Eco Friendly House And Garden

Welcome back, and I hope you are ready for more top tips for your eco friendly vegetable garden!

Moving on from just growing too many in the first place, these next 2 tips cover storage issues and gardening overload!

2)  Where can we put them all?
What could be more disappointing to the end of your growing season than to have runner beans (or whatever you grew too much of) going rotten in the fridge. 

Home grown crops - especially when grown organically - do not have the same shelf life as those brought from super stores.  They are not designed to stay fresh for a week or so for retail purposes, and if picked or dug out of the ground will only last a few days.

Yes, there are many veg that can be stored for months if you do it right, like potatoes and onions for example, but generally everything else needs to be eaten or preserved as soon as possible really - or given away to who ever will take them!

So, you need to learn which crops can be stored for a long time, those which can be frozen, veg that need processing in some way before storing, and which ones only have a short shelf life.  Then plan how many of each you can grow.

Many beans and peas can be blanched before freezing so as to increase the number of nutrients remaining in them, and others need a certain amount of other actions before they are ready for freezing or turning into preserves or chutneys, etc. 

You also need to make sure that you only freeze them in portion size amounts, otherwise when you want to eat them you have to take the whole lot out and smash off the amount you need to cook!

And do you have enough freezer space in the first place?  Most avid vegetable growers need another freezer to store all their summer veg to last them through to the winter!

Planning ahead is the key here - and if in doubt ask someone who is already growing their own crops what they do with all their veg!

3) What a waste of your land:
If you are turning over great swathes of your garden to vegetables because ‘that’s how many seeds there were in the packet’ then you are taking the fun out of your garden.

Imagine the kids playing ball and they keep tripping over plants and cane poles.  You want a few minutes to yourself on the patio but all you can see are plastic bottles and rows and rows of pots and mud!

You won’t get a moments peace either, as you will have so many crops to keep an eye on that you will constantly be out there checking on everything.  When you look out of your windows making your morning coffee - you’ll see something wrong with the plants, or something has fallen over or whatever.

You could end up out there on your afternoon off from work, tending to a huge number of plants that you might not even end up eating (see points 1 and 2).

The Answer?
Growing your own veg should be fun, and if you grow too much of one thing, then you lose that fun. 

Eating artichoke every so often is a nice treat, but when you always have another 2 in the fridge, it loses it’s speciality.  It’s not even fun to eat it anymore.

Also, if you know that you always have more of something growing outside, you may actually care less about each individual vegetable you have indoors.  For example, will you care if one parsnip goes rotten waiting to be eaten in the fridge if you have another 2 meters of them left outside to dig up?  No, you won’t. 

Too much of something actually tends to encourage waste as if you have so much - why does one matter?

This certainly wouldn’t be true if you had brought the parsnips. Every penny counts these days and you can see it when you have brought something yourself out of your wages.  But vegetables you have grown don’t seem to be worth anything, you don’t see the money and energy they have cost.

Your back yard vegetables aren’t free, so don’t treat them as such.  Value them as your time - and your time is worth more than money.

Everyone is thinking about home-grown food now - so here are a few less thought of tips to help you on your way!

We all know to get a water butt and to not use a powerful sprinkler during the heat of the day, so I thought of some less obvious one that can really make a difference.

1) Why Grow Potatoes?
You can grow just about anything these days after a bit of reading up, so why just grow anything?

There are certain vegetables that are very easy to buy at stores and very reasonably priced local foods - so why grow them yourself? Why not focus your time and energy on the foods that you can’t easily get hold of or that are very expensive to buy.

For example a lot of berries and currents are extraordinarily expensive to buy, but you can easily grow your own in a corner of your yard and pick them when you need them. And if you have a small greenhouse or poly-tunnel you could easily be growing things that are not normally found in your local area but are suitable for this environment.

2) Will They Grow Themselves?
There are many crops that need a lot of care and attention to grow from seed or when potting on. There are also many plants that are energy or water intensive.

Think about these restraints on your time and the environmental costs before taking on a demanding crop - don’t just think about the end result.

It is probably a lot less energy-intensive for a large farm to grow such crops and ship them to your store than for every household to try to grow their own. Increasing the scale of production always lowers costs and resources.

Also, out of season crops need more attention as do out-of-environment crops. Out-of-environment crops are those that can’t be grown without plenty or extras - like protection, fertilisers (natural or not) and other considerations.

Basically they are fruits and vegetables that are perfectly suited to a particular environment - which isn’t where you live! So, if you want to try something different that needs more resources, then make sure you put every effort in to nurturing it; hitting a bumper crop and then eating every last piece of edible material it produces!

Seriously, if you are going to be putting 3 months or more of intensive effort into growing vegetable A, then you had better make sure you follow that care through to the end. What a waste it would be if you started off ok and then went on holiday or got ‘too busy’ and let them die. What an even worse waste of resources that would be!

3) Are They Attractive To Bugs?
Make sure you find out which fruits and veg are less attractive to pests and disease before you start planting.  And when they are less atrractive to pests - pests all have their own ‘cycle’ so avoiding this can sometimes be advantageous and plant-saving!

There is nothing worse than getting a problem with your crops and then finding the only solution is to apply chemical cures or simply to start over! What a waste!

Sometimes it’s just a matter of choosing the right planting dates or using the right natural protection. For example, the first round of runner beans I planted when I first started growing veg got totally destroyed by hungry slugs (regardless of my organic slug repellent) whereas some I planted much later in the season never even got one bite to them - the whole crop survived!

Make sure you do your research in advance so that you know all the info before you lose your first crop!

Join me in a few days for Part 2 , bringing you some more unusual but extremely helpful tips…..