Cucumbers have come on a great deal since the old days when they needed expert attention to get anything other than a miserable crop of bitter fruit. There are now all-female varieties that save you the effort of removing the male flowers that produce bitter fruit and there are also bitter-free varieties. Nevertheless, cucumbers are something of a specialist crop. If you feel like trying them, buy ready-grown plants and put them three to a growing bag or singly in pots. The outdoor or ridge varieties are easiest and for a novelty crop you could try to get hold of plants of ‘Crystal Apple‘, which, for some reason or other, produces cucumbers the size, shape and colour of a large lemon. ‘Sweet Success’ is an all-female plant that can be grown out of doors in a container and ‘Patio-Pik’ claims to take up no more room than a cabbage and endure neglect yet still produce more than thirty cucumbers per plant. I haven’t tried it myself but, even allowing for a bit of horticultural hyperbole, it sounds just the thing for the window box gardener. Read the rest of this entry »

In the days when half an acre was regarded as a small garden the idea of growing vegetables in window boxes would have been a huge joke. Today, with our smaller plots and smaller families, the idea is not so laughable. Seedsmen, too, have been working for us to produce dwarfer, tidier plants that can be accommodated in boxes, tubs and other containers. There are, too, the ubiquitous growing bags so that anyone with a fancy for home-grown beans or peppers or tomatoes or other salad crops can easily indulge this. All right, you will hardly have surplusfor freezing but you should be able to enjoy good early pickings. And what a triumph, to be able to serve French beans with a real snap to them, freshly picked from your own window sill. French beans, especially the dwarf varieties that need no staking, are a vegetable particularly suited to container growing. Read the rest of this entry »