I love cooking and part of that for me involves cooking and eating things that I have grown myself. Growing produce yourself whether it be a few herbs and salad leaves or a full kitchen garden of produce is extremely satisfying. It is hard to describe how enjoyable it is to plant a little seed and then watch it grow into something you can eat and believe me it tastes so much sweeter when it is freshly picked.
I have a kitchen garden at my home and in the summer I grow as much as I can grow, potatoes, all sorts of beans, peas, courgettes, sweetcorn, carrots, beetroot, turnips, spring onions, the list goes on. However living in Ireland is not obviously the sunniest place to live, I live alongside a large pine forest and I have a freshwater spring on the property, hence it is quite damp.
Over the past few years I have tried to grow, very unsuccessfully, my own lettuce and salad leaves, I have a huge slug problem probably exacerbated by the fact that I live in a damp place! If my salad seeds in the garden do germinate, they seem to either rot before they grow or are eaten by slugs before they can get to any decent size to harvest. I think that the whole point of growing your own veg is for it to be organic and free from GMO's, pesticides, herbicides etc. therefore I won't use slug pellets, apart from the fact that I don't want chemicals on my homegrown produce, slugs are eaten by wild birds, frogs, hedgehogs etc, if a slug has eaten slug pellets and that slug is then in turn eaten the result can be catastrophic for that animal.
My solution, my Click & Grow smart gardens, during the winter months, I have grown all sorts of herbs, salad leaves, tomatoes, wild strawberries etc. However now that the spring/summer is here I will be turning my smart gardens over exclusively to growing soft herbs & salad leaves - no slugs, no damp, just perfect growing conditions to be able to grow all the salad leaves I will need this summer.
Currently in my smart gardens, I am growing rocket, green sorrel, green romaine, oregano, green lettuce, red & yellow tomatoes, wild strawberries, mint, coriander, parsley, basil & thyme. However, I am now in the process of transferring my oregano, parsley, coriander, thyme, mint & wild strawberries to larger pots to carry on growing outside. I will be planting my basil up into a larger pot but keeping it on the kitchen windowsill as caterpillars seem to be extremely partial to Basil if outside. I will then be replanting my smart gardens exclusively with different salad leaves, so that I can enjoy salad all summer, I will stagger putting the pods in, first putting in probably 6 different pods, then a couple of weeks later another 6 and a couple of weeks after that the remaining 6. (I have 2 Click & Grow 9 smart gardens) when the first 6 are over I will replant those and so on all summer.
If like me you try to grow salad leaves outside with little success, I can highly recommend a Click & Grow Smart garden. When you buy your garden it will come with seed pods to get you started, the Click & Grow 3 comes with 3 basil pods, the Click & Grow 9 comes with 3 basil pods, 3 mini tomato pods & 3 lettuce pods to get you started. There are also 27's and a new 25 coming soon and even wall gardens which hold up to 51 pods. Once you own your garden you can order a huge range of pods - salads, herbs, fruiting plants and flowers many of them being edible flowers. Many of the plants can be transplanted once they have grown in your smart garden, wild strawberries for instance if planted in your garden will come back every year and will in fact spread, the same goes for green sorrel. If you plant on your herbs like basil, parsley, coriander, thyme, mint etc they will carry on growing and thrive for a long period of time, some of them like mint & thyme will come back each year.
I plant them up into bigger pots on my window sill in winter and out into the garden in the summer.
My windowsill, currently with parsley x2, wild strawberries, red tomatoes, mint, thyme, coriander & basil, all transplanted up from my smart garden.
If you are interested in buying a Click & Grow smart garden, to get a 10% discount, click on my link or enter my discount code JACQUI10 at checkout.
Thank you and happy gardening
Jacqui
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