Gardening in Small Spaces

By Charles Dowding, No Dig Gardener and writer

You can grow a lot in small spaces, but there are challenges, such as low light levels from nearby buildings and trees. It’s not worthwhile to grow large, slow-growing vegetables such as cauliflower, winter squash and broccoli. On the other hand, it’s amazing how much you can grow from just a few plants. Especially when you buy a good compost!

Pest levels can be high, with slugs and woodlice hiding in dark, damp corners. I go out at dusk with a torch to gather the emerging slugs and move them to wild areas, and over one week you can reduce the population massively.

Choose a top compost

Multiply the value of your space by using containers with high-quality compost. Composts are not all equal, yet it’s impossible to judge the quality from its packaging. With the advent of peat free, many composts have too much undecomposed wood. The result is plants not growing, money and time spent, all for not much result. There are two potting and container composts I recommend. Moorland Gold from Yorkshire has some waste peat from the water company and that helps increase its quality. I’ve used it for 12 years and it’s never let me down, although it’s not cheap. Perhaps you could buy a half pallet of 40 litre sacks with some friends, to reduce the price.

The other compost I recommend is Pete’s Peat Free, made from worm compost. The high price justifies itself with steady growth over a long period. Both of these composts have no synthetic fertiliser, meaning plants grow in a balanced way with, for example, no flush of nitrogen which promotes soft leaves, attractive to aphids. Growth continues over a period of months, with no need to feed unless you’re growing big plants in a small pot. For example, you could justify feeding tomatoes, but otherwise it’s not worth it. Better to buy good compost!

Make a small bed

If space allows, you can grow much food in one bed of 1.2m², or 1.2m x 2.4m. Beds can sit on sloping concrete or gravel, with no membrane underneath. If the bed sits on grass or weeds, that’s best because roots can grow down into undisturbed soil below. Fill your bed with mushroom compost, old manure, or green waste compost, which hopefully is not fresh and warm. Walk on the compost to firm it down and aim for a 15cm depth. This is a lot of compost and is a long-term investment, because you can grow in the same bed for many years ahead, with just an annual surface dressing of 3 to 4cm of new compost each winter.

A great first planting for such a bed is potatoes. Use a trowel to pop seed potatoes in, with 5 to 7cm compost above them. When growth is strong, drop more compost around the stems, to prevent greening of the swelling potatoes. To harvest, simply pull them out, there is no need to dig!

Small-space vegetables

These vegetables need little space and grow rapidly. Radish takes the crown, and if you water them as they swell, the flavour is not too pungent, just fresh and juicy. I recommend the variety Rudy – dark red and round. It stays crisp even when large and when flea beetles make little round holes in the leaves, which is so common in spring and summer. You can sow these radish until September.

Carrots are worthwhile because their serrated leaves are not hungry for light. You can grow a fair number in a small space, to pull within 3 to 4 months. A pot with a depth of 25cm works well. Scatter seeds on top and spread just 1cm of compost over them, no more. Tiny leaves should emerge within 10 to 12 days. If you scattered a lot of seeds, the only harvest will be carrot leaves for a delicious pesto. If you want carrots to eat, thin the seedlings after a month to 1 or 2cm apart.

After four more weeks, thin again and you can eat these sweet new carrots. Keep thinning and eating the carrots of increasing size. What makes this so worthwhile is the extra dimension of flavour, compared to any carrots you can buy.

For salad leaves, the number one vegetable to sow, now and until late July, is lettuce. You get much more flavour from homegrown lettuce and also an incredible weight of mild tasting leaves. I use lettuce as the bulk ingredient in salad bags I sell. For extra flavour, texture and colour I add small leaves of sorrel, chard, pea shoots, and herbs such as dill and coriander.

For harvests of pea shoots, use any variety of pea, preferably one that would grow to a metre or more, so that shoots are prolific. For example, Hurst Greenshaft and Alderman, also Sugar Snap from Seaspring Seeds. Sow peas 5cm apart in boxes, pots or in a bed, any time until July. About five weeks from sowing take a pick of the growing tips, and keep picking new shoots through the following five to eight weeks.

Five other vegetables worth a look:

Dwarf pea varieties for pods are best sown before May. They can grow to a height of 45-60cm, so push in a few woody branches as support for plants, plus this makes it easier to find and pick the pods.

Chard provides colourful and tasty leaves over a long season of picking. More production comes when you avoid cutting across the top. Instead keep twisting off the lower and larger leaves as they develop.

Salad onions are good to sow every six weeks or so. Pop eight seeds into 1cm deep holes in a container or bed, and they grow happily in clumps, 20-25cm between each clump. Twist out a few larger ones as and when they’re the size you like.

Tomatoes need sowing in March, or buy plants in May. Look for bush types, which do not need support and sprawl sideways, or down over the edge of containers. Most bush varieties are cherry tomatoes.

Chillies grow well in containers no larger than 10cm diameter, one plant in each. As with tomatoes, buy a plant if you have not sown any, to set outside after mid-May.

This is an article featured in a last Spring’s issue of our members’ magazine The Pod.

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