My Kitchen Garden

This summer I've created my own kitchen garden in raised beds. I bought the raised bed kits from Wickes and built them myself; OK, with a little help from Mr.O! I filled the beds with a lasagne (layers) of peat-free bought compost, soil from the garden, garden compost and barbecue and bonfire ashes.

In an attempt to thwart the millions of rampaging slugs and snails which inhabit my garden, I surrounded each bed with about 20-30 cm of gravel. This does seem to be doing the trick, but I still need to pick out the little blighters which do make it across.

I'll admit that I've rather overcrowded the beds this year, but everything still seems to be growing well. I've planted just a few plants each of: runner beans, green beans, broad beans, courgettes, butternut squash (grown from seeds which I dried and saved from a shop-bought squash), tomatoes, herbs and chillies.

I've also been growing mixed salad leaves including lettuce, rocket and watercress.
As we eat a lot of salad and I like a bargain, I've come up with a thrifty way to grow salad leaves for the price of a couple of bags of shop-bought leaves.

• Lettuce: Buy a 'growing' pack of mixed lettuce for £1-2 from your local supermarket, split them up and plant them out, you can start picking the leaves within 7-14 days and can be harvested for over a month if you keep them well watered.
• Watercress: Just plant a few odd sprigs of left over watercress from a bag of salad. Look out for the pieces which have little roots attached to the base of the stems. Again, with a few weeks, they'll have spread and will be ready to start harvesting. I was quite amazed that watercress doesn't need to be grown in water!
• Rocket: This is really quick and easy to grow from seed. Just sprinkle a row of seeds every couple of weeks and pick the larger leaves off as soon as they're ready.

My courgettes have just started fruiting and my runner beans won't be far behind, so look out for more recipes featuring my kitchen garden harvest.

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