Your Guide To Growing Vegetables At Home
Welcome to OwningAnAllotment.com where you will find all the information, tips and advice you need to start growing your own vegetables, fruit and herbs at home.
Whether you are an experienced gardener or a novice, you will find lots of information designed to help you successfully grow vegetables at home.
Enjoy visiting the site, use the navigation options above and below to find the information and feel free to leave a comment with your experiences, questions and tips!
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Some people want to grow a few herbs or a couple of tomato plants at home whereas other people want to grow more plants in a larger area.
Whatever your space and time requirements, growing vegetables at home is very beneficial to you, to your family and even to the environment!
Perhaps the biggest benefit is easy access to cheap, fresh, healthy food that is free from artificial fertilizers and pesticides (if you have grown it organically). I can tell you now there is nothing like the taste of fresh, home grown produce and it tastes nothing like the same produce in the stores!
I didn't believe this when I first started growing my own vegetables so I did a test one Christmas dinner. I served up two lots of carrots to everyone - one lot had been grown myself at home and the others were store bought. I was very surprised when people left half the carrots ... the half that came from the store and commented on how delicious the carrots were!
This was further demonstrated by my six year old who does her best every year to make sure no strawberries come home from the allotment by eating them all. However, if I buy strawberries from the store she will not touch them and tells me "they taste yucky".
When you pick and fruit or vegetable it starts losing its flavor the moment it is picked. When you pluck that first ripe tomato off of the vine and pop it in to your mouth you will be shocked by just how delicious it tastes! It is so completely different from store bought produce it is unreal.
Store bought produce is also often transported hundreds if not thousands of miles and so is often picked whilst unripe and then ripened artificially. This results in bland, tasteless produce that really does very little for you.
By growing your own vegetables you are also helping the environment by not contributing to the carbon footprint of transporting vegetables across the country or world to get to you.
Growing your own vegetables is also a huge money saver, and for anyone on a budget is a great way to get fresh fruits and vegetables for a fraction of the price you would pay in the shops.
A packet of courgette (zucchini) seeds will cost you less than £1 (about $1.50) and will typically have ten to fifteen seeds in them. A pack of 3 courgettes can cost you anything from £0.85 upwards depending on where you buy them.
Last year I planted 6 courgette plants and got 20 to 30 individual courgettes from each plant. I had so many I was giving them away to anyone and everyone!
The same with rhubarb. A single plant will cost you a couple of pounds or a few bucks and will produce 20 to 30 stalks in the second year - and this is an expensive product to buy!
Growing your own vegetables at home is also very good for your health because you get a lot of exercise from doing the gardening. Even just going outside and tending a few containers is good for your health and will benefit you immensely.
Having been growing my own vegetables for close to twenty years now you will learn from my mistakes (and there have been plenty of those) and my successes. You will learn how to grow different vegetables and fruits as well as learn what to do with them, particularly when you end up with a glut of them!
There is nothing like growing vegetables at home. It is so fulfilling and so much fun and can take as little or as much time as you want. Enjoy looking around this site and please leave comments and ask any questions that you may have!