Visitors given advice on growing their own vegetables in small gardens

The lecture theatre in the Great Yorkshire Garden Show was packed with visitors for a talk, Growing Vegetables In Small Spaces, by David Allison, the West Yorkshire secretary of the National Vegetable Society, editor of the society magazine and author of Getting Started On The Show Bench.

Old-fashioned galvanised dustbins were among his favourite containers for rhubarb and potatoes. He said: “Galvanised is ideal because soil is a very corrosive material.”

He also cadged a lot of “florists’ buckets” and drilled holes in the bottoms. But ordinary six-inch flower pots would grow a surprising range. Defying environmental concerns, he said he still used peat because there was still nothing better and claimed gardening accounted for only a tiny percentage of the peat dug up.

He said he used a range of branded additives – including a water-retaining gel, “brilliant for hanging basket”, grit or perlite or vermiculite for aeration, and a combined slow-release feed and slug deterrent called SlugGone.

He also recommended an expensive product called Rootgrow for long-service plants like gooseberry bushes. For disease control, the best product had been withdrawn but the second best was Bayer Fruit & Vegetable Disease Control.

Mr Allison spoke of “pushing” crops like cauliflower, by planting them a foot apart. They would still be big enough for a meal.

He also grew fast-maturing crops, like radish, beetroot and lettuce, in between rows of slower growers like parsnips, so he could crop the former before the latter formed a canopy.

“Successional cropping” was another productivity trick. He would be lifting early potatoes now and planting beetroot to come up in September and make way for late lettuce. He added: “When ground space is limited, grow high. Cucumbers are ideal for this. You can get 40 or 50 off one plant.”

Vale’s Emerald was a good potato to grow in pots for early cropping. And early potatoes, he said, were the only reason for bothering to grow your own “for the flavour you get when they go into the pot inside an hour”.