Home grown food

 In my last post I promised to blog about my latest efforts to grow some of my own food.  As I don't have a garden, I am slightly limited in what I can grow, but I think you can do quite well with just a patio.  So, here are some of the things I am growing this year:

 Last year I grow a few tomato plants in a grow bag, which worked really well, but I thought that this year I would go for something that looked a little better!  I think the pots provide a bit more flexibility as well as you can move them around and arrange them more easily.  Anyway, I have two tomato plants, of different varieties, so hopefully they'll do well.

 These are radishes, which are really very easy to grow and make an excellent salad vegetable.  They grow quickly, particularly  in the hot weather we've been having recently, so I am keeping a couple of pots going planted some time apart.  I hope that this will allow me to have an extended supply of radishes, though continuous would be even better.

 These will be spinach fairly soon...

 This is regular garden mint, which I find is superb for making fresh mint tea!  It's a bit too small at the moment, but when there is enough of it, the thing to do is to simply cut a short branch, wash it, put it into a mug or a cup and pour boiling water of it.  This makes a suitably refreshing hot drink for the hot weather!

 I also planted some Alpine strawberries, which are those really small berries you sometimes see in the shops.  They may be small, but they have a lot of flavour, so hopefully these will turn out well!

 And these are red peppers!  To be honest, I'm not sure how well these will do but I bought them as seedlings from the garden centre and the label said that they were ideal for patios...  It will be exciting if they do produce fruit, but I tried growing sweet peppers indoors last year and it wasn't very successful. 

 I've got space for quite a few more pots, so if I have time I shall be making some additions.  The great thing about using pots is that, once planted, they are really low maintenance, except for needing watering and the occasional feed.