Whether you are running a restaurant that emphasises quality, ultra-fresh ingredients, or are simply a culinary enthusiast, having a well-run garden is an immense asset to your endeavours.

Designed with the kitchen in mind

The first thing to consider when planning your kitchen garden is the ingredients you need to produce. You may prefer to grown herbs for a reliable and cost-effective supply of savoury flavours for your meals. Then again, a vegetable garden requires experience and knowledge to produce consistent results. One late frost or summer deluge can ruin a whole crop. However, with planning, foresight, and preparation, you can avoid almost every pitfall, and enable your garden to be a great factor in your source for ingredients.

 

 

Long or short term fruits

If you are prepared to wait for a while, planting fruit trees can yield immensely rewarding results. By selecting rare varieties that prioritise flavour over marketability, you can harvest apples, plums and pears with amazing taste, which will greatly improve the quality of your meals, and that is just the beginning. Smaller berries give splendid early yields, and these will improve over time if you enable the plants to thrive.

A little about tomatoes

Tomatoes are perhaps the best example of a fruit whose taste qualities are improved when produced in the garden. Most fruit markets and supermarkets will only consider the bright red, hardwearing varieties that stand up well to being transported and packaged, like the Globe or Cherry tomato. There are so many other varieties available to grow, which produce complex flavours, and the mainstream producers are unable to monetise due to their vulnerability to bruising during transport.

How to deal with pests

You approach to pest control is important if you wish to be considered organic or vegan-friendly. There are a range of organic pest control strategies, like using companion crops, rotation, or by using organic insecticides or fungicides, you can maintain your organic credentials if you are likewise prudent with your choice of fertilizer. Then again, some vegan gardeners prefer to keep their produce under netting, or simply let the pests have their share.

There are many options available for effective pest management though, and your method should be up to you to decide.

Water

Managing water on your kitchen garden is paramount to its success. Ineffective drainage can ruin a crop if there is heavy rainfall. Likewise a drought can devastate a crop. We can help you implement irrigation systems using hosepipes and other mechanisms. However, in the event of a hosepipe ban, when your plants will most need the water, most of these methods will be off the table. By installing waving water butts, a well, or even a pond, you can mitigate or negate these effects however.

Planning the season

Choosing varieties of fruit and vegetables that enable harvesting over a long season makes for a much more consistent and manageable kitchen garden. In this way, you can have a reliable harvest of potatoes, for example, from early June right through to November. This is especially important for restaurant gardens, where a longer season makes seasonal menu items much more commercially viable.

 

If you need help in planning your kitchen garden, you can always consult the experts at Gardens Revived, by calling 07939 619 537.

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