Right. Let’s get one thing out of the way immediately.
You don’t need a big garden. You don’t need a greenhouse. You don’t need to know what you’re doing, and you absolutely do not need to have green fingers — whatever that means. What you need is a bit of outdoor space, a willingness to get your hands dirty, and the sense to stop telling yourself you’ll start next year.
Because here’s the truth nobody in the gardening world says loudly enough: growing your own food is not complicated. It has been made to feel complicated by decades of gardening television presenting it as a specialist pursuit full of technical jargon, arcane soil chemistry, and the kind of know-how that takes a lifetime to accumulate. That is, with respect, nonsense.
Courgettes practically grow themselves. Radishes are ready in three weeks. Tomatoes grown in a pot on a sunny patio will outperform anything you can buy in a supermarket. And the moment you eat something you’ve grown with your own hands — really eat it, straight from the plant or within hours of picking — you will understand immediately why people become mildly evangelical about this stuff.
This is your complete beginner’s guide to starting a kitchen garden. No condescension. No fluff. Just the practical information you actually need.
Why Bother? The Case for Growing Your Own
Before we get into the how, a quick word on the why — because if you’re going to invest time and effort into something, it helps to be clear on what you’re getting out of it.
The flavour argument is real. – The difference between a shop-bought tomato and one grown in your own garden and eaten the same day is not subtle. It is dramatic. Supermarket tomatoes are bred for shelf life and uniformity, picked early, and transported in conditions that destroy flavour. Yours will be picked at peak ripeness and taste like an entirely different vegetable. The same applies to strawberries, peas eaten straight from the pod, herbs snipped moments before serving, and courgettes harvested young and sweet before they become the marrow-shaped embarrassments they turn into if left two days too long.
The cost argument is also real. – A single packet of salad seeds costing under £3 will produce more leaves than you can eat over an entire summer, whereas a bag of supermarket salad bought two or three times a week adds up to real money over the course of a season. Herbs are particularly egregious — a living basil plant from the supermarket costs £1.50, lasts a week, and produces a fraction of what a properly grown outdoor plant will give you from June to September.
And then there’s the other stuff. – The time spent outside. The satisfaction of making something grow. The way children who won’t touch a vegetable on their plate will cheerfully eat things they’ve grown themselves straight off the plant. The slight smugness at a dinner party when you mention the salad is from the garden. We all know that last one is a factor. Nobody has to admit it out loud.
Getting Started: What You Actually Need:
A Suitable Space
South or west-facing is ideal — most vegetables and herbs want at least six hours of direct sunlight a day. If your garden is predominantly north-facing or heavily shaded, don’t despair: leafy greens like lettuce, spinach, kale, and chard tolerate shade better than most, and you can still have a productive kitchen garden, just a slightly more selective one.
Space is much less of a limiting factor than most people assume. A 1.2m x 2.4m raised bed — a very modest footprint — is enough to keep a family of four in salad, herbs, and a few bonus crops throughout the growing season. Pots and containers on a patio or balcony work brilliantly for tomatoes, chillies, herbs, and cut-and-come-again salad leaves. Window boxes are perfect for herbs. Even a grow bag propped against a sunny fence will produce an impressive crop of cherry tomatoes.
Raised Beds vs. Digging into the Ground
For beginners, raised beds win almost every argument. They give you immediate control over your soil — you fill them with good-quality compost rather than wrestling with whatever challenging stuff the previous owners left behind. They warm up faster in spring, drain better in wet weather, and are significantly easier to manage from a weeding perspective. They also look neat and deliberate, which matters more than gardeners like to admit.
Once your kitchen garden is producing, you’ll want somewhere comfortable to actually sit and enjoy it — and for that, Dobbies have an excellent range of garden furniture to suit every outdoor space and budget, from compact bistro sets perfect for a patio corner to generous dining sets for long summer evenings eating food straight from the garden.
The Soil Question
Soil — or more accurately, compost — is where it genuinely pays to spend properly. The single biggest variable in how well your vegetables grow is the quality of what you put them in. A good-quality peat-free multi-purpose compost, ideally mixed with some well-rotted manure or a specialist vegetable growing compost, will give your plants a far better start than budget alternatives.
Fill raised beds with a mix of approximately 70% topsoil and 30% compost if cost is a concern, or go with a proprietary raised bed mix for convenience. Refresh the compost each spring by topping up beds with a few centimetres of fresh material. That’s really about the extent of the soil management a kitchen garden requires.
What to Grow: The Beginner’s Hit List
Some crops are genuinely forgiving, productive, and satisfying for first-time growers. Others are best left until you’ve got a season or two under your belt. Here’s where to start:
Cherry tomatoes are almost foolproof. Varieties like ‘Gardener’s Delight’, ‘Sweet 100’, and ‘Tumbling Tom’ (especially good for hanging baskets and pots) are vigorous, disease-resistant, and extraordinarily productive. One plant in a 30-litre pot on a sunny patio will produce more tomatoes than you know what to do with from July to October.
Courgettes are — and this is not an exaggeration — one of the most productive plants you can grow. Two plants will provide more courgettes than most families can eat. The key is to harvest young and often; leave them even a few days and they become marrows. Varieties like ‘Defender’ and ‘Patio Star’ (compact enough for containers) are reliable and tasty.
Salad leaves are the gateway drug of kitchen gardening. Sow a row of mixed leaves every three weeks from April to August and you’ll have a constant, cut-and-come-again supply of fresh salad all season. Cut to about 2cm above the soil and they’ll regrow. Endlessly satisfying and endlessly practical.
Herbs deserve their own section, really. Start with the ones you actually use in cooking: basil (best grown from seed and kept on a sunny windowsill until June), flat-leaf parsley, chives, thyme, and rosemary. Of these, thyme and rosemary are essentially perennial garden plants that require almost no attention once established. Chives come back every year without any effort on your part. Fresh herbs transform cooking in a way that dried herbs simply can’t replicate, and growing them costs next to nothing.
French beans are brilliant for beginners — fast to grow, incredibly productive, and far nicer than runner beans for those who find the latter a bit stringy. Sow direct into the ground or into pots from mid-May onwards, once frost risk has passed. ‘Purple Teepee’ is a particularly good variety for containers and looks spectacular.
Strawberries require no introduction. Plant bare root or pot-grown plants in spring, give them a sunny spot, and water during dry spells. In their first year the harvest will be modest; from year two onwards, expect genuinely impressive quantities of fruit. Varieties like ‘Cambridge Favourite’ and ‘Elsanta’ are reliable performers in the UK climate.
Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Sowing too early. – The enthusiasm of a warm March day is a dangerous thing. Seeds sown too early in cold soil simply don’t germinate — or germinate weakly and get overtaken by plants sown six weeks later in better conditions. As a rule, if you’re growing outside without protection, wait until the soil has warmed up. In most parts of the UK, that means mid-April at the earliest for most crops.
Overwatering. – More container plants die from overwatering than from drought. Before watering, push a finger into the compost. If it’s moist below the surface, leave it. If it’s dry, water thoroughly. The goal is consistent moisture, not constantly sodden compost.
Not hardening off. – If you’ve started plants indoors or in a greenhouse, they need a transition period before living outside full-time. Put them outside in a sheltered spot during the day for a week, bringing them in at night, before planting them out permanently. Skip this step and cold nights can set plants back by weeks.
Planting too close together. – Seed packets and plant labels give spacing recommendations for a reason. Crowded plants compete for light, water, and nutrients, and become far more susceptible to disease. Generous spacing feels wasteful when plants are small, but makes an enormous difference to the eventual harvest.
The Rhythm of It
What nobody tells you before you start is that growing your own food gives your week a completely different rhythm. There’s something to check on, something to water, something that’s changed since yesterday. It sounds small, but it’s unexpectedly absorbing — a reason to step outside first thing in the morning, to spend twenty minutes in the evening doing something genuinely restorative rather than staring at a screen.
The kitchen garden doesn’t ask much of you. A little attention, a bit of water, the occasional feed. In return, it gives you food that tastes better than anything you can buy, a reason to be outside, and the very particular satisfaction of putting something on the table that you made happen yourself.
Start small. Start this weekend if you can. You’ll wonder almost immediately why you waited this long.
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