Contact Us: Karen Burgess 18 Kingsdowne Road Surbiton, Surrey, KT6 6JZ Tel: 020 8274 0096 Fax: 07092003581 Email: karen@berrylandscompanion.com Web: www.berrylandscompanion.com
possible. Fresh herbs will not only transform your cooking but can make a salad something very special too. Choose your favourites and either grow them in a dedicated herb pot with extra grit in the compost for good drainage, or even consider popping a few in with your main crops. Vegetables, like most plants, do best in a relatively warm spot with plenty of sun, so site your containers carefully. You want them to be easily accessible from the kitchen, but it’s more important to ensure they’re sheltered from the wind but still get enough sun – although sunshine is less critical to salad crops than it is to fruit. You can make your salad pot using crops raised from
seed and sown directly into the compost – root crops such as carrots don’t much like being transplanted, and so are perfect for direct sowing. If you’re growing beetroot for its sweet juicy root, it too tends to perform better if direct-sown. Just make sure that the compost is kept moist at all times but not actually wet: as long as the container has plenty of drainage holes in it you shouldn’t have any problems with over-watering, even if there’s a downpour or two.
The new plantings will very quickly blend in with the old, and all summer long you’ll have a garden that’s as pleasing to the eye as it is to the tastebuds. Visit Pippa’s website, www. pippagreenwood.com, for ‘Grow Your Own with Pippa Greenwood’, the AskPippa Q&A service, Nemaslug, natural pest controls, and lots more.
You may prefer to raise some of your crops in pots and grow them on a bit before planting them out. The advantage of this is that the containers out in the garden will always be full and looking their best, even while you’re harvesting them.
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