Top Tips

• Healthy soil is essential to growing any food successfully and maximising its nutritional value. 
• Check that your growing space, or container, has optimal conditions for growth.
• Crops need consistent water, not just when it rains. So consider water catchment right from the start.
• With some growing experience, try intercropping (growing quick crops in the gaps) to maximise the use of your space.
• Grow ‘multi croppers’ that can keep cropping over several months, such as purple sprouting broccoli, peas, courgettes, cut-and-come-again lettuce, kale, and autumn fruiting raspberries.
• Stagger your sowing to prolong your harvest and avoid a glut.
• Extend the growing season by warming your soil up from early March to try early sowings in late March. An old shower door, or pane of glass will do.
• Do the same in the autumn months to protect tender outdoor crops such as lettuce and leafy herbs.
• Plan carefully for winter growing- it’s easy to miss the ‘window’ for sowing and planting winter crops when you are busy in the summer.
• Choose your seed carefully, and remember sowing times in Scotland may be a 2-4 weeks behind those written on the packet.