety of crops. We won’t be harvesting avocados or dragon fruit any time soon, but don’t let that stop you – once you understand what you can grow easily and naturally right outside your house, I promise that you’ll start to rethink your eating habits (and for the better, too). British gardening isn’t all about cabbages and apples, though you may be surprised at the delicious new varieties of cabbage and apple you have access to when you grow them yourself.

There are so many kinds of food available to grow that it can be difficult to decide where to start. To narrow things down, here are five simple questions to ask yourself as you shop for seeds and plan your garden.

A basket of courgettes, cucumbers and tomatoes
Growing so many cucumbers has encouraged me to think about them differently. They are sweet, crisp, and melon-like. I eat them whole like apples, or make jars of simple pickles that I add to salads for months afterwards.

What do you like to eat?

There’s no point growing things you don’t like! The wonderful thing about growing food you enjoy is that you get to try it in its highest quality form: completely fresh, with sugar and nutrient levels exactly as nature intended. When I first tried a strawberry picked in early summer – creamy, sweet, warm – I realised that this was how they were meant to be eaten. No wonder I wasn’t fond of supermarket strawberries bought in December…

You may also get to try varieties that you can’t buy. I love mangetout peas, but the only way to get my favourite variety Bijou – a giant sugar pea – is to grow it myself. I only discovered it because the lovely people at Real Seeds decided to stock it. Otherwise I’d just be eating limp little green mangetout from Sainsbury’s.

Growing food is rewarding, but it also has its challenges. You’ll be so much more invested in growing crops if you are looking forward to the final result.

What do you buy most?

The fruits and vegetables you buy most often should form the backbone of your planting plan. When I first started gardening, I figured I could buy things like carrots and potatoes so cheaply that I was better off devoting growing space to more unusual things. Then I tried them fresh and realised how wrong I was. I absolutely could not buy that flavour, texture or experience. Carrots are so full of herby, earthy flavour and sugar when they are first picked that it seems wicked to eat them so old, as we often do. Whether you roast, boil or fry potatoes that have just been cooked, they are moist, rich and buttery. Fresh veg of any kind will spoil you for their supermarket counterparts.

Once you have a list of your most used crops, think about whether you have the space to grow a useful volume of them. This particularly applies to peas and sweetcorn (you’ll need at least a metre square to grow a grid of sweetcorn plants). A pod of fresh, sweet peas is abolutely delicious, but you only get about five in a pod and thus it takes a considerable amount of space to grow a mere bowl full of peas. I don’t have this space, so I grow mangetout and sugar snap peas instead, of which I can grow plenty.

Don’t forget to factor fruit into this equation. If you love apples, pears and plums, consider whether you have space for trees, and look for varieties that store well. Nobody ever regrets putting in a strawberry bed – you’ll need at least a square metre for the kind of crop that saves money, but a single plant will still supply you with the euphoria of fresh, warm strawberries.

What will save you the most money?

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You should also consider growing crops that are expensive to buy in shops, or that you simply cannot buy in shops. This is one of the many reasons that I grow so many heritage tomatoes. I couldn’t afford to buy them by the tray, but I can certainly grow them. The colour and flavour is vastly superior to supermarket tomatoes. There’s nothing more disappointing than spotting an unusual tomato in shop, then picking it up to find it is so soft that it is almost mush. A good tomato is plump, its flesh succulent and firm.

Salad, spinach and other greens can be a big money saver, too. Having your own supply means no more throwing out soggy, half-used bags of leaves that are past their sell-by date just a few days after opening. Garden-fresh lettuce, on the other hand, will keep up to a week in your fridge.

What would be most convenient to have in the garden?

If you eat a salad every day or enjoy adding greens to your smoothies, it will be convenient for you to grow those greens. Why go to the shops a few times a week for fresh leaves when you can just pop outside and have the crispest greens possible, every day?

If you cook with herbs a lot, grow them close to your back door.

Berries like strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and blueberries are a good option if you’re trying to eat more fruit. Even if you only have a handful ready, that’s a handful to add to breakfast cereal or smoothies every morning, or to eat with yoghurt as a snack. I also like to add them to crumbles and cakes when I’m using up apple gluts.

I find crops like potatoes and beans especially convenient as they are so filling. When I pop out to the garden to investigate dinner options, between the potatoes and other veg, I can quickly assemble a hearty meal.

A handful of glossy red strawberries
An early crop of strawberries, harvested in the polytunnel in May (early peas in the background)

How much space do you have?

We all have to decide on our gardening priorities, no matter how big our growing spaces are. If you are limited on space, consider what will give you the most bang for your buck. This is about perspective: if you have a big allotment, you could try growing a chunk of your vegetables for the year, but if you have a balcony or patio with pots, you can grow a lot of your salad for the year and that will still make a big difference to your pocket and the quality of food that you eat.

If you want to make better use of the space you have, consider vertical gardening over arches, on self-built structures, or along fences. I use trellis wire to grow peas, beans, sweet peas, grape vines and cucumber vines along my fences. I build teepees with canes and string for more beans and peas, and I grow pumpkins and squash over an arch. Vertical gardening can add interest and layers of colour to your garden along with convenience.

You don’t have to have the answers to all of these questions now. The truth is that they are likely to change year on year. Feel free to experiment, and when you are mulling over plans for the next season, come back to these points again. Remember: you can learn a lot about your garden by failing!

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