You may have plenty of experience growing vegetables, but if you’re new to growing vegetables and you have a pot or a small space you want to try it out in, here are a few ideas about what you could grow.

If you’re looking to have a doorstep pot, use a large pot (10 litres plus). Try filling this with 1 tomato plant, 2 basil plants and 3 multicoloured lettuces.

If you’d like to try a window box, nasturtiums for edible flowers and leaves, spring onions, radishes and mixed lettuces would make for a great combination.

If you’ve got a bed – say around 3 metres square – you could have a go at golden courgette, chard, and a border of spring onions. Or, you could make a support out of canes in the centre with runner beans on, and surround this with red Russian kale and leeks. 

These crops are all fairly easy to grow and don’t take a lot of maintenance.

CLARE FERGUSON

You may have spotted something new in Cutteslowe Park – this is Edible Cutteslowe’s new vegetable bed, now ready and waiting for planting up!

It’s a no-dig bed – rather than break our backs churning up a muddy mess of the grass, we decided to simply cover it. You can see here how we laid some cardboard over the strongest looking grass, then piled used compost over everything. A bed this size takes a LOT of compost, but luckily we had a lot available not too far away, after growing hundreds of tomato plants at the Horticultural Therapy and Garden Centre!

We’ll leave it now for a few weeks while our seedlings get started in the glasshouses, then plant those straight into the mulch later in the spring.

If you would like to try this at home or at your allotment, there’s lots of information on Charles Dowding’s website