Starting Our Family Vegetable Growing Patch

by Liz Thornber
(Oxfordshire, UK)

Potatoes Four Weeks In...

Starting our family vegetable growing patch has been an ambition, being in the throws of selling our house for over 12 months I was fed up waiting for my new garden in which I could start a vegetable patch. Already an existing Freecycler I noticed a post by someone giving away free seed potatoes. Little did I know this would be the start of something bigger.

I started researching the best way to grow potatoes, on the web and asking friends. A friend suggested the best thing to use was an old recycling box, so there I was posting on Freecycle for people's old recycling boxes (our council recently having swapped over to wheelie bins). This seemed so practical, starting our family vegetable growing patch could begin and I would be recycling at the same time.

It didn't stop there. My daughter (aged 3) was getting very excited about all the to-ing and fro-ing and wanted to join in. So we bought some lettuce, cauliflower, pumpkin and sweetcorn seeds as well as a couple of tomato plants. One Saturday afternoon there we were planting into pots on our patio all these little seeds.

Then we did it we sold the house! We're now at the stage of moving into the new house next week (with an existing veg patch). My parents are now 'plant sitting' all my recycling, window boxes and my pots. Having instructed my dad to keep topping up the potatoes with compost, he now has his very own one with some Anya potatoes and sitting next to them are some tomatoes.

There we are, thanks to a freecycler starting our family vegetable growing patch, it has now influenced three generations of our family who are now growing our own veg!