Big Issue vendors have a wide variety of skills and experience, so we bring you the best of their knowledge each week. This week, Exeter vendor Richard Todd, who has worked as a landscape gardener and organic farmer, explains how you can start growing your own vegetables now spring is upon us.
Right now in early spring I’d definitely be planting onions, peas, parsnip and hardy salad. I’d be putting my potatoes in too, plant new potatoes as early as possible. With main crop potatoes you need to use a copper sulphate mixture to keep the blight away whereas with new potatoes you get them out of the ground before the blight even comes.
You can store them, they don’t store that well – but it’s still food! And you can grow a hardy salad at this time of year – I just grow a few lettuces, leave them in the ground and take a few leaves off and make a salad out of that.
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There’s still a risk of frost until into May so crop covers and cloches are a good idea to place over the top of your crops. I prefer reusable fleece rather than throwaway stuff, it seems wasteful and it’s not very strong. I used to use any old recycled plastic bags and just weigh them down with earth or peg them with tent pegs.
You can also make cloches out of glass – old windows for example. Cloche tunnels are quite a good idea, I’ve used plastic piping for that in the past. And when garden centres replace their polytunnel plastic you can sometimes get scrap bits of plastic from them. Most crops need some kind of protection at this time of year.
