Growing in small spaces

There has always been a kitchen garden at Leith Hall – some of the very first records of the garden are of the sale of cabbages and kale from the garden in 1749. While the property was used as a hospital during the Second World War, the whole east garden was turned over to a market garden to provide fresh vegetables for the wounded servicemen.

These days, it is still very much at the heart of the garden, where we have the most engagement with our visitors, and where we continue to provide fresh vegetables for the café.

In 2022, the challenge was set to make the kitchen garden more attractive and educational while maintaining our practice of using heritage varieties that would have been available to the Edwardian gardener.

The first part was relatively straightforward: inspiration came from a mix of Mr McGregor’s Garden in The Tale of Peter Rabbit and the Hovelsrud Gård in Norway. To achieve it, we grow a range of different coloured vegetables (for example, lettuces ranging from pale lime green to the deepest, darkest red, and chard ranging from bright yellow to candy pink), we try growing in different shapes rather than just in rows, and we use a variety of edible flowering plants as edges to the beds.

For the second part of the challenge, we set up an ‘exhibition bed‘, the theme of which changes each year to bring interest to the garden and to help educate and inspire our visitors. Last year, we featured a ’taste of the Americas’, which highlighted the wide range of vegetables that originated in the Americas, such as squash, tomatoes, corn and quinoa.

This year, the theme is ‘growing in a small space‘, and the bed aims to show visitors that you don’t need a massive area to grow your own vegetables. Hopefully, it will encourage people to have a go themselves. The exhibition bed is split into three sections, each highlighting a different method of space saving.

In the vertical garden, lettuces grow in drainpipes suspended between posts and in milk cartons hanging from fences, tomatoes grow in hanging baskets, and a vertical bed of 36 felt pockets holds lettuce, radishes, herbs and edible flowers. We are also trialling three ways of growing potatoes in a small space – in old tyres, in a large container and in a chicken wire cage filled with straw and compost – and we will see which yields the biggest crop!

The ornamental garden shows you don’t have to sacrifice looks to grow vegetables. You can create an attractive and edible garden by sowing in more organic shapes and not in rows, using a diverse mix of different colours and shapes of leaves, and mixing in some edible shapes.

The square-foot garden is based on a system developed in the US in the 1970s as an alternative to growing in rows. Packing crops tighter together reduces the need for weeding and produces higher yields in a smaller space. In our demonstration, the squares are slightly larger than 1ft square (the space would have given a whopping 81 squares to fill!), but there is lots of advice available on how many of each vegetable plant you can grow in each square foot.

My top tips for starting to grow your own in a small space:

• Salad leaves are a great way to start – they‘re easy to grow, and if you grow them as cut and come again (rather than growing full heads of lettuce), you can have salad leaves all summer long from a relatively small space. Salad is one of the most wasted foods in the UK, with approximately 178 million bags being thrown out yearly. Two of my favourite varieties are ‘Hendersons Black Seeded Simpson’ and ‘Marvel of the Four Seasons’.
• Grow up where you can and sow underneath – peas and beans are obvious climbers, but squash grows on vines and will happily climb a sturdy trellis. Use the space below them to sow small things like salad leaves or radishes. One of my favourite bean-growing plants is the runner bean ‘Painted Lady’ – one of the oldest named vegetable cultivars in the world, producing many lovely flowers and delicious beans.
• Grow what you like to eat, but try to get in various colours. There‘s no point growing peas if you hate them, and things like onions are cheap to buy, so try growing stuff that is harder to get hold of.
• If stored correctly, most seeds will last a couple of years, so don’t limit yourself to one variety – try a few different colours. You could also swap seeds with friends, so you each get a bit of a packet.
• My favourite different-coloured vegetables to grow are lettuce ‘Dark Roden’, which is a deep purple; beetroot ‘Bulls Blood’, which has dark leaves that are also edible; and chard ‘Candy Stripe’, which has stems like a stick of rock.