In the continuing saga of us growing our own veg we’ve hit a major milestone. While we’ve been eating more lettuce and other greenery than you can shake a stick at (we’ve had to give some to our neighbours such is the amount we’ve grown) we’ve been really looking forward to our ‘proper’ veg being ready. I’m thinking traditional stuff like carrots, beetroot, onions and of course potatoes.

We’d been growing potatoes in bags – the sort you add more soil to when the potato leaves have found their way to the surface, bury them and let them break through again and so on until the bag is full. We knew that you’re supposed to wait until they flower before harvesting but ours hadn’t and the first couple of bags we planted were starting to go yellow as if they’d been hit with blight. Turns out that in fact this also means they’re ready for picking so we tipped the first bag out to see what we got – and personally I’m pretty impressed!

To a farmer growing potatoes is as trivial as breathing in and out, but since I’d never done it before it felt like a real novelty. We went with anya potatoes which are small, thin and tasty. We planted two in each bag starting back in March and that was long enough to wait! Anyway, have a look at the photos below to see what we did and ended up with:

This plant growing is definitely a learning experience and there are lessons we’ll be applying next year such as thinning the carrots and beetroots out more, what to plant from seed and what to grow indoors first and many other things. It’s been fun so far and it just makes me want to buy a house with a huge garden so I can fit poly tunnels and grow grow grow! I think I’ll need that lottery win first though…

We decided to take some of Jamie Oliver’s advice and grow our own strawberries in hanging baskets this year.

We have (or rather my good lady has) been taking good care of them as they’ve grown from little shoots. We kept looking out for little green strawberries to appear and when they did we were counting the days until we could eat them! Unfortunately the local bird population had other ideas so we netted them up after one particularly juicy strawberry disappeared without a trace one day (and my good lady swears she didn’t eat it).

More and more red strawberries looked almost ready for eating and then last night we decided enough was enough – it was time to harvest! As the title suggests, they really do taste sweeter when you grow your own. We’ve bought a few boxes of strawberries lately but they didn’t taste half as nice as the ones we picked – they were delicious!

Of course my good lady’s creative talents with food presentation made them taste even better:

So if you’ve got hanging baskets filled with boring pansies or some other tedious flowers then why not throw them in the bin and plant something you can later eat? That’s my kind of gardening! And if you don’t like strawberries then not to worry, invite me round your house and I’ll eat them for you!