Peacock - Patio Produce: How to cultivate a lot of home-grown vegetables from the smallest possible space

This book is aimed at the majority of us who live in terraced houses, high rise flats, town houses and semi-detached properties with little more than a postage stamp for a garden and often nowhere to grow but the patio.

It seems the great buzz words of the last few years are Grow your Own. A real movement of people who grow their own food is building in popularity and I longed to be one of them. But with no land at all and even less free time, the whole idea of growing vegetables seemed dead in the water. I became increasingly frustrated watching TV gardeners with acres of space, room for tonnes of produce, chickens and pigs, tell me how easy it was to live off the land. Television programmes that exhorted me to get out there and Dig for Victory simply got on my nerves.

I tried an allotment but it had insurmountable problems for me. It was too far away for a start; by the time I got there it was time to come home. Secondly, there were too many regulations. There was always someone coming along with something negative to say (I have since found out that the politics of the allotment can sometimes be difficult to cope with). Finally, when I tried to find a friendlier allotment I found there were no plots available; nothing but waiting lists. So, finally I cut my losses and decided to concentrate on turning my little postage stamp of a patio into a productive food-producing machine.

So, why should we bother growing our own vegetables on a patio when there isnt that much space there in the first place?

We have all been urged to look inside our shopping baskets to find out where our food comes from, what chemicals are in them, how many food miles they have travelled and what are the rights and wrongs of the stuff we eat. One thing that all the pundits seem to be agreed on is that sooner or later we will have to grow more of our own food at home. The economics of shipping tomatoes from Kenya and potatoes from Brazil will eventually give way to a more home grown, local system of growing and distributing food. But even if you care little for the politics of food, the very idea of having fresh produce at your back door must excite anyone who, like me, likes their grub. Once you have tasted potatoes plucked from your own garden, carried to your kitchen, cooked and eaten within minutes, you will no doubt have all the motivation needed for growing more and more food at home, even if there is only a postage stamps space to grow it in.

The common patio takes many shapes and is made from all sorts of material. For some, like those in a modern town house, it is simply a few paving slabs dropped by the French windows. For others it is a raised area of decking, and for some it is a balcony many metres in the air. The environment of the patio, the growing conditions and its ability to sustain plant life obviously depends on the geographical setting, but they all have some properties in common. There are many reasons why you should consider patio gardening techniques in your garden if it is less than around 10m2. In such a small garden there is not really enough space to set aside land for crops, and by growing in containers you will have a greater versatility, the ability to move crops around, and by harvest, probably a better yield.

There is no end to the ways you can grow on a patio, and no end to the crops you can grow. Of course, the very word patio implies that you will actually be growing in pots and containers of all kinds. Containers should provide all the requirements for a plant to grow well, if only for a few days at a time and with the added bonus of being able to move them around to suit your needs. As a plant grows too large for a space you can move it elsewhere, or you can rotate your pots so that the plants might get their turn of good sunlight.

Roots, the parts of plants we normally dont see, need to be kept healthy. Healthy roots do not always make for healthy shoots, but the opposite is always the case. Containers need to be the correct size for the plant so that the roots can grow without being confined. The compost they grow in needs to provide water and oxygen as well as an ample supply of nutrients and support so the plant doesnt fall out of the pot in the breeze. Sometimes in growing on the patio it is necessary to help the roots by providing extra support.