Photo by vertigogen.

Gardening is the only unquestionably useful job. - George Bernard Shaw

If you’re into sustainable living, or getting into it, the best way to green your food is to start growing your own vegetables, herbs and fruit. You may think that’s not possible if you live in a flat in the city. Well, not only is it possible, but it’s a great stress-buster and a good way to cut food miles.

Preparing your patch

Turning lawn/grass/weeds into a vegetable garden without digging - The sheet-mulch method of getting a growing area ready is one of the true wonders of permaculture. There’s no need to spend hours weeding or lifting turf. Just do this!
1. Cover the area that you want to use with thick cardboard, newspaper, and old natural-fibre clothes and carpets. Be sure to have a good overlap to prevent the weeds from finding their way though. If you’re covering long weeds, just knock them down flat before covering them.
2. Weigh the sheets down with about 10-15cm of rotted manure, compost, kitchen scraps, old leaves or seaweed.
3. The best crop to put in at this stage is potatoes, which do very well in new sheet mulch. Using a sharp knife or screwdriver, make a hole through the mulch and sheet into the ground. Scrape away some of the mulch around the hole and replace with a few handfuls of soil, then place your chitted potato into this. Keep doing this until you’ve filled your patch with potatoes.
4. Cover it all with about 20cm of straw, grass clippings, wood chips or shredded newspaper.
Not only will you have a crop of potatoes for your trouble, but by next year it will all have broken down into lovely fertile soil that you can grow all sorts of lovely vegetables in. Once your growing area is established, make a border for it by burying empty glass bottles upside down in the soil, or re-using old roof tiles or railway sleepers.

Container gardening - Gardens can be made anywhere. If you’re limited to a small courtyard, terrace, balcony or roof-garden then container gardening is the way forward for you. In the interest of keeping your garden eco-friendly, seek out items that can be recycled into container gardens. Here are some ideas to get you started:
1. Building materials - old chimney pots, butler sinks and baths.
2. Buckets and barrels - ask for these from catering companies, make sure they were for food use.
3. Car tyres - these are excellent for growing potatoes.
Make sure your containers have a hole or holes for drainage. Then add broken tiles or old rubble or pebbles to aid drainage. Fill with compost, preferably home made.

Indoor gardening - You can grow your own vegetables and herbs in your kitchen. This clever city vegetable garden is designed for city dwellers without gardens. It’s fully mobile (it has wheels and is light) and is made from 100% recyclable aluminium. Available from ECOutlet for £89.99. To get the city garden ready to plant, you will need 1 x 10 litre bag of substrate or compost and 2 x 10 litre bags of soil.

If you’re so pressed for space that you can’t even fit in a city garden, you could grow your own herbs on the kitchen window with one of these cute bean pods. They come with basil, chives or parsley seeds. Attach the pod by its sucker to the kitchen window and have fresh herbs always available when you’re cooking. The bean pod is made in the UK, so it has a minimal carbon footprint, and it is reusable. Available from Nigel’s Eco Store for £6.99.

Make your own compost

In the garden - There are a number of different composting methods for the garden.
1. The French method: no equipment necessary.
2. The Berkley Thermophilic Compost method: 18 days to beautiful compost.
3. Build a compost box, fill it with kitchen and garden waste and wait 12-18 months: for the DIY enthusiast.
4. Buy a composter, fill it with kitchen and garden waste and wait 12-18 months: for everyone else.

Balcony and courtyard composting - Vermicomposting (composting with worms) is a great way to produce lovely compost for your container garden. To get started you can either make your own wormery, or buy one. Feed your worms on raw or cooked vegetable waste from the kitchen.

Indoor composting - You can compost right in your kitchen, it doesn’t smell and it doesn’t take up much room. You will need to kit yourself out with an all-waste kitchen composter kit. All food waste, including meat and cooked foods, can be composted in this system. The composter takes two weeks worth of waste, and the waste takes two weeks to break down to compost, so it’s recommended to buy a kit of two composters and use them simultaneously.

Harvest rainwater

If you have an outdoor area with a gutter downpipe coming into it, you can collect rainwater. You’ll need to fit a water butt to the downpipe and before long you’ll have lots of rainwater for watering your garden with.

All that’s left to do now is to get planting. The sky’s the limit, but remember that you’ll be eating what you grow, so plant things that you like eating. To get you started, here are some suggestions:

Indoor planting - parsley, mint, chives, thyme, basil, American cress, rocket, mustards, lettuces, tomatoes, aubergines, peppers and chillies.

Containter planting - fruit trees on dwarfing rootstock, soft fruits, most vegetables, potatoes and herbs.

Outdoor planting - anything you like, subject to climate and growing conditions.

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