10 Easy Peasy Veg To Grow This Spring
You have seen in recent weeks I have been busy sowing seeds and getting a good head start for Spring. However, I know some of you maybe don’t have the time, space or even the inclination to get involved with the whole propagating indoors malarkey. Don’t worry though, there are LOADS of easy PEASy vegetables you can grow straight into the garden. Here is the “Lulu’s Garden” Top Ten veg to grow this Spring. Oh, and a quick and easy craft project to make your own plant labels too!
These teeny tiny sets will grow into big onions!
1. Beetroot
Beetroot is really easy to grow and yummy to eat. And it makes your hands go funky colours 🙂 Just sow a row of seeds, cover them over and watch them grow. Remember to thin out those seedlings as they come up so you can make room for some lovely big beets.
Gather your sets, seed potatoes and seeds
in a funky bucket like this one from Twigz (2)
2. Radish
Radish grow super fast, even faster than me! You just need a small area and just follow the same rules as beetroot and you will have some funky radishes to add to your salads in just a few weeks.
3. Peas
That’s right, I told you it was easy-PEASy! Sow your seeds, leaving some space between each one. Peas will need some support so they scramble upwards so add some canes and string. You can buy special varieties which are bushier and perfect for growing in pots too if you have less space.
Make sure you weed and prepare your
veg beds before you sow your seeds
4. Lettuce
Like radish, lettuce grows really fast and you will have your own salad in just a few weeks. I like sowing a mixed salad with different types of leaves in it and you just cut some when you need it and it keeps on growing. How clever is that?!
5. Tomatoes
Regular reader will know all about what keen tomato growers we are. We have all sorts of wonderful tips in our Tasty Tomato blog. You can grow them in a greenhouse but if you don’t have space go for a bush or tumbler variety which grows brilliantly in pots or even hanging baskets!
6. Potatoes
We all love potatoes don’t we? I love digging them up at the end too. Loads of fun! Growing them is dead easy, just plant them deep in the soil and cover up with soil. As the leaves come through keep “earthing up” (covering over with soil, lot’s of fun!) ’til they are way high in the air! You can grow them in a bag on your patio too if you don’t have a veg patch.
Our potato crop
7. Spinach
Spinach is another easy one to grow, just like lettuce. You can add it to salads or any of your cooking. Apparently it makes you really strong like Daddy too!
8. Courgettes
Courgettes are great to grow and I like to grow them in among our flowers rather than in the veg patch. They have lovely big leaves and funky yellow flowers (which you can eat too) and then the lovely courgettes appear. Make sure you water around (not over) the plant so the courgettes don’t rot. And watch out how quick they grow too or you will have marrows before you know it!
9. Onions
Onions are the basis of most meals we cook so we need a LOT of them. From pastas and risottos to pies and curries they are an essential ingredient which are really easy to grow. Growing them from teeny onion sets is really simple and they need very little attention other than some watering and weeding as we go. We always grow both white and red onions as well as shallots.
Make sure you space your onion sets out nicely like me
10. Spring Onions
You can’t have a spring veg list without Spring Onions can you?! Another one where you grow seeds in a row and thin out as seedlings come through. A lovely addition to salads and all sorts of cooking.
If you have never grown anything before why not choose just one thing off this list and give it a try? Whether it’s salad in a window box, tomatoes in a pot or potatoes in a bag there is always space to give it a bash. Let me know what you choose to grow this year and even better, send me some pics!
And don’t forget to label what you have sown so you remember what will be coming up. Forget expensive plant markers, why not make your own out of old lollipop sticks (1)…
- Lollipop sticks
- Paint
- Marker Pen
- Varnish
Make your own plant labels
To make:
1. Paint your lollipop sticks funky colours and leave to dry. You could draw pictures of what you are growing, add glitter or even make little people out of them too!
Easy to Grow Veg That’s Hard to Buy
So come on, join in and in just a few months you will be harvesting lots of lovely, home grown goodies.
1. Thank you to the wonderful, clever people at the RHS for the idea to make your own plant labels. For more cool projects like this read the fabulous “RHS Garden Projects” book.
2. Also, a BIG shout out to the cool people at Twigz who have designed a great range of garden tools for children, some of which you can see me using in this blog. I will tell you lots more about them in future blogs…
Harvest, Hooray!
I had a really fun weekend here at Vialii Towers with M&D. On Saturday it was really quite wet so we stayed indoors and did lots of fun arty projects with crayons, pencils, paints and glue! On Sunday the weather was a lot better which meant we could get outside and give the garden a bit of a tidy It was also time to harvest some of the fruit and vegetables we have been growing over recent months.
Now, regular readers will know that we had quite an array of vegetables we were growing this year. Some things didn’t do so well like the spring onions ‘cos someone kept climbing up onto the veg beds and lying there (1). And the cavolo nero suffered as the caterpillars decided they were going to get in there first (2)! Not to worry as we still had loads more things we were growing. Here is a pic of a few of the things we did manage to harvest at the weekend:
We harvested lots, from parsnips to chard and beetroot to turnips! Oh and some potatoes and apples too!
Lulu
1. I can’t imagine who that could have been!We had a scrummy dinner with the potatoes and Mummy roasted the beetroot, parsnips and courgette. Then she made a rhubarb crumble and a lovely Rhubarb & Lemon Cake.
2. Next year I am going to insist that we cover the kale in netting before butterflies can lay their eggs and caterpillars get munching!
Growing Our Own
This time last year we were in a bit of a tizzy as we had just had Lulu and every minute was taken up with our new bundle. We just about managed to throw a few seed potatoes and onion sets into our veg patch and not a lot else. Whilst family life is still our central focus we have managed to spend a bit more time in the garden already this year and started to get Lulu used to horticultural life. This weekend we managed to get all of our veg sown, and miracle of miracles it happened the same weekend as Monty sowed his on Gardeners’ World. (1). So here’s what we are looking forward to from our modest veg patch this year as we are growing our own…
Lulu shows she’s willing to muck in and help
- Potatoes: Last year we grew “Maris Peer” potatoes for the first time and we really loved their waxy texture and nutty taste. Perfect for boiling. So this year we stuck with what we love and gone with that again.
- Onions: Nothing out of the ordinary here. “Sturon” as our white onion, Red Barons for our erm, red onion (!) and “Golden Gourmet” shallots.
- Salad Leaves. Just a general packet of “Cut n Come Again”. We have left space for sowing another row in a few weeks too for some extra summer salads.
- Wild Rocket. A lovely addition to the above in our salads, over pizzas, stirred into pastas etc.
- Radish “French Breakfast”. Think we’ll leave the French to have these for breakfast but we will certainly enjoy them in salads. And they grow so quick! We have left space for succession planting on these too.
- Spinach “Bordeaux”. We’ll use this in both salads and cooked.
- Sweetcorn “Sweet F1”. We have never successfully grown sweetcorn before so this will be an interesting experiment for us.
- Squash “Sunburst F1”. Another first for us so watch this space.
- Turnip “Purple Top Milan”. We lovely the sweetness of baby turnips.
- Beetroot “Boltardy”. A staple in the Burt household. Great for both cooking and pickling (2)
- Leek “Musselburgh”. We love leeks for both soups and general cooking.
- Spring Onion “White Lisbon”. Another great addition to salads.
- Parsnip “Palace F1”. Another newbie for us. We we were running out of space so we have planted a few seeds in a pot to see what will come of it.
- Pea “Ambassador”. A firm favourite and although we will get limited crops as they have just been planted into a couple of troughs we will enjoy what we do get.
Our newly sown veg beds
Thanks for reading.
All at Vialii
If you need advice on planting veg or are interested in incorporating a “Grow Your Own” area into your garden please get in touch.
1. Only really because Monty, like the rest of country, was delayed by the awful Spring weather rather than us being organised but we will take it anyway! It will NEVER happen again!
2. Add a few of the shallots into the jar and a few peppercorns when pickling.
3. The gooseberry bush was a gift from our lovely neighbour who was getting rid of it.
4. We are hoping to get a decent crop of raspberries as Lulu LOVES them and is eating us out of house and home!
5.Our existing herbs are looking old and tired, a bit like the pots they live in. So our plan is to build some new pots from old pallets we have at our yard. Watch this space for a future blog on this subject…