Growing, foraging and keeping

Producing food: the bed, the coop, the hive, the hedgerow.

• FG1 Start a bed from scratchCardboard, compost, and no digging. You can make a productive bed on top of grass in an afternoon and plant into it the same day, and the two decisions that matter most are where you put it and how big you make it.Quick actions, 9 steps
• FG2 Soil and compostCompost is the input that makes the whole system free, and a heap is mostly a matter of mixing green and brown and being patient. Feed the soil rather than the plant, and almost every other problem in the garden gets smaller.Quick actions, 9 steps
• FG3 Grow for calories, not for saladA garden that grows lettuce, courgettes and runner beans produces almost no energy. Potatoes are far and away the best calorie return per square metre in Britain, and the honest arithmetic of feeding a person from a garden is worth doing before you plan one.Quick actions, 9 steps
• FG4 A year-round sowing plan for the UKThe point of a plan is February to May, not August. Anybody can grow a glut in high summer; the skill is having something to eat in the hungry gap, and that is sown the previous summer.Quick actions, 8 steps
• FG5 PotatoesThe best calorie return per square metre in Britain, easy to grow, and they store for months in the dark. Blight is the thing that will beat you, earlies mostly dodge it, and a green potato is genuinely poisonous.Quick actions, 8 steps
• FG6 Brassicas through winterKale, leeks and sprouting broccoli are the crops that stand in the ground and are picked in February, which is exactly when a household on stores needs fresh food. They are sown the previous June, and that is the only difficult thing about them.Quick actions, 9 steps
• FG7 Salad and fast cropsRadish in four weeks, cut-and-come-again leaves in five, pea shoots on a windowsill in ten days. These produce nothing worth counting as energy and they are the quickest fresh food there is, which matters most exactly when the cupboard is dullest.Quick actions, 8 steps
• FG8 Growing under coverA cloche buys a few weeks at each end of the season, a cold frame a month, a polytunnel two months and a crop that would not ripen outdoors at all. Ventilation is what kills plants under cover, not cold, and it kills them in March as readily as in July.Quick actions, 8 steps
• FG9 Watering and droughtWater deeply and rarely, at the base, in the morning, and mulch everything. A light daily sprinkle trains roots to stay at the surface, which is exactly what kills a plant when the water stops.Quick actions, 8 steps
• FG10 Pests without chemicalsBarriers work, predators work, and timing works. Slugs cost more crops in Britain than everything else combined, and the single most effective control is a torch and half an hour after dark in the fortnight after planting out.Quick actions, 9 steps
• FG11 Seed savingStart with peas, beans, tomatoes and lettuce, which pollinate themselves and come true with almost no effort. F1 hybrids do not come true and never will, and a biennial like a carrot takes two years and more plants than most gardens have room for.Quick actions, 9 steps
• FG12 Keeping chickensA few hens turn garden waste and forage into a daily protein supply in a very small space, which is the best food return available to most households. You must register as a keeper, and feeding them kitchen scraps is illegal in the UK, which surprises almost everybody.Quick actions, 8 steps
• FG13 Keeping beesThis is the one thing in the domain you should not start from a page. Bees need a course, a mentor and a local association, because a neglected hive becomes a disease reservoir that infects everybody else's bees for miles.Quick actions, 8 steps
• FG14 Keeping rabbitsRabbits convert greens into meat in a very small space and breed fast, which is why they were the classic wartime backyard livestock. The part that stops most people is the despatch, and that is a hands-on skill that must be learned from somebody competent, never from a page.Quick actions, 9 steps
• FG15 Fishing: the basics and the lawYou need a rod licence for freshwater fishing in England and Wales from the age of 13, and separately you need permission from whoever owns the fishing. Sea fishing from the shore needs no licence, and both have rules on size and season that exist for good reasons.Quick actions, 8 steps
• FG16 Hedgerow foraging by seasonA dozen reliable British hedgerow plants, when each is ready, and the two lookalikes that kill. Elderberries must be cooked, and hemlock water dropwort has killed people who thought they had found wild celery.Quick actions, 8 steps
• FG17 Wild mushrooms, and why this is not an ID guideThe one foraging page that refuses to teach identification, and explains why. Then the part that actually saves a life: what to do when somebody has already eaten one, including the false recovery that kills people.Quick actions, 8 steps
• FG18 Nettles and common wild greensSix plants that grow almost everywhere, are hard to mistake, and give fresh green food from February onwards when nothing in the garden is ready. Wild garlic is the exception: it has two lookalikes that poison people, and the smell test settles it.Quick actions, 8 steps
• FG19 The rules and the law of foragingPicking wild fungi, flowers, fruit or foliage for yourself is not theft in England and Wales. Uprooting a plant without permission is a criminal offence, access land gives you no right to take anything, and Scotland works differently.Quick actions, 9 steps