Home and Garden: You don’t need a big garden to start growing vegetables and flowers… plant them together

Whether you are a seasoned veg grower or have decided that this year is when you will finally give it a go, then March is when it all begins to happen.

As the days lengthen and the temperature begins to rise everything wants to grow. It is great if you have space in the garden for a dedicated vegetable plot or have finally made it to the top of the waiting list for your local allotments, but what if you have access to only a tiny balcony, a shady garden or a courtyard with paving slabs underfoot?

Don’t give up before you get started because there are ways of making even the most unlikely spot productive.

Courtyards benefit from lots of shelter and most vegetables will grow happily in containers, especially if you choose some of the miniature varieties of carrot, cauliflower and other edibles that have been specially bred to mature while they are still small.

Meanwhile, surrounding walls and fences can be turned into vertical allotments. There are special self-watering systems available with planting pockets for raising crops, but using scrap timber to make batons you could fix plastic window boxes to the walls for a fraction of the cost. Just remember that because these boxes contain little soil you will have to feed and water the plants in them regularly.

This is also the case if you are growing veg on a balcony. Here exposure to high winds and, in some cases, strong sunshine, can cause scorching, so it is best if you can create some sort of windbreak by fixing mesh to the railings and growing a few tall plants, such as phormiums, to shelter vegetables growing beneath them.

Many Mediterranean herbs, however, love balconies as these are not so dissimilar to the places where these plants grow in the wild, so choose lavender, rosemary, thyme and marjoram for the most exposed spot.

In shady gardens, a lack of sunshine can make things slow to ripen, but mint will run amok if you let it and gooseberries, currants of all kinds and rhubarb will do quite nicely without too much exposure to direct sunlight.

And if the problem is that you don’t want to dig up your flowerbeds to make room for edibles, then why not grow food and flowers together? Artichokes are handsome plants and there are lots of lettuces with colour or frilled leaves that can make very attractive edging plants. It’s just a question of using your imagination.