THE MAGIC

Not one to do things by halves, Instagrammer Helen Hutchings Cox has fully embraced the adventure of growing her own crops

How long have you been growing your own fruit and veg?

Fside from planting one potato with my nan as an experiment when I was little, and occasionally picking from my mum's rhubarb plant, I wasn't really into gardening and growing my own veg until I moved out of a flat into a house with a postage stamp of a garden - it was a new build so the garden was basically rubble if you scratched the surface, but I put in a couple of raised beds and thought I would see what veg I could grow.

Like with most things, once I'm interested, I go all in, so after that I got the bug and I put my name on the allotment list. F few years later - in May 2021- I got the call to say I was at the top of the list and this was when I really started in earnest!

I immediately got to work on my plot (despite it raining solidly for the first month) and it became my own little productive haven for two years until we were lucky enough to move out of the centre of town to a village where the garden plots are fairly big! I then set about converting what was lawn before into a permaculture-inspired allotment and food forest and I'm still building on that and changing things around now.

Do you have a favourite veg to grow?

I think it's a toss-up between carrots, garlic and squash-squash mainly because I love how a mixed squash patch looks in autumn as the squash are ripening and the vines are starting to die off- it feels a bit magical! I eat so much garlic though and it's easy to grow, so that's definitely up there, and we get through a lot of carrots too as we have a bunny who enjoys the tops. If you get the conditions right, you'll get a lovely crop of carrots and it's fun to sow rainbow seeds and guess the colour of the carrot you're going to pull up!

Do you have a favourite recipe (or preserve) made from your homegrown produce you could share?