Growing Vegetables features clear, beginner-friendly guides on how to grow popular crops in the UK. Learn when to plant, how to care for vegetables through the season, and how to improve yields in gardens and allotments.
The best bee friendly plants for UK gardens are single, open-faced flowers that bloom across as much of the year as possible: lavender, borage, catmint, foxgloves and hardy geraniums for the main season, hellebores and pulmonaria for the hungry early spring, and ivy and sedum for autumn. Skip the frilly double-flowered varieties, because they carry … Read more
The best place to buy seeds in the UK depends on what you are buying. For sheer range and reliability, Thompson and Morgan is the company I order from most. For rock-bottom prices on everyday vegetables, no-frills online packet sellers and the seasonal seed racks in discount stores beat everyone. For unusual varieties worth paying … Read more
Broad beans are sown in two windows in the UK: October to November for an overwintered crop that picks in late May, or February to April for a summer harvest six weeks or so later. Sow the big seeds 5cm deep and about 20cm apart in double rows, give the plants a simple string support … Read more
Garlic is one of those crops that makes you feel like a proper gardener for almost no effort. You push a single clove into the soil in autumn, more or less forget about it over winter, and the following summer you dig up a fat bulb of home-grown garlic that knocks the socks off anything … Read more
Lavender is the plant people most often ask me about, and the one they most often kill. There is a particular sort of disappointment that comes from planting a lovely young lavender in spring, watching it flower beautifully through summer, and then finding it brown, woody and half dead the following spring. I have had … Read more
Thyme is the herb I recommend to people who think they cannot grow herbs. It genuinely thrives on neglect. The worst thing you can do to thyme is treat it kindly, because the kindness usually involves rich soil and regular watering, both of which it hates. My oldest thyme plant has been going for over … Read more
The first three rosemary plants I bought all died in their first winter. Not because of frost, although that is what I assumed at the time, but because they had been sitting in waterlogged Oxfordshire clay since October and the roots had simply rotted. By the time spring came around they looked fine on top … Read more
Coriander has caught me out more times than any other herb. Twenty-odd years of growing it in Oxfordshire and I still occasionally end up with a patch of plants that bolts to seed after a fortnight, leaving me with thin yellow stems and white umbellifer flowers instead of the bushy leafy plants I was hoping … Read more
Chives were the first herb I ever grew successfully. Twenty-odd years on, I still rate them as the easiest, most forgiving plant in any UK garden. Mine come up every March without me doing anything, crop until October, and disappear quietly back into the soil for winter. There is no fussing, no rescuing, no propagation … Read more
