Changing how you eat starts with growing food on your balcony or patio

Pots and containers are ideal for growing highly nutritious and flavourful herbs and salads. And growing food on your doorstep makes it so easy to eat what you grow.

A common misapprehension is that you need a garden or an allotment to grow a significant amount of your own food. This is what I thought, too, back in 2009. Little did I know I’d soon be picking fresh leaves for our meals nearly every single day from just a small balcony and window sills.

Picking salad on my balcony back in 2010 when I lived in London © Sarah Cuttle / Vertical Veg
In one year, we picked 24kg salad, 28kg tomatoes, 3 kg of herbs and 28kg of other fruit and veg.

True, growing at home in containers is different from growing in the ground. Containers are less suitable for growing large quantities of staples like carrots and onions. However, they are ideal for salads and herbs and other highly perishable things like soft fruit. Luckily, these are all also delicious, nutritious and expensive to buy in the shops - and arguably the crops that make the most sense to grow yourself anyway.

The biggest boon of container gardening at home is that your plants are literally on your doorstep. This makes it so quick and easy to pick and incorporate them into your everyday meals. In summer I will often pop out for a few minutes to pick berries for breakfast, salad for lunch, and veg and herbs for our evening meal.

My family is lucky to also have an allotment (a small plot of land we rent for food growing) just ten minutes walk away. But that’s still twenty minutes travel time, before we even start gardening. We rarely make it down more than once a week. I feel lucky to have it, but it isn’t nearly as convenient for day to day eating and cooking.

I now live in Newcastle upon Tyne, in the north of England. This is our north facing concrete front yard where I grow herbs, salad, veg and fruit in containers. (I have a few more containers in the south facing back garden, too, for tomatoes and Mediterranean herbs).

Once you have fresh herbs and salad growing in containers on your doorstep you can discover the difference it can make in your kitchen. I used to buy herbs once or twice a month for special recipes, but we now eat them nearly every day. We also eat freshly picked salad on most days, too - simply because it’s there, is quick to pick, and has so much more flavour than supermarket salad bags.

Indeed, most of us who grow at home find we start to incorporate more plants into our meals because they are so accessible, more affordable, and taste so delicious. Many of us also start to eat a much wider range of plants, too. There are lots of unusual herbs, salad leaves, and edible flowers, as well as heritage varieties of tomatoes and chillies that are easy to grow in pots but almost impossible to buy in the shops. For example, herbs we grow include savory, Scot’s lovage, sorrel, Vietnamese coriander and chervil - none of which I’d even tasted until a few years ago.

Homegrown salads are more colourful and taste like nothing you can buy in the supermarket. Hard to resist!

Growing edibles in containers at home has many other advantages. For example, you can enjoy the beauty of your plants and watch them grow every day. I walk through my front yard in Newcastle each time I leave the house - and every time I relish the chance to catch a fleeting glance of a new flower in bloom, blackbirds scurrying, or bees at work. It feels almost magical to live in the middle of the city, surrounded by concrete, AND to have plants and wildlife on the doorstep.

There are other reasons to grow at home, too - and more about these in future posts.

A mini herb garden on the north facing window sill of our old London flat. It supplied enough mint, parsley and chives for us to use these herbs several times a week.

The potential of balcony and patio gardens

With increasing urbanisation, more and more us have no garden, and no opportunity to get an allotment. However, a good number of us (but sadly far from all) are lucky enough to have a patio or a balcony or even window sills that get a bit of sun and with enough space to grow a few plants. For the keen gardener, it is often possible to pack a lot of containers into a very small space and grow a lot of food. But even a few pots of herbs can make a difference to what you eat - and be a fun and rewarding project.