Making a Garden: A PLACE FOR HOMEGROWN

In this second part of the series, Alan Titchmarsh shares his expert tips on how to bring fruit and veg into the heart of your garden

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Has growing your own fruit and veg always been something you've meant to do? Especially with shop prices the way they are and the fact that you can't always find what you want at the greengrocers. If the answer is 'yes', then come on! Make this the year where you actually do something about it. The effort you put in at the start will be more than compensated for by the satisfaction that you gain from actually growing your own food, every bit as much as eating it.

Of course, you can always find a good excuse to avoid knuckling down: we haven't enough room; vegetables don't look very good (which isn't true); we don't really eat enough to make it worthwhile; I really haven't got the time... and so it goes on.

The thing is that if you start now - at the very beginning of the year when it is still quite early for most sowing and planting - you can take things steadily, at your own pace. You can work out where to put your vegetable patch, what to grow in it, and then make a start on preparing the ground, constructing beds and paths.

You haven't enough space? It's even easier to grow fruit and veg in containers on a patio, in a porch or even on a doorstep. Oh, you won't be self-sufficient, but until you have actually picked a fresh lettuce or a sun-ripened tomato and tasted it moments later, you haven't lived.

And don't imagine for one moment that vegetables will not look as attractive as flowers. Well grown - and even slotted into gaps in flowerbeds - they are good to look at, as well as good to eat. As long as you can bring yourself to harvest them...

Good-looking kitchen gardens

There’s something wonderfully beguiling about the term kitchen garden’; it’s so much more attractive-sounding than veg patch’, and more accurate, too, since you can add herbs, strawberries and raspberries, maybe a dwarf apple tree or two, and some gooseberry bushes.