A Year On The Veg

Is it possible to live off vegetables and fruit from your garden all year round? John Wright considers how we could all do more to make the most of home-grown produce

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THE last overgrown courgette waiting in vain for a recipe to spring to mind has, mercifully, been consigned to the compost heap, together with the steadfastly green tomatoes sojourning on the windowsill. The summer, the harvest, is over and, apart from the obvious winter brassicas and root vegetables, there’s little to look forward to until late spring. Yet what if we could fill that gap, particularly from the ides of March to those of May, the ‘hungry gap’? What if we could eat food that we’ve grown ourselves all year round?

My serious gardening days—I ran an allotment for 12 years—ended when my stay-at-home-father plan of having our baby daughter gurgle peacefully in her pram as I tended my plot came face to face with reality.

However, I still grow rhubarb, the occasional runner bean, apples, figs and herbs in my small garden, with my status as an ‘expert’ bolstered by being the once-a-year chairman of a local village ‘Gardeners’ Question Time’ team. Frankly, I’m seriously outgunned by my panellists and my only helpful advice was to a gentleman whose wife permitted him to use only a tiny patch in which to grow vegetables and was worried about crop rotation. I suggested he consider ‘wife rotation’. Memory fades and new methods and philosophies develop, so, in attempting to make my advice useful, I’ve gathered the current wisdom of people who grow things all year. Chief among these are those who supply veg boxes and for whom ‘all year round’ is a necessity.