Great Dixter’s Aaron Bertelsen shows you how to make a potager on your patio in his lushly illustrated, inspiring book, Grow Fruit & Vegetables In Pots
Grow Fruit & Vegetables In Pots: Planting Advice & Recipes From Great Dixter
Aaron Bertelsen Phaidon £24.95
You’ve got no excuses now. No saying ‘My garden is the size of a postage stamp’. No complaining ‘I can’t keep even a cactus alive’. And no whining ‘I haven’t so much as a single green thumb’. In lushly dewy photographs and clear, inspiring prose, Aaron Bertelsen, head vegetable gardener and cook at Great Dixter in Sussex, shows you how to make a potager on one’s patio.
Bertelsen’s book was inspired by a tiny corner of Great Dixter, the former house and garden of the great gardening writer and designer Christopher Lloyd, who died in 2006. The space was ‘just a few metres square… a threshold between house and garden – a place to knock the mud off your boots, prop up a spade or fork, or set down a heavy trug full of freshly dug produce’.
If you’re after prettiness, petals and tulips, search elsewhere. This is a book for kale fanciers and beetroot botherers. One of the most arresting photos in the book is a portrait of a concrete balcony in east London. In the distance, the skyscrapers and cranes of Canary Wharf. In the foreground, pots, buckets and best terracotta planters blooming with herbs, cabbages and edible flowers.
Aaron Bertelsen (above), head vegetable gardener and cook at Great Dixter in Sussex, shows you how to make a potager on one’s patio in his new book, Grow Fruit & Vegetables In Pots
It makes me feel quite ashamed of not having done more with my Paddington fire escape. Indeed, if you have never so much as pricked out a parsley seedling, this book would be a treat simply to leaf through: peering into potting sheds, ogling ripe tomatoes and admiring new shoots sprouting from old tin cans and antique Brown Betty teapots.
Bertelsen is admirably honest: he warns you off unnecessary hard work (‘maximise productivity, minimise backache’), recommends short cuts and is ‘a total convert’ to cheap, light, easily-stored fabric growing bags.
The book roughly divides into three sections: sowing, growing and chowing. The first covers containers, compost, watering, mulching, feeding, weeding and, the pick of the bunch, harvesting.
The second takes aspiring growers through salad leaves, roots, fruits, beans, cabbages and herbs, identifying hardy varieties, common problems and the nitty-gritty of flies, slugs and bolting radishes.
The third part is a tempting recipe book. I was bracing myself for a vegan lecture, but here are herby beef broths and thyme-topped haddock soufflés, baked trout with fennel, lemon and dill and fig leaf ice cream. There is little puritanism and much pleasure. The recipe for baked apricots (from the supermarket, may I be forgiven) with bay and honey came out of the oven sticky and amber-sweet.
It’s almost cruel to publish this book in February, the so-called ‘hungry gap’. Some of the recipes are the stuff of high-summer fantasy: ‘scented-leaf pelargonium sorbet’, a ‘breakfast salad’ of poached eggs, peppery radishes and nasturtium flowers. I made the hearty, warming cannellini beans on toast with crispy cavolo nero from my mother’s garden. By next winter, I hope to have grown my own.