Nigel Slater
How I garden for my kitchen

Nigel Slater, TV cook, bestselling cookery author and food columnist for The Observer, has joined the RHS grow your own veg campaign.

Nigel kickstarts his new series on food from the garden.

I have always grown something for the kitchen. The first rickety wigwam of runner beans in my father’s sloping Worcestershire garden; the sprouted lentils on blotter in my room at college; the single row of tomato plants balanced precariously on the windowsill of my first London flat. The main reason for buying the terraced house in which I now live was its long garden. Far from what you would call large, I nevertheless felt it would give me a wider opportunity to grow something edible of my own.

A small fruit and vegetable garden is frustrating for the excitable gardener – there is so much you are forced to leave out. At first I refused to grow potatoes or peas because they threatened to take up so much room. Even now, having calmed down from my initial overenthusiasm, the beans, tomatoes and squashes tend to collide with the dahlias giving an impression of mild chaos in a small space.

The first thing I planted in this garden, almost a decade ago now, was a ‘Discovery’ apple tree. It was a flight of pure nostalgia. I had the urge to re-create the single most pleasing memory from my childhood; that of the particular scent of the tree’s ripe fruit falling into the Phlox paniculata underneath. The scent of happy days.

Other edibles quickly followed: a damson tree, a mirabelle, a medlar, Kentish cobnuts and then my first vegetables, a sturdy frame of scarlet-flowered runner beans and three rows of different broad beans. Before long I was comparing one bean to the next and assessing their suitability for the kitchen.

I know I can never be even remotely self sufficient; the organic box and the Saturday trip to the farmers’ market continue to be part of my life, but that is not the point. I garden for the feel of pushing a seed into the soil, the joy of watching that first little shoot, of being able to eat something within minutes of picking. Above all I grow for the pleasure (admittedly with the occasional heartbreak) of growing at least something whose story I will know from seed to plate.

Find out more about Nigel - visit www.nigelslater.com