Grow Your Own — Native Ivy

I want to start this blog post by saying that I am in no way a professional gardener! I am interested in indoor plants and the idea of growing my own veg! I researched how to do certain things as I went along and documented some of it on Instagram which led to me wanting to write a post about my experience and what I learnt along the journey!

When we bought our first house at the start of April the thing I was most excited about was that it had a built in raised bed in the back garden. A few weeks before we finally moved in I started planting some veggies. I wanted to plant vegetables that I love to eat obviously but I wanted to also grow fruit and vegetables that I can only buy in plastic such as Spinach, Peas and Raspberries.

I started off by buying my seeds.. I got mine in Homebase as they have such a wide variety of seeds and different makes. I also bought some fresh compost to mix in with the soil that was already in the raised bed.

I decided to grow my potatoes separate from the raised bed and use a grow bag.. If you don’t want to buy a grow bag you can use a reusable shopping bag or (Bag for life) instead.. I have heard that it works really well. I learnt along the way that there were a few rogue potatoes in my raised bed that must have been there previously.. The plants grew and grew and ended up taking over the whole patch so I would recommend growing them separately and let it overgrow away from your other veg.

Fruit and Veg seeds I planted
Broccoli
Spinach
lettuce
Peas
Onions
Raspberries
potatoes

Vegetables that grew successfully
Potatoes
Peas
Spinach
Raspberries

If you are a first time grower I would highly recommend starting with spinach!! It grows really fast and takes little care! I planted two rows of spinach and got so much crop out of it. The only thing I would say is to keep cutting it when it does start to grow because when it starts to flower the leaves go bitter and aren’t very nice to eat! I buy spinach in my weekly shop and I can only buy it in plastic so it was really nice to use home grown spinach when cooking and not have to buy it in plastic.

My spinach started flowering about a month ago so I cut it all back and planted some fresh seeds. It starts to show signs of growth really soon after planting which is rewarding.

Potatoes are also an easy starter, I bought some seed potatoes but you can use old potatoes you have, let them grow some roots and plant them. I planted mine in a grow bag with compost and manure.. they also take little care, just keep in a place that gets good sunlight and water regularly and leave to grow. Once the plants start to flower you can pick them but the longer you leave them the bigger the potatoes get obviously! Mine started flowering about a month ago and I picked the potatoes on the 1st of August!

The third seeds that successfully grew were my peas! They take a little more work as you need to either buy sticks or use twigs to help them climb. You can also use a net and plant your peas close to a wall so they climb up the wall. Other than making sure they attach onto the sticks they don’t take a lot of looking after.

Some of the extras a grew were Peppers from a plant that I bought in IKEA and Chillies from a chilli plant that was given to me by a friend.. We got a number of really good Peppers and Chillies from both these plants. I kept them in their original pots but if I was to get them again I think I would plant them into better soil and try and buy a local plants somewhere.

I have since grown a Pepper plant from seed which I started inside and then re-potted outside along with some herbs so i’m looking forward to them growing!

My Raspberries also grew well except I one plant didn’t grow very many so if I was to do it again I would buy more Raspberry plants and plant them together!

I tried to grow lettuce, broccoli and Onions and I still haven’t figured out why they didn’t grow successfully when I find out I will let you know…

Top Tip
If you haven’t created a place to plant your veg yet, have a look at your garden to see where gains the best sunlight and make your raised bed there.

Thanks for reading, if you have any questions comment below or send me a message on Instagram.