Bounty on a budget

PART 2 In this second of the new six-part series, expert grower Sally Nex shows you how to get more out of your plot, with harvests that keep on coming right into autumn

- Sally Nex

The sun is high in the sky, you can garden almost until bedtime and there's simply no better place in the world to be right now than your vegetable patch. You can almost taste the anticipation, with all those crops that you sowed in the springtime just beginning to deliver and the first harvests of the season arriving in the kitchen at last. As the gardening year really moves into top gear, though, your monthly spend at the garden centre can soar if you're not extra careful - especially these days, when prices everywhere seem to be rising fast. But there's no need to do without.

This month, we'll be showing you how to expand your veg growing with new raised beds and containers - but at a fraction of the cost to your purse and the planet, compared to buying materials brand new.

Repurposing and upcycling old, unwanted materials helps to keep your garden's carbon footprint as low as possible, and you get a new vegetable patch with hardly a dent in your bank balance.

Ready to pick

You know summer has truly begun when you sit down to your first plateful of buttery new potatoes and sweet baby broad beans from the garden. June harvests, grown fast and eaten young, are among the most delicious of the year.

Gradually start digging up your new potatoes from about ten weeks after planting. They'll usually be flowering at this point; as the flowers fade on the remaining plants over the next few weeks, the harvests get bigger. You can test the size of tubers by burrowing alongside plants with your fingers. Broad beans are ready when you can feel beans swelling inside the pods.

Pull beetroot no bigger than table tennis balls, and snip baby-leaf lettuces and annual herbs at 10cm. You can steal extras, too: snip curly pea shoots and beetroot leaves for salads and pinch out broad bean tips to wilt in butter for an unusual side dish.