Whatever your age, growing and looking after plants is stimulating and rewarding even when gardening becomes a bit more challenging.
If you can’t run an allotment these days, you’ll still get a kick out of growing some food for yourself. It’s tastier and healthier and your plants can be highly decorative. Rainbow chard brightens up any corner and the silvery-grey foliage of a statuesque globe artichoke brings elegance to a bed, contrasting with variegated and
purple-leaved sages.
Decide what you can manage, and select plants that largely look after themselves, are easy to harvest and may be perennials.
For starters, decide how big a harvest you can handle at a time. If there’s only one or two of you, it’d take a week to plough through a giant cabbage or cauli and a hefty trug of courgettes would be daunting.
Go for veg to pick a bit at a time, cut and come again lettuce, annual rocket, mustards or amaranths and kale. Also, lots of herbs are good grazing plants.
You no longer have to break sweat digging up a long row of tatties, constantly checking on cordon tomatoes or building stout frames for swarming runner beans. Modern varieties of all these favourites are much easier to manage.
Nibble a tasty Tumbling Tom tomato whenever you pass its 10 litre pot. Grow some new potatoes in a bag. Or pick a manageable dish from dwarf French or runner bean plants.
Ruby Beauty raspberries are absolutely brilliant. These compact little bushes take up hardly any space, thrive in a 30 litre pot and give you a long picking season of tasty fruits.
That’s provided you don’t have to surround them with a deep moat and daunting fortifications to fend off
sweet-toothed badgers, as I do.
I’ve just been breaking my back carting large pots of rosemary and bay out of the greenhouse now winter is supposedly over. I’d have been better selecting plants that are tough enough to handle a Scottish winter outdoors. Thymes, winter savory, chives and tree onions give you a much easier life.
And though seed-sowing is very satisfying when comfortably seated in the sun,
self-seeding plants do the job for you.
Take chervil and that vital spring salading, lamb’s lettuce, Valerianella locusta.
Soft and top fruit are probably also greatly overlooked. As we all know, strawberries in pots or cascading over and through the sides of special towers are a worthy option but, for me, trained fruit bushes are almost indispensable.
Try planting a soft fruit hedge. Rather than struggling into an impenetrable gooseberry bush, prune to an espalier or fan-trained shape. I thoroughly enjoy this pruning and get great satisfaction casting an eye over the end result, knowing I’ll be rewarded with large juicy fruits dangling from waist-high stems.
Picking is so much easier. And you don’t even need to fertilise the ground with your precious blood if you choose a thornless or semi-thornless variety instead.
If you’re impatient for a harvest and don’t want the hassle of training a bush, pick up a ready trained one at a garden centre or by mail order. A huge list of fruits, such as currants, thornless brambles and tayberries, to name a few, lend themselves to different styles of training.
And make apple harvesting on a precariously shoogly ladder a thing of the past. Many different apples on dwarfing or semi-dwarfing rootstocks lend themselves to fan and espalier training.
With light pruning you’ll control height and spread. Depending on where you live, pears, peaches and apricots may also work.
Canny gardening keeps ageing at bay.
www.askorganic.co.uk
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