Grow your own at Chelsea
The RHS Chelsea Flower Show is not just about flowers. Fruit and vegetable lovers’ won’t be disappointed this year with many of the show gardens and Great Pavilion stands embracing our enthusiasm for growing our own.
The Thompson and Morgan display in the Great Pavilion has a theme of ‘Our food miles or metres’ and highlights the growing concern about food miles. The idea behind this display is to illustrate what can be grown at home, and includes a wide range of food such as corn, strawberries, lemons, oranges, peppers and lettuce.
Still in the Great Pavilion, the Notcutts display also featured heavily on edibles, with pretty raised beds of herbs and vegetables grown around ornamental bay trees.
Outside, Summer Solstice is a sustainable garden with a green-roofed building at the foot of a kitchen garden. All the produce in this garden has been produced organically and the aim is to show that an organic garden can be beautiful. And this Show Garden certainly is, with vegetables and herbs grown in raised beds made of willow.
Off the Main Avenue are the Courtyard Gardens, smaller gardens showing what can be done with a much smaller space. The Dorset Cereals Edible Playground seeks to encourage schools to develop small kitchen gardens for teaching children about growing and healthy eating. Most of the veg in this garden has been grown by school children.