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Growing your own fruits and vegetables in your garden isn’t just fun and convenient, it is also empowering and can greatly reduce your family’s and your home’s carbon footprint.

You don’t need particularly green fingers either. With a little planning, preparation, and the right approach, anyone can grow vegetables in their garden, no matter how little space they have to play with. Here is our quick guide to five of the best methods for growing your own vegetables, and saying goodbye to the supermarket vegetable aisle!

Plant a Vertical Veg Garden

If you are short on space, don’t worry, you can still grow your own vegetables and herbs using a vertical garden. Grow up instead of out!

People are crafting their own vertical gardens out of all kinds of materials. One of the easiest and cheapest ways is to use a large, fabric shoe tree that you would normally find in a wardrobe and hang it on a fence or on a gate. This provides you with a number of pods you can plant vegetables in, and they will grow.

Some vegetables are better suited to virtual gardens than others, such as tomatoes, peas, cucumbers, squashes and melons, as well as herbs. There are many flowers that grow well in these conditions if you want to add some extra colour to your garden.

Use Discarded Wooden Pallets to Make a Raised Plant Bed

If you keep your eyes peeled, you will probably notice wooden pallets lying abandoned in all kinds of places, often in supermarket car parks or at your local refuse centre.

These make quick and simple raised planters that you can use to grow a number of vegetables, and this is a great technique to use if your garden is mostly paved. Simply attach weed proof material that you can find in any garden centre to the underside and sides of the pallet. This allows you to fill the pallet with soil and use the planks of the topside of the pallet as spacers between your vegetable planting. You can even use these for vertical gardening by attaching the bottom side to a fence or wall.

Build a Bucket Garden

Big five-gallon buckets are used for all kinds of purposes, but once they are empty, you can be stuck for ideas on what to do with them. Why not give them a new lease of life and create a bucket garden?

You can use these buckets by filling them with soil and organic matter and planting leafy greens and tomatoes inside. These large buckets give a plant and its root system plenty of room to grow and mature, and it makes the plants portable. This makes your vegetable garden convenient, as you can move them out of the way to create extra space in the garden when you need it. You can also move the plants around your garden through the day to give them the maximum amount of available sunshine.

Use Large Planters as Vegetable Patches

If your garden gives you some space to play with, then making your own raised planters can give you an attractive and functional area to grow any kind of vegetable.

Timber sleepers, such as old railway sleepers, are the perfect material to construct your raised vegetable bed. You will need quite a few wooden sleepers for the garden that are roughly 2.4m in length. Use this handy guide from Armstrong Supplies on how to lay railway sleepers in the garden to help you construct the perfect planters. You can also get your timber sleepers 2.4m from their online store.

There is a huge range of vegetables you can grow using this method, including root vegetables like potatoes, carrots, and sweet potatoes. If you do plan on growing root vegetables, however, make sure your large raised planters are tall, so the plants have the depth they need to grow vegetables under the surface of the soil.

Use Plastic Sheeting to Make a Greenhouse

If you want to grow some vegetables, and even fruits, that are more suited to a warmer temperature, then you can make your own greenhouse, or polytunnel, using plastic sheeting above your planters to give them extra insulation through the warmer months.

Using these ‘polytunnels’ allows you to grow a wider range of fruit and vegetables all year round. If you want to get the most from your vegetable garden, then a polytunnel is the way to go. You can buy some polytunnels online, but it is much cheaper to make your own if you have the time. With a well-constructed polytunnel, you can grow tomatoes and chillies all year round, and even exotic fruits like lemons or grapes in the spring and summer months.

Having a functional and diverse vegetable garden outside your home is incredibly convenient, and can be a lot of fun. You don’t need a huge financial investment to get started, and the money you will save helps the garden pay for itself. Get started today.

Claire Preece