Growing Food in Polytunnels (simple tips)
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!)
If you share your home with animal friends, learn about pet-friendly gardens (many plants and mulches are unsafe near animal friends). And use nontoxic humane slug and snail deterrents.
Avoid netting and read tips for wildlife-friendly gardens. Also how to create safe havens for garden birds and stop birds flying into windows.
When cooking, bin allium scraps (onion, leeks, garlic, shallots, chives) and citrus/tomato/rhubarb scraps, as acids could harm compost creatures. It’s okay to put them in food waste bins (made into biogas).
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.
More on polytunnels
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.
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.
