Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Introduction
Universal Growing Info
Grow Table
1/HERBS
Basil, Mint, Parsley, Rosemary
2/VEG AND SALAD
Chillies, Courgettes, Rocket, Tomatoes
3/FLOWERS
Geraniums, Lavender, Osteospermum, Pansies, Bulbs, Daffodils, Hyacinths, Muscari, Tulips
4/HOUSEPLANTS
Aloe Vera, Money Tree, Maidenhair Fern, Oxalis
Gardening Terms Explained
Index
Copyright
The essential, no-stress gardening guide for beginners.
If you are feeling green-fingered but not sure where to start, this book is for you. Growing herbs, veg, salad, flowers and houseplants is fun and pretty easy. You just need some practical knowledge – all in this book – and a bit of space – a window ledge, pot or plot of soil.
Enjoy growing (and keeping alive) basil, mint, parsley, rosemary, chillies, courgettes, rocket, tomatoes, geraniums, pansies, lavender, osteospurmum, daffodils, hyacinths, muscari, tulips, succulents, aloe vera, money plants, maidenhair ferns and oxalis.
If you have no outside space at all, you can grow nearly everything here inside too …
Alice is an arts journalist who has been growing things in London for a while now, but she really became fascinated with plants after taking over a wind-blown balcony nearly three years ago. A self-taught gardener, she has learned how to grow plants to eat, admire and enjoy both inside and out, and maintains that limited experience and space shouldn’t stop anyone from growing things. For the past year Alice has been documenting her plant adventures on Instagram as @noughticulture and keeping a column on urban and rookie gardening for The Telegraph.
If you’ve never grown anything before, herbs are the best place to start. They are cheap, unthreatening and a pot or packet of seeds can be picked up in a supermarket aisle.
It’s easy to be taken in by the delightful-looking wooden planters filled with lots of different types of herbs, but it can be tricky to keep them all looking lovely if you’re just starting out. Basil, for instance, needs far less water than parsley, while mint and rosemary both like their space. Shoving them all together in one vintage wine crate can be the equivalent of a botanical Big Brother house – they’re unlikely to all get along nicely.
So, this chapter will teach you how to grow and look after four useful, everyday herbs that look, smell and taste wonderful. Basil, mint and parsley elevate countless salads, sauces and cocktails, while rosemary adds as much depth and substance to heartier meals as it will your outside space.
Plus, all of them flower beautifully, attracting bees and other wildlife to your home. So if you do grow more parsley than you can eat, let it flower and you know that another creature is benefitting from your endeavours.
While rosemary can live for years in the right conditions, basil, mint and parsley are all treated here as one-season plants, or annuals. Although parsley and mint can return for another spring, it’s better to enjoy your herbs while they are in their prime and to encourage them to keep cropping during their growing seasons, so consider any extra subsequent growth a bonus.
To keep your herbs bushy and beautiful, only take leaves from the top of the plant when you are picking them. Look out for the tiny new leaf nodules growing lower down on the stems and cut or pinch off the stem and leaves that grow above them. This is called ‘pinching out’ and it will encourage new growth outwards, rather than upwards.
If you just pick leaves from the side of the stems, you’ll end up with a plant that has long, bare, woody stalks and fewer leaves.
When parsley, basil and mint are exposed to hotter temperatures they can ‘bolt’. This means the plant grows very tall very quickly and produces flowers to try to make seeds so it can reproduce before it dies.
While this looks impressive, it isn’t great for the quality of your herbs, as the plant is putting energy into making seeds rather than delicious leaves. So, pinch off those little flowers along with two sets of leaves underneath. If there’s enough of a stem, pop them in a glass of water – they smell great.
The first plant I nurtured as a pretend grown up. If you want to make this your foray into herb growing, it’s not a bad way to start. You can pick up a basil plant cheaply from the supermarket any time of year.
I’ve grown a few varieties – purple, lettuce, sweet – with mixed success, and I now generally accept that it’s a herb to cherish while it lives and should be replaced when it goes past its best.
Basil hails from India and now grows in Mediterranean countries, so it likes sunshine and warmth.
Take off the plastic wrap around the plant and pop the whole thing, including the pot, on a saucer or in a fancier container. Keep inside, somewhere warm and sunny – a windowsill will do – and let its leaves gloriously flop out.
Supermarket herbs are usually very well watered, so there’s no need to water it unless the soil is dry. Leave it be for a few days to settle into its new home. Basil never needs watering as much as people think it does; the trick is to wait until the soil is dry and the plant looks on the verge of wilting, then give it enough water that it just starts to run out into the saucer or pot.
If you have forgotten to water it and the plant doesn’t recover after a thorough soaking, accept defeat and pick all the leaves. They can be chopped up and frozen, or made into pesto. Go and buy a new plant.
Make sure you turn your basil around in the light every few days to encourage growth on all sides.
If you’ve managed to keep your basil alive, you may want to treat it to a summer holiday outside. Warm weather can encourage more vigorous growth. Decant the plant into a bigger pot with stones at the bottom (for drainage) and topped with compost or into a hole in a flowerbed. Either water the basil before it goes in, or give it a soaking once you’ve put it in the new soil and patted it down. After a few days, water it regularly if it’s warm and sunny outside, and less when it’s cooler.
When the weather gets colder later in the year, take your basil back inside. If it’s looking peaky, you might be better off digging it out and composting it to let the ground rest over winter, or to make space so you can plant something else.
Basil can be grown from seed but this requires more patience.
Put about 8–10 seeds in one flowerpot that is roughly the size of your palm. Cover them with a thin layer of soil. Give the pot a light watering so that the soil feels damp but not wet. Unless it’s summer, keep your pot inside on a sunny windowsill. Otherwise, put the pot outside in a sunny spot and water every few days. Tiny shoots should appear after about 10 days, followed by flat semi-circular leaves in two or three weeks – these are the baby basil’s starter leaves (see here).
Once the baby basils are between 5 and 10cm tall and have at least two sets of true leaves you can transport them to bigger pots or the ground outside. Give them enough room to grow: basil can get pretty big in the right conditions, so plant your seedlings about 15cm apart.
Although some basil plants will die back and reappear the next year (gardeners call these ‘perennials’), most of them are just one-summer plants (known as ‘annuals’).
When it comes to mint, the first thing that experienced gardeners will try to bamboozle you with are the different varieties available – there are loads of them. The vast majority are very easy to grow and can be quite bossy (or invasive) in your garden, and will take over the space of other plants.
You might want to start with growing either sweet mint or spearmint. Sweet mint has large, bright green leaves and a pleasant, all-round taste and is good for salads, cocktails, tea and general cooking. Spearmint is even more versatile and is the type that is most frequently used in cooking. Both are good for beginners and require similar care, and if you get really into gardening you can look into growing other types.
The biggest problem with mint is controlling it. If you plant it straight into the ground, prepare for a fragrant takeover – mint sends its roots out far and wide, sprouting new mini mint plants in the process, which is why it’s best to grow it in a container. If it’s in a pot, you can keep it indoors, too.
Mint is best bought as a baby plant in spring; it should last you all the way through to the winter, before dying back and returning the next year. Like basil and parsley, you can start growing mint from a plant found in the supermarket herb aisle. If you want to grow your shop-bought mint outside, harden it off for a few days first. If you bought it at a plant nursery, it can be potted up in a container outside straight away.
Mint grows best in a container that is wider than it is deep – something shaped a bit like a salad bowl – but make sure it has holes in the bottom. Fill this up with potting mix or compost, and stick the plant in the middle. It will grow to fill the space quite quickly. Don’t be tempted to plant two very different types of mint next to each other, as this can weaken their individual flavours.
Mint grows best in partial shade and likes to live in moist soil, so make sure you give it plenty of water on hot and sunny days. If you’re keeping it inside, it will benefit from being misted or sprayed, as well as watered normally.
You can pick the leaves between late spring and autumn. As with other herbs, picking regularly from the top will keep your plant bushy as it will put out new stems. Over winter, your mint will probably die back, so pick all of the leaves before this happens and freeze them.
Mint will flower in the summer, which means you can cut those stems that have flowered down to 5cm above the soil. This will encourage nice new, tidy growth.
After a year or two, your mint plant may start to look a bit big and bedraggled. This is because it has put out loads of those long roots in the container and got tangled up with itself. This is the right time to take the plant out of its pot and look for new mint babies growing away from the main plant. You’re looking for smaller plants with healthy leaves and a good base of roots. Pluck them out, sever them from their parent and plant them up in separate pots.
Alternatively, you can pull the rootball of the main plant into two, or use a spade to cut it in half, then put both sections into new containers.
New mint plants are best grown from cuttings. Pretty much any sprig of mint, with leaves or otherwise, can be made to grow roots. Cut the sprig away from the plant about 1cm above the point where two other stems meet, so that the existing plant will grow more stems in its place.
Stick the cutting in a glass of water, maybe with a little soil in it to help things along, and in a week roots should appear. Keep the water level topped up, and after a few more days the roots will be long enough for the mint cutting to be potted up to grow into a new plant.
Until I started growing it, I would buy parsley in enormous bunches from the greengrocers, which even the most enthusiastic herb fan wouldn’t be able to thrash through. Now I grow my own, and the smell and flavour is even better when it’s picked seconds before it gets added to a salad or sauce.
As far as varieties go, I prefer the flat-leaved stuff – it has a stronger flavour and is easier to grow. Parsley is generally considered a one-season plant, but I’ve kept one going for longer than I can remember. I’ve witnessed a supermarket pot of parsley thrive, die and magically revive out on the balcony, and I have also grown it from seed in a matter of weeks; it’s perfect for a windowsill, too.