A Year Full of Veg: A Harvest for All Seasons

By Sarah Raven and Jonathan Buckley

A Year Full of Veg is a month-by-month gardening guide to growing the best seasonal veg, from the Sunday Times bestselling author of A Year Full of Flowers.

With her wealth of experience, Sarah Raven shares the most reliable and bountiful varieties to grow, her tried-and-tested favourite crops, and unusual vegetables, herbs and salads that you can't buy in shops.

As well as planting inspiration, Sarah reveals expert tips and techniques for growing and harvesting flavourful crops from January through to December, all based on easy, efficient and productive techniques that ensure you'll always have something fresh to use in the kitchen.

No matter how much outdoor space you have, you'll be inspired to grow at least a little of what you eat.

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'This book, it's a revelation. I can't stop reading it. Sarah writes so well and there is hardly a paragraph where you don't learn something' Prue Leith

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Mar 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526639325

Sarah Raven

Since the publication of her first book The Cutting Garden Sarah has led the way over the last three decades in introducing a new kind of productive gardening which fuses intense colour, elegance and do-ability, bridging all kinds of gardening from dark rich dahlia glories to subtler smoky modern colours of poppies, roses, sweet peas, and all kinds of vegetable deliciousness. She is a teacher, broadcaster, has a popular gardening podcast Grow, Cook, Eat, Arrange with colleague Arthur Parkinson and runs a mail order plant nursery and online store sarahraven.com, (with 500,000 customers). She is the author of many books, most recently A Year Full of Flowers which was a Sunday Times bestseller. sarahraven.com / @srkitchengarden

Book preview

Introduction

Growing veg for abundance, flavour and ease

What to Grow

The best produce for your plot

January & February

Fresh greens on cold days

Salad

Practical: making a propagator; sowing

March

An ideal time to sow

Herbs

Practical: sowing in pots; pricking out

April

A riot of colour and crops

Rhubarb

Practical: planting potatoes; making frames

May

Bridging the ‘hungry gap’

Chard and Spinach

Practical: companion planting; pest control

June

Summer’s tubers and flowers

Potatoes

Courgettes

Edible flowers

Practical: tomato care; making fertilisers

July

A garden full of produce

Beans

Herbs for tea

Practical: plaiting onions; creating compost

August

Harvest, harvest, harvest

Tomatoes

Basil

Practical: taking cuttings; caring for pots

September

Warm-weather specials

Peppers (chilli and sweet)

Aubergines

Practical: sowing for winter; dividing rhubarb

October

A bright autumn feast

Squash

Beetroot

Practical: storing produce; making leaf mould

November & December

A forest of crinkly leaves

Kale

Practical: planting tulips with crops

Sowing & Planting Guide

Acknowledgements

The central pot features dahlias, salvias and lemon verbena for edible flowers and tisanes; these tender perennials are brought in for winter and planted out again the following spring.

Introduction

There are two things I want from my garden. It has to be beautiful, – jam-packed with flowers, form and colour – and it has to produce lots of delicious, fresh, homegrown food. I’ve loved cooking since I was a child and have always known that homegrown is best, so a kitchen garden has been a long-standing priority.

Few things give me more pleasure – and help me relax and wind down at the end of the day and at the weekend – than wandering through the vegetable garden and into the greenhouse, first to see what’s looking good and then to decide what to eat. It feels like a luxury not to have to travel anywhere to buy fresh food, and that’s better for me and better for the environment.

Once you start growing your own, you can make sure your easy-to-grow favourites are there week by week, changing as the year goes on. In winter, I adore picking enough leaves for a punchy salad, as well as a basket of kale for dinners and lunches, and then I’m thrilled when the rhubarb starts in spring, and the early broad beans and peas towards the end of the season. I love being able to dig new potatoes and pick courgettes and runner beans as baby vegetables, tiny and tender and at their absolute best in summer, and then by midsummer, enjoying tomatoes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. By autumn, meaty aubergines are on offer, and finally the squash, before we’re back around to the salads and kale again. Having this ever-changing freshness keeps my cooking on its toes, with a hand-picked harvest there whenever I want it.

If we grow too much for us (that’s Adam, my husband, and I, plus sometimes a grown-up child or two, home for the weekend), then the team at Perch Hill get first dibs and pick what they like to eat. Anita Oakes is in charge of growing the vegetables here, with Josie Lewis overseeing all parts of the garden – they have their favourites, as do the rest of the team, which all make it into the garden. Together, we grow colanders and colanders of fresh edibles, which we also integrate into our lunch menu in the Perch Hill café when the garden is open. Pretty much nothing goes to waste.

Abundance and ease

In the parts of Perch Hill given over to vegetables, I have concentrated my efforts (over what is now thirty years) on trying to ensure that we get the maximum amount of delicious produce from every corner, throughout the year. That’s my number one driver as far as edibles go – year-round, square-metre productivity. It’s why most of the vegetable garden is devoted to cut-and-come-again plants, which we can harvest on one day, only to find that a week later we can do so again. These cut-and-come-agains provide us with the most efficient productivity. That’s why classics such as cabbages and maincrop potatoes don’t usually make it into my plot, while salad leaves, plenty of herbs and leafy greens always do.

The vegetable garden at Perch Hill in spring, with rhubarb in the foreground.

We tend to grow one or two difficult-to-buy and exceptional-tasting potato varieties such as ‘Pink Fir Apple’ and ‘Ratte’, but the whopper maincrops (such as ‘Maris Piper’) are easy to find, even organic ones, in supermarkets, greengrocers and through local veg-box schemes – they are true space guzzlers, so I’d say don’t waste your precious garden beds on these.

For the sake of culinary completeness, you might think it crazy not to grow Brussels sprouts or cauliflowers for winter. But however handsome they are, unless you have lots of space, I’d leave them to the farmers. They sit in the ground for a good six months before harvest and then, after all that waiting, give you only a small amount of food per square metre. And, as a brassica, they need netting protection against cabbage white caterpillars, which can add fiddle, time and work.

The plants we do grow must be both productive for a long time and easy to look after. I want to have a good range of crops, which means that no one plant should require too much attention. I’ve tried growing ginger and sweet potatoes, for example, but wouldn’t recommend either. They require a lot of faff, or at least more heat and better light than we can give them naturally in the UK; even with those essentials, they produce rhizomes and tubers that are only half the size we’re used to seeing in the shops.

Instead, I want the things I grow to germinate reliably and progress fast to harvestable size. Once there, they should be slow to bolt and sit at just the right picking stage for ages, offering kitchen ingredients on minimal TLC.

Abundance and easy growing is about finding crops that give you a great return, even when resources are limited. Each and every one of the edibles I recommend are life-enhancing and generously productive in any space – anyone with a bit of garden, a yard, or even just some pots or window boxes, can grow at least a few of the crops I recommend in this book. You don’t need great skill, knowledge or space to harvest fresh, healthy food.

Since my mid-twenties, wherever I’ve lived I’ve grown something edible. However small my home, I’ve managed to prop a few pots on my doorstep. When I lived in a flat in London, I used to sow things to eat into long, narrow boxes that were made by my now husband Adam to fit our small window ledges. Our window boxes were supported by a couple of plant theatres mounted on either side of the backdoor to give us more growing room. All of these containers were densely planted with easy-to-look-after crops like parsley, lettuce, Swiss chard and herbs, all available for simple snipping right outside the kitchen door. There are so many benefits to growing in this way: firstly, if picked the correct way, these crops regrow, even in winter. And importantly, growing in containers is often done well out of the reach of neighbourhood cats.

Perch Hill, a garden in the middle of a 90-acre organic farm in the densely wooded Sussex Weald.

A two-season system

What I’ve found from our trials and experiments here at Perch Hill is that there are plants that can provide you with great things to eat for 365 days a year.

Most traditional approaches divide veg gardening into four seasons, but it’s simpler and more successful to stick to two. A useful general principle is to consider the 12 months to be split into two halves: early October to April, when it’s colder, greyer and rainier here in the UK; and May to September, when temperatures and light levels rise. That gives us two seasons and lots of edible plants that will fit into each. You just need to know what does well in which and select from the right group. There are a few must-haves (such as parsley and chard) that do well in both seasons, but these sorts of plants are rare.

It’s safe to say that the hardy plants (mainly annuals) are the all-important givers for the October to April season: think kale, leeks (though these are not, of course, cut-and-come-again), chard, salad rocket and any of the mustards. The half-hardy or tender varieties – such as tomatoes, basil, cucumber, courgettes, runner and French beans – are the crops to concentrate on between May and September. Particularly if you’re a beginner grower, this two-season system will help you hugely in growing food.

The veg slope in March, with tulips growing up through the salad.

The veg slope, herb garden and greenhouse in July.

Flavour, colour and life

While abundance is a big motivator for me, outstanding flavour is right up there too, and to this end we continue to repeat trials here at Perch Hill to establish which forms have the most distinctive taste. I love a trial; it really helps to work out which are the best varieties for flavour and for our growing conditions here in the UK, so we can be confident in our recommendations when speaking to other growers and offering advice. You’ll see I’ve mentioned the results of various trials throughout the book.

Our kitchen garden grows on a slope, which wraps around the flower garden and cookery school building and is therefore very prominent as you come into Perch Hill. Being so visible, this whole area needs to be more than just productive; it’s important that it’s also full of interesting plant combinations that offer colour, form and shape. If you’re growing food in your garden rather than in formal rows in an allotment, these things matter, and so throughout the book I’ve highlighted the plant combinations and forms that bring character to the garden.

And finally, it makes sense to me on all levels that we garden according to organic and no-dig principles. The garden here is run entirely without the use of chemicals. We’re lucky to have plenty of well-rotted manure available from the organic farm next door, but even if that wasn’t the case, organic we would be. If you’re growing food to eat, there’s increasing evidence that organic is better for you, and that grown slowly, without the use of lots of extra water and chemical fertilisers, food tastes better. While there’s nature and biodiversity to attend to above ground, there is equal richness below ground, with mycorrhizal fungi, earthworms and millions of other invertebrates that need to be nurtured for healthy soil. With that in mind, several years ago we moved to a no-dig system, more or less retiring our spades and opting to leave the soil structure undisturbed.

I am also a great believer in encouraging natural pest predators into the garden (most garden birds, frogs, toads and beneficial insects) as well as companion planting (using one plant to help another remain healthy and free from pests). It’s a satisfying way to garden that brings so much life to the veg plot.

These are the main pillars of our Perch Hill kitchen garden: abundance, ease, flavour, colour and nature. They’re what you’ll find advice on in this book. Now on to what I’d suggest you grow…

A summer harvest; a pot with Hyacinthus orientalis ‘Anastasia’ growing up through kale in March; dwarf French bean ‘Speedy’; a potato trial.

Rainbow chard, which we can pick all year.

What to Grow

Deciding what to grow in the time and space you have available is one of the main pleasures and challenges we gardeners face. I use a method that divides edible plants into five categories to help me decide what I’m going to grow and how much of it. If you have lots of time and space, you could choose something from each category, but if you’re short of either, I’d advise sticking with just the plants in category 1 – these are the generous producers that will keep giving on minimal TLC – though you could add in a few things from category 2 if you have more room.

The labour/reward ratio should be at the forefront of your mind. Concentrate your time and energy on the easy and generous producers, particularly where space is limited. I always think it’s best to grow something you really love, and enough of it to transform a meal once or twice a week, than go for small, not very useful quantities of a wider range of plants. For me, this means an emphasis on salads and herbs, whatever the time of year, but use these pages to make your own selection. And then use the rest of the advice in this book – based on 30 years of trialling here at Perch Hill – to grow what you love efficiently, well and with joy.

Category 1: Big producers

In this category you’ll find the cut-and-come-again plants that offer a harvest that appears to be almost limitless. To ensure this reliability, you need to keep picking to keep them producing; you should not leave fruit and pods on the plants or allow the leafy ones to get too big and struggle, as that’s when they bolt or concentrate their energy on ripening only one or two bumper-sized fruits rather than a new crop.

We work to two seasons here at Perch Hill: the first in the colder, greyer October to April, and the second in the lighter, warmer May to September. We adjust the varieties we grow accordingly (see here).

For the latter, warmer season we select varieties bred for greater heat and drought tolerance, for example, kale ‘Red Russian’ replaces kale ‘Curly Scarlet’, which is harder cropping and has better flavour in the summer season. And the prolific chard ‘Lucullus’ is the one to go for in the hot, dry months: we’ve found ‘Lucullus’, bred in Australia, much more able to put up with our average summer conditions and it is also slow to bolt.

The selection in this list are all worthwhile even if space is limited and most are ideal for growing in pots. The most prolific producers are at the top of the list, which moves down in order of square-metre productivity, so if you have very limited space, select from the salads, herbs and leafy greens only.

Salads

• Lettuce

• Salad leaves

• Edible flowers

Herbs

• Annual salad herbs (such as parsley and coriander)

• Perennial herbs (such as mint, sorrel, chives, fennel, tarragon)

• Tender perennials (such as scented-leaf pelargoniums)

• Woody evergreen herbs (such as bay, sage and, to an extent, rosemary)

Leafy greens

• Kale

• Annual spinach

• Perpetual spinach

• Chard

Summer squash and courgettes

Beans

• Runner beans

• French beans

Rhubarb

Great for shade.

Peas

• Sugar snap

• Mangetout

Both more prolific than shelling pea varieties.

Tomatoes

A key crop, but not pick-and-come-again. See categories 3 and 4.

Cucumbers*

Large varieties as well as small, so-called Lebanese cucumbers.

Peppers*

Chilli and sweet.

Aubergines*

* These three crops are best grown in a greenhouse in most of the UK.

Productivity table

To make clear how productive some edibles are compared with others, see the table below. It shows the results of a small patch of garden given to Savoy cabbage compared with the same-sized bed of asparagus and purple sprouting broccoli, as well as the same surface area given to Swiss chard and a salad leaf like mizuna ‘Red Knight’ (you’ll see why the latter is my take-to-the-moon plant).

Harvests from category 1, the big producers.

From category 2, a four-colour beetroot harvest.

A note on growing in pots

For growing in pots and large containers, I’d recommend the following selection (taken from the main category 1 list).

• All the cut-and-come-again salads and herbs

• Compact varieties of kale such as ‘Red Russian’ If picked regularly, it becomes sort of bonsaied

• Swiss or rainbow chard

• Climbers such as runner beans To make use of vertical space

• Chillies These are particularly suited to pots as they look great, need little room and can be grown inside on a window ledge if necessary.

Category 2: Easy edibles

These are the easy plants that can be chucked in and ignored. They get on with growing and don’t need much care and attention. They are ideal if you have limited time or you grow vegetables on an allotment and can’t make it there every day.

Annuals

Even in drought, this lot will just about be okay without regular watering, and they don’t need constant harvesting to stop them running to seed.

• Beetroots

• Broad beans

• Kale

• Kohl rabi

• Leeks

• Purple sprouting broccoli

This helps bridge the ‘hungry gap’ in spring.

• Squash

These admittedly take up lots of space, but are happy on minimal TLC if you add plenty of well-rotted manure on planting.

Perennials and shrubs

You can plant these perennials in spring or autumn and they should keep producing for years, or even decades, without requiring much attention.

• Asparagus

I think asparagus just about makes it into this category, but it’s a borderline case. It’s so tasty, and at its best eaten straight from the garden, but it crops for a short time and doesn’t properly provide a harvest until three years from planting, so it’s only for those who have lots of space and can keep on top of the weeds long-term. If you have an asparagus grower near you, your space is probably more constructively filled with other plants from categories 1 and 2.

• Bush and cane fruit (such as blackcurrants, blackberries and raspberries)

Note that I don’t cover fruit in this book.

• Evergreen herbs (such as rosemary and sage)

• Globe artichoke

• Perennial kale, such as sea kale

• Rhubarb

Tubers

• Jerusalem artichokes

• Potatoes

These are ideally chitted and earthed up, which is a small amount of work, but even if you only manage to get them into some rich soil without doing either of those things, it’s probable you will end up with a worthwhile harvest.

Category 3: Flavour first

We’ve all experienced tasteless tomatoes or bland carrots from the supermarket or even greengrocer (often because commercial growers put productivity and ease of storage before flavour). It’s true that buying organic, locally grown vegetables in season matters (increasing your chances of tasty produce), but it’s even better to grow them yourself, focusing on varieties that pack a flavourful punch. In this category you’ll find the edibles that especially benefit from being homegrown.

Varieties and time

Growing excellent varieties slowly and with care means better flavour – a lot of commercial varieties are not bred for flavour, and growers flood their crop with nutrients and water to speed up harvest.

• Tomatoes

Particularly if you have a greenhouse (where they crop longer and harder than outside and aren’t prone to blight), tomatoes are one of the most worthwhile plants to grow.

Sugar content

Vegetables with a high sugar content (which rapidly converts to starch after harvest), are much nicer when freshly picked or pulled.

• Shelling peas

• Sweetcorn

• New potatoes

• Carrots

• Asparagus (to a lesser degree)

Water content

Some plants grown very quickly with lots of heat and water – as they often are commercially – have a fraction of the flavour of those grown more slowly in the home garden or greenhouse.

• Many herbs (such as tarragon, basil and even chives)

Homegrown, these have twice the strength of flavour as those you find in supermarket bags.

• Lettuces

• Peppers (chillies and sweet)

Until you’ve grown a pepper yourself, you won’t really know their true sweet smokiness.

Texture

The texture of supermarket vegetables is often impacted by over-refrigeration and long transport times – getting from plot to plate can really impact the flavour of the produce. Homegrown, right at your backdoor, is an utterly different and much better experience.

• Beans (particularly French and runner)

When fresh, they’re squeaky on your teeth!

• Purple sprouting broccoli

• Radishes

These are best when just picked and crunchy.

Size

Finally in category 3, I’ve included the vegetables that taste much better harvested as baby vegetables, something you can control yourself when growing at home as you can pick them whenever you like.

• Baby Florence (bulb) fennel

• Beetroots

• Broad beans

• Courgettes

• Runner beans

Harvests from category 3, the flavour-first crew.

A selection from categories 4 and 5, the unbuyables and the lookers.

Category 4: Unbuyables

This category focuses on the edibles that are generally not easy to find in shops, and I include here unusual coloured varieties of some readily available vegetables.

• Beetroots (multicoloured)

• Borlotti beans

• Chard

• Courgettes (multicoloured, climbing and crookneck)

• French beans (purple and yellow)

• Onions (green)

• Tomatoes (green, black, yellow and orange)

• Unusual herbs (such as chervil and summer savory)

Category 5: The lookers

I recommend this final category, which includes plants that are both edible and ornamental, bringing life and colour to the garden. I used to include flowering parsnip in this category because their flowers are beautiful, acid-green umbels and I loved picking them for arranging, but have found the flowers, stems and leaves can burn the skin on a sunny day, so parsnip flowers are best avoided.

• Globe artichoke

• Herbs (such as oregano and sage)

• Kale (particularly ‘Redbor’ and ‘Curly Scarlet’) as well as kalettes

• Leeks (purple-washed varieties such as ‘Northern Lights’ and ‘Saint Victor’)

• Rainbow chard

• Scented-leaf pelargoniums

A note on growing in a greenhouse

In the practical sections of each chapter you’ll find jobs ‘in the greenhouse’, which really means any space that’s protected under glass or cover. I’m pretty averse to ‘kit’ and rarely recommend buying additional equipment. However, if you want to grow a plentiful supply of vegetables through the year, I’d suggest working out how to include even a small area of under-cover space.

If you possibly can, include a greenhouse in the garden. It is a fabulous way to extend a garden’s potential, particularly if there’s room in it for soil-filled troughs or beds, as well as a bench for propagating.

A polytunnel is also a great space for growing almost any plant and is often easier to integrate into small spaces. Offering all-round light and a bit of frost protection, it makes certain crops like tomatoes much easier to grow.

If you don’t have space or budget for a greenhouse or polytunnel, then I’d really advise considering even a small cold frame, which will offer cooler and brighter conditions than any spot in a house. And if you don’t have space for a cold frame, even on a balcony, I’d suggest buying seedlings from a good nursery rather than trying to grow more than the odd thing on an indoor window ledge. In my experience, plants