Luke Kirkness: The lessons I learnt from growing fruit and vegetables and what to avoid when starting

Home-grown tomatoes. Photo / Alex Cairns

OPINION

Growing your own groceries is a great way to help address the cost of living and bring down your shopping bill.

I’m not a master grower, more of a jack of all trades, but I’ve learned a few lessons over the years, and as Jo Raphael pointed out yesterday in her editorial on this topic and articles over the weekend showed, there are many people out there willing to lend a hand to beginners.

The first lesson is to plant things you enjoy eating.

Among my favourite fruit and vegetables to eat are beetroot, beans, carrots, potatoes and tomatoes and I’ve tried my hand at growing all of these and in the past year with some success.

In the past, I’ve planted cucumber and broccoli which I can eat but prefer to avoid.

The cucumbers grew like wildfire and pretty soon there were too many to keep up with. I ended up with enough cucumbers to keep a family well-fed for a month.

I tried to give them away but they were coming out of the garden faster than we could do that but maybe we didn’t try hard enough.

I buried the ones we didn’t eat back into the soil and this past spring they came back with a vengeance and took over the entire patch, blocking the sun from other plants.

The compost solved that problem.

And when it came to broccoli, slugs or caterpillars or some other pest were my enemy and while I won the battle after pelting them with pest-killer, they won the war when I forgot to keep applying it.

This season because I knew what I wanted to grow, I made more of an effort.

The forgetfulness of the broccoli fight taught me another lesson — grow your vegetables in the front yard.

It’d be almost impossible to neglect them if you’re walking past them each day.

Another tip I’ve picked up is to space out carrots and other plants once they’ve sprouted.

Last year, I decided to grow from seed in a bid to challenge myself and to my surprise, everything sprouted including an avocado.

The problem with the carrots was their seeds were very small and I planted them close together but as I’ve since discovered after pulling out the world’s smallest carrots, once the tops appear it’s best practice to space them apart and encourage growth.

The most important lesson I’ve learned is that gardening is fun and doesn’t need to be a burden.

And if pests kill a couple of plants and even if your crop doesn’t look perfect be assured everything that ends up on the plate is tasty, good for you and the satisfaction of growing your own is even better.