Patio Gardening

It is quite possibly the fastest growing form of gardening Worldwide, as the credit crunch and Worldwide recession have seen many food prices rise by twenty percent. So this has caused many more people to look towards growing their own food.

Yet in this modern society many of us have never tried growing anything, as it is so convenient to simply buy a bag of salad or tomatoes from the supermarket. However, shop salads have often been picked up to a week earlier!

Try growing your own tomatoes and salad, and you will never look back. In fact you will spend all Winter waiting for the Summer growing season to come around again. It is the way they taste so much better!

However a lot of people in cities previously thought they did not have the space to grow anything if they did not have a garden. Well a few people started to buck this thought trend and planted anything from salads in window boxes, to runner beans in small homemade raised beds.

The beauty of patio gardening is that it costs next to nothing to get one going, and I do not care how little space you have, with ingenuity you can fit vegetables in containers of just about any shape and size. All you really need to get going is a few large terracotta plant pots, although plastic ones will do they are not ideal, a bag of compost and a trowel.

You will also need some form of seed germination tray, and I would recommend that you get a plastic one with a clear glass cover that will fit on your windowsill inside, although I can highly recommend one of the ones with 7 individual trays that come with a self watering system. I use one. They are ideal for those living busy lives, all you need to do is check the water once a week. The self-watering system does the rest for you, and with seven trays it is easy to start to grow a wide variety of seedlings and keep track of them.

Seeds cost around £1-2 a pack and you can now even buy them from a lot of supermarkets, or do as I do when it comes to chilies and peppers, and keep the seeds from the ones when you cook them for use next year - free seeds!

I would also recommend buying or building a mini-raised bed. If you have an awkward shape then build one to fit. This will enable you to grow a wider variety of vegetables on your patio.

So hopefully this will have given you a little inspiration to get into patio gardening. If you only have a small space but would like to grow vegetables and salad plants, then patio gardening is the one for you!

By Richard Allen -