Gear Alan - Organic Vegetable & Fruit Growing & Preserving Month by Month

Former scientists Alan and Jackie Gear, Britains leading organic gardeners, were directors of the Henry Doubleday Research Association (now called Garden Organic) for many years, where they were instrumental in making environmentally friendly gardening mainstream.

They set up Ryton Organic Gardens, the Vegetable Kingdom visitor centre, developed the Heritage Seed Library, created National Potato Day, presented Channel 4s ground-breaking series All Muck & Magic?, and ran many campaigns, including Grow Your Own Organic Fruit and Vegetables the first initiative in the country-wide trend towards producing home-grown food. Celia Haddon, writing in The Daily Telegraph, said At the heart of Jackie and Alan Gears message lies a great truth that to change the world for the better a person can, and should, start in their own back yard.

In 2003 they were awarded Honorary Fellowships by the Royal Horticultural Society, and MBEs for services to organic horticulture. They are authors of the highly respected Organic Gardening: The Whole Story, published by Watkins in 2009.

Alan and Jackie are passionate fruit and vegetable growers on their garden and allotment in north-west Norfolk.

WATKINS PUBLISHING

LONDON

This edition published in the UK 2011 by
Watkins Publishing, Sixth Floor, Castle House,
7576 Wells Street, London W1T 3QH

Text Copyright Alan and Jackie Gear 2011

The authors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work.

All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the Publishers.

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Designed and typeset by Paul Saunders

Printed and bound by Imago in China

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Available

ISBN: 978-1-78028-208-4

www.watkinspublishing.co.uk

For past and present staff of the Henry Doubleday Research
Association (working name Garden Organic)

This book draws on the expertise and experiences of many more people than we are able to mention here. Were it not for Lawrence D. Hills, the acknowledged leader of the organic gardening movement in the early days, we wouldnt have written it at all. He personally passed on much knowledge when we trained with him in the 1970s at HDRA, the charitable research organization he founded. As directors of HDRA between 1986 and 2003, we also learned an enormous amount about growing fruit and vegetables organically from the gardeners, advisers and scientists who worked there. We have also taken advantage of invaluable research done at that time by what was then called the National Vegetable Research Station, now part of the University of Warwick. There is nothing quite like sharing experiences to broaden your outlook, and we freely acknowledge the role of the many HDRA members, friends and other keen gardeners we have chatted to over the years, who have generously passed on their tips and advice.

Our thanks also go to Bob Sherman, Director of Horticulture at Garden Organic, and one of the countrys leading experts on organic fruit growing, for checking what we have written about fruit in .

To Michael Mann at Watkins, our gratitude for commissioning the book, and for allowing us free rein to develop it as we saw fit. Wed also like to thank Penny Stopa, our editor Alison Bolus, Paul Saunders for his illustrations, and our indefatigable agent, Jane Graham Maw. Any mistakes in the text are, we fear, entirely down to us.

Finally, we would like to acknowledge the constant support of family and friends during the past six months, particularly Gray and Sue, Betty and David, Anne and Brian, Heather, Graham, Sylvia and Norman. They must have asked the question Hows the book going? thousands of times!

Alan and Jackie Gear, Snettisham, Norfolk, Easter 2010

This is the perfect book whether you want to start growing your own produce for the very first time or if youre an experienced grower who would like all the details of yearly cultivation laid out concisely and clearly in a handbook you can pop into your pocket for easy reference.

So, if you want to eat healthily and cheaply and enjoy the wonderful taste of freshly harvested produce, as well as help the environment by avoiding chemical pollution and unnecessary food miles, read on! Youre in good company, for it seems that just about everyone is using whatever space they can find from their patios to allotments to grow their own. Flowerbeds up and down the country are being dug up in favour of fruit and vegetables, and even the Queen now has heritage vegetables growing in the former flowerbeds of Buckingham Palace.

This book will show you how to produce fresh, sweet-tasting peas, mouth-watering tomatoes and luscious strawberries. It will guide you through the gardening calendar, from sowing to harvesting, with a comprehensive list of jobs for each month of the year. And its backed up with detailed descriptions of how to grow more than 80 different vegetables, herbs and fruit, ending with advice on all the many ways in which you can preserve and store what you have grown.

Its philosophy is unashamedly organic, because we care about the food we put into our bodies and, more importantly, we care about the environment, so we avoid chemical pesticides and fertilizers, concentrating instead on building up a rich population of soil organisms. When fed by the composted organic matter we add to the soil, they convert it into a range of nutrients to feed our plants to make them healthy. We also encourage a rich diversity of beneficial wildlife, which helps us to cope with any plant pests and diseases.

Our thinking is based on how we have been gardening for the past 35 years, ever since we gave up conventional jobs as scientists to work for Lawrence Hills, the legendary organic gardening guru, and founder of the horticultural research organization, the Henry Doubleday Research Association (HDRA). In 1986 we took over as joint directors of HDRA, and during the next 17 years we and its gardeners, scientific researchers and educational advisers built it into the largest organic horticultural research and demonstration organization in Europe. Much of the information and many of the growing techniques in this book were discovered and developed by our team at HDRA. Its important work continues to this day, as Garden Organic, its new working title.

Unusually in a gardening book, we have included information about human nutrition, because, as much as we all enjoy our food, its role is to nourish us. Put simply, we are what we eat, and research from trials around the world has shown that organically grown produce contains greater amounts of phytochemicals than conventionally produced food. These plant chemicals play an important role in protecting the body against cancer, heart disease and other degenerative conditions, and so we list the major phytochemicals, minerals and vitamins contained in each fruit and vegetable in the book. Certain of them, usually the brightly coloured ones, are so rich in vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals that they are called superfoods. We have selected the top 20, so that you can take these into consideration when youre planning what to grow, although, as we emphasize in the book, you cant really go wrong if you eat a balanced diet containing a rich variety of fresh fruit and vegetables five a day at the very least!