Kim Stoddart offers ideas to help you grow the crops that work best for you and your garden space
There is so much pressure nowadays to look and be a certain way, and vegetable gardening can also succumb to the weight of tradition, expectation and peer power. From how a garden is structured and managed, to the crops that are grown, there are many perceived ‘must-have’ varieties that one often feels obliged to grow. Yet we are all different, with varying growing conditions and preferences for what we like to eat from the veg plot. I’ve interviewed many gardeners over the years and so often I hear tales of guilt around gluts of unwanted produce that have gone uneaten.
With everything still so expensive to buy in the shops, the last thing we need to do is feel bad that we’ve grown too much of something and it is sitting there slowly rotting away on the ground. Or that our freezer is laden with carrots because we had to put them somewhere, yet we know that those orange horrors are very likely to come back and torment us in the middle of the night with childhood memories of how truly awful frozen carrots can be to eat. Those nightmares will float back in, unbidden, no matter how we try to hide the offending carrots out of sight and mind at the back of the freezer
I’ve been there, done it and have ‘the t-shirt’ when it comes to growing produce because that’s what others expect, because said varieties are deemed a staple that should and must be grown. But now, living in such an exposed spot, 750ft above sea level in the hills of West Wales, has forced me to re-think what was feasible, practical and enjoyable to grow.
I hope that my produce recommendations (and the excellent articles by Andrew Oldham and Bob Flowerdew on pages 48 and 66) will help encourage you to grow the crops that work for you, and which you love eating to make the best use of your precious outside plot.
Cherry tomato varieties
I need tomatoes that are easy to cultivate and which can handle periods of minimal watering and still grow strong. This is why these smaller fruits fit the bill perfectly in my undercover growing space. I cannot grow tomatoes outside because of my location, and I am able to beat the blight with lots of mixed planting in the polytunnels where tomatoes are located a good 6ft (2m) apart. I also trail the stems of the tomatoes along the ground and enable them to develop a second or third set of roots before they are allowed to grow upwards. This means that they can obtain food and water from more than one spot. This process, combined with my mainly no-dig approach, cover crops and mulching, means that they are a lowermaintenance crop with no fertilising or exacting watering requirements - and that’s just the way I like them.
There are so many cherry varieties from which to ch
