For the past few seasons we have been selling complete gardening kits, which arrive on your doorstep complete with everything you need to grow a herb or vegetable garden of your choosing. Seed catalogues can be mind-boggling, and it’s hard to decide what cultivars of each plant will suit your space. These instant gardens take all the guesswork out of planting your own kitchen garden, making them ideal for novices and busy gardeners.
Whatever your taste, level of ability or available space you’re sure to find a garden that suits you. Here is what’s on the menu for 2010:
Instant Patio Container Garden £39.95.
This organic garden is ideal for small spaces and gardeners with little time to spare. Among other tasty veg this garden features undemanding and compact plants such as runner beans, courgettes and strawberries combined with hardy tomatoes, lettuce and rocket for salads. These can all be grown in containers quite close together, so you only need a small patio or garden for a whole array of delicious organic produce.
Instant Vegetable Garden, £54.99.
This vegetable garden is ideal for gardeners who would like to grow a range of different salads and vegetables both in containers and in the ground. It is primarily composed of classic greens such as cabbages, kales and lettuces with other veg such as spring onions, turnips and broad beans.
Window Box Garden, £24.99.
Proving that you can have an abundance of home-grown produce in even the smallest spaces, our Window Box Garden is packed full of dwarf and compact cultivars of classic kitchen garden plants such as carrots, rocket, basil, coriander and beans. This fragrant mix is ideal for planting in windowboxes, as the scent of fresh herbs will waft in through open windows.
My personal favourite is the Instant Mediterranean Garden £36.99 which provides a mixture of seedlings popular in Greek and Italian cooking such as aubergine, artichoke, courgette, basil, oregano and mixed peppers. These are flavoursome, fragrant kitchen ingredients and are ideal for summer salads and barbeques.
The Instant Organic Salad Garden, £39.95 is specifically designed to offer a large range of salad leaves along with rocket, tomato and beetroot. It is an ideal low-maintenance high-yield garden but slugs do love lettuce leaves so make sure you protect your garden using slug tape or nematodes.
The Kid’s Organic Vegetable Garden, £36.99 was developed with the aim of encouraging children to take part in growing their own vegetables, which seems to make them much more likely to eat them. With that it mind this is a varied mix of nutritious veggies including carrots, beetroot, tomatoes, peas and strawberries. By encouraging your children to grow their own food now you will be setting them up with an invaluable skill to take into adulthood.
