What do you keep in your front garden? Your bike? Your recycling and bins? The chances are that small space outside your front door isn’t being used for much. Which is why Incredible Edible Bristol is calling on us to start using the space to grow our own fruit and veg.
Over the past year, Incredible Edible Bristol has been growing food in the most unlikely of places across the city. So far they have grown food in Castle Park, orchards, outside At-Bristol, in The Bearpit and there are plans afoot for gardens in adventure playgrounds and schools across Bristol.
“We want to encourage people across the city to look at their front gardens as an area that is ripe for food production. We at Incredible Edible Bristol believe that any space that is under-utilised could probably be used for food growing with a little bit of careful and perhaps somewhat out of the box thinking and so we are challenging you all to grow some food in your front gardens this year,” says Incredible Edible Bristol’s Sara Venn.
But I haven’t got any soil? We hear you cry. That doesn’t matter. Pots, containers and window boxes are all great for food growing, and you can even by ranges of seeds from Suttons that are especially for the patio or balcony grower and most offer a range of seeds for use in smaller gardens.
Where to start?
Here are Sara’s top tips:
- To begin it’s wise to start off with a small amount of pots or just a window box. They need to be filled with good quality compost after checking for drainage holes to allow excess water to run off and then you are ready to plant.
- Try growing something you can sow from seed straight into the container such as a salad leaf mix, radishes or dwarf beans and don’t forget that they will need regular watering during the summer, but very quickly there will be seedlings emerging and with some salad crops it’s possible to be eating the crop within 3 to 4 weeks of sowing the seed.
- Once the crop is over, take out what’s left and re-sow. It’s possible to start some crops as early as March outside.
- If there is no room in your front garden for pots the alternative is a hanging basket filled with trailing tomatoes or strawberries or a wonderful selection of herbs and salad leaves perhaps. Again, other than regular watering and occasional feeding with something like a good seaweed feed, they are really low maintenance and will provide you with a great crop of homegrown produce.
Once you are harvesting please take photos and share them to the Incredible Edible Facebook page so we can all see what an amazing array of produce is being grown across the city and offer help and advice if it’s needed. We look forward to a summer of exciting front garden projects. Find out more about Incredible Edible Bristol here.
If you are interested in growing your own, you might also want to put 21st February in the diary, which is when Feed Bristol will be running their Bristol Seed Swap. Take along some seeds to swap, learn how to save seeds and other relevant topics in interactive workshops. Find out more.
Incredible Edible Bristol are partners of Bristol Food Connections, so you can expect to see plenty of urban growing popping up during the festival.