Growing Food in Polytunnels (simple tips)
Polytunnels are more affordable (around £100) than greenhouses (and these ones are opaque, so can prevent bird strike, as they won’t see the vegetation inside). Choose ones with secure doors and roll-up alternative doors for wheelbarrows. Biodegradable paper mulch is designed for polytunnels.
Read more on no-dig gardening and humane slug/snail deterrents. If you live with animal friends, read up on pet-friendly gardens (some recommended flowers and fruit trees are not safe). Also avoid netting to protect food (just leave some for wildlife!)
Birds often clash with glass windows (including greenhouses) when seeing vegetation inside. So softer fabric polytunnels are usually safer to help stop birds flying into windows.
No-dig gardener Charles Dowding has a post on how to choose and use a polytunnel. He recommends burying the polythene all around in a trenches of one spade’s depth to prevent animals, weeds and draughts creeping in! Charles also has ha YouTube playlist on polytunnels and greenhouses.
How to Grow Food In Your Polytunnel is the ideal book if you wish to grow food out-of-season or run an organic veg box farm, to offer your customers more food during the ‘hungry gap’ (when not much grows apart from kale!)
Polytunnels are ideal for English weather, as they enable gardeners to grow and harvest fresh organic food year-round. This book (illustrated with photos and diagrams) offers a detailed crop-by-crop guide to grow:
- Sweet potatoes and celery in November
- Winter radish, baby carrots and celeriac in early February.
- Salad leaves all through winter
- New potatoes, pak choi, peas, cabbage and beetroot in early spring
You’ll find dedicated chapters on growing for each season, plus a handy sowing/harvesting calendar to help with planning. And tips to increase crop quality, yield and harvesting.
Mark Gatter has been growing vegetables since the early 1980s, and is a firm fan of the organic raised-bed approach. He grows food all year round, in chilly Northumberland!
Andy McKee began gardening with his dad as a child, and grows sustainable food for his family (and wildlife) using a mix of no-dig, perennial and polytunnel methods.
How to Store Your Own Garden Produce
How to Store Your Garden Produce is an updated version of a classic book, to show that anyone with even half an acre of land can feed a family of four for an entire year. Most gardens produce harvests in spring and summer, so this book shows how to avoid the rest of your harvest spoiling (of course you can donate the rest to others if wished).
This simple A to Z guide shows how to dehydrate, freeze, ferment and pickle your produce, plus there are recipes like strawberry wine, peach chutney, mushroom ketchup and celeriac soup. Also read the author’s book he wrote with his daughter: The Vegan Cook and Gardener.
