Grow your own veg box

Summer vegetables

Image: Tastes of summer, second week of July (clockwise from top left): potato ‘Cosmos’; tomatoes ‘Golden Cherry’ and ‘Gardener’s Delight’; bulb fennel ‘Zefa Tardo’; cucumbers ‘Flamingo’, ‘Prima Top’ and ‘Sunsweet’; beetroot ‘Boltardy’, courgettes ‘Sebring’ (yellow), ‘Genovese’ (pale green) and ‘Defender’ (dark green); garlic; carrot ‘Nantes Early’; onion ‘Radar’ (from sets); calabrese ‘Green Sprouting’; edible-pod pea ‘Sugar Snap’; dwarf French bean ‘Slenderette’; artichoke ‘Green Globe’.

Summer offers far more choice than spring, but often has some tricky weather gambles – too much rain can ruin heat-loving plants (such as tomatoes, cucumbers and French beans), while the hot, dry summers these enjoy is difficult for calabrese, salad leaves and spinach.

If you have enough room, try and grow a few plants of each variety to spread the risk. In small spaces difficult choices are inevitable. Growing cut-and-come-again salad leaves is usually one of the safest bets.

Planning

Seeds of the vegetables pictured were mostly sown in a greenhouse with some heat in March and April, to achieve earlier and more reliable harvests.

If you don’t have a greenhouse, it may be worth buying young plants. I grew tomatoes and cucumbers in a polytunnel; they would barely have cropped outside in the summer of 2007.

Globe artichoke is a perennial plant, benefiting from full light and plenty of room. Garlic grows slowly from plantings of cloves in October or late winter, to harvest in early July. The onions were planted in autumn, as sets, and bulbed up nicely through June, when mildew was badly affecting many of the spring-planted onion crops.

Peas offer the reward of a taste that cannot be bought - delicate and sweet when freshly picked but so quickly lost if stored. They are best sown from late March to late April; I grow tall sugar snaps for their high yield of extra-sweet peas in edible pods, all through July; runner and French beans take over in August and September.

Detailed growing information