A Beginner’s Guide to Growing Food for Resilience

Growing some of your own food doesn’t mean becoming completely self-sufficient. For most households, that isn’t realistic, and it doesn’t need to be. The aim is simply to become a little less dependent on buying everything you eat, while learning useful skills and producing food that actually makes a difference in the kitchen.

Even a small garden, greenhouse, patio or a few containers can contribute. You don’t need acres of land or years of experience to get started. The important thing is to begin with what you have and gradually learn what works for you.

Choosing What to Grow

The best place to start is with food you already eat. It sounds obvious, but there is little point spending time and money growing vegetables that nobody in the household likes.

Think about what you regularly buy. Tomatoes, potatoes, beans, courgettes, salad leaves and herbs can all be useful crops to start with, depending on the space and conditions you have. There is also something to be said for growing the things you enjoy most, even if they aren't necessarily the most productive crops in the garden.

If you are new to growing, resist the temptation to buy dozens of different seed packets. Pick a handful of crops and learn how they behave. A few successful crops will teach you much more than twenty different varieties struggling at the same time. You can always add more the following year.

I've shared quite a bit of my own experience with growing food on YouTube, including the successes, failures and things I've learnt along the way. For me, that's one of the useful things about gardening videos: you can see how things actually work in a real garden rather than everything looking perfect on paper.

Making the Most of Your Space

You don't need a huge vegetable garden to grow useful amounts of food. Containers can be used for potatoes, herbs, salad crops and tomatoes, while climbing beans can make use of vertical space. A greenhouse can extend the growing season and give more tender plants some protection.

If space is limited, it becomes even more important to think about what gives you a useful harvest for the room and effort involved. Runner beans and French beans can produce heavily from a relatively small area, salad leaves and spinach can be picked over a long period, and courgettes can provide an impressive amount of food from just a few plants.

Tomatoes are particularly useful because they can be eaten fresh but can also be turned into sauces and other preserves. Potatoes are another practical crop because they are filling, versatile and can be stored.

That doesn't mean everything you grow needs to be chosen purely for productivity. A garden should still contain things you actually enjoy eating.

Growing Through the Seasons

Resilience isn't just about having a huge harvest in August. A garden becomes much more useful when you learn how to keep something growing for as much of the year as possible.

Spring and summer naturally get most of the attention, but autumn and winter can provide plenty of opportunities too. Depending on your conditions, crops such as kale, chard, spinach, winter salads, leeks, cabbage, broad beans and hardy herbs can extend the season.

One of the most useful habits to develop is simply asking yourself, "What can I sow next?"

Instead of planting everything at once and then having a glut, smaller sowings can give you a steadier supply of food. Once you start thinking about what will replace a crop when it finishes, you can make much better use of the growing space you have.

This is something I regularly talk about on my YouTube channel as well, because seasonal growing is much easier to understand when you can actually see what is happening in the garden from one month to the next.

Getting to Know Your Garden

Every garden is different, and learning the particular conditions of your own space is one of the most useful things you can do.

One part of the garden might stay wet after rain, while another dries out quickly. One bed may get sunshine all day while another is shaded for much of it. Wind, drainage, soil type and pests can all make a difference.

Pay attention to what succeeds and what struggles. You don't need complicated records, but making a few notes each year can be surprisingly useful. After a couple of seasons, you'll start to know which areas are worth using for particular crops and where problems are likely to occur.

This is also one of the reasons I enjoy documenting my own garden online. A garden changes constantly, and looking back at previous growing seasons can be a useful reminder of what worked, what didn't and what I'd do differently next time.

Soil, Compost and Water

Good food growing starts with looking after the soil. You don't need to become an expert in soil science before planting your first seeds, but adding organic matter and maintaining good soil structure will help over time.

Compost is particularly useful because it turns garden and some kitchen waste into something that can go back into the garden. Over time, making your own compost can also reduce the amount you need to buy.

Water is another part of the equation that is easy to overlook until there is a dry spell. Containers and greenhouses in particular can dry out quickly. Collecting rainwater, using mulch and paying attention to which plants actually need watering can all help.

These are the less glamorous parts of gardening, but they are often what makes the difference between a garden that looks good for a few weeks and one that continues producing food throughout the season.

Harvesting, Storing and Preserving

Growing food becomes much more useful when you can keep some of it for later.

You don't have to preserve everything you grow. Start with one crop and one method. Beans can be frozen, tomatoes can be turned into sauces, fruit can be preserved, herbs can be dried and suitable crops such as potatoes can be stored.

Saving suitable seed is another useful skill once you become more confident. Beans, peas and some open-pollinated varieties can be good places to start, although not every variety is suitable for straightforward seed saving.

Being able to eat something during winter that you grew during the summer changes the way you look at a garden. You're no longer just producing a few fresh vegetables; you're beginning to build skills that allow some of that harvest to last beyond the growing season.

I cover some of these practical aspects of growing and harvesting on YouTube too, where I can show the process rather than just explain it in writing. For anyone starting out, sometimes seeing something being done is more useful than reading another page of instructions.

Expect Things to Go Wrong

Some crops will fail. Slugs will eat things, seedlings will become leggy, tomatoes will split and bad weather will occasionally undo weeks of work.

That's simply part of gardening.

The important thing is to learn from it. If something fails, try to work out why and make a change next time. Perhaps it was planted too early, didn't get enough water, was in the wrong place or simply wasn't suited to your garden.

You don't need every crop to succeed every year. The aim is to become better at growing food over time.

That's probably one of the biggest things I try to show through my gardening videos. Gardening isn't always neat rows of perfect vegetables and enormous harvests. There are plenty of mistakes and disappointments along the way, but those are often where the most useful lessons come from.

Start Small and Build From There

If you're completely new to growing food, keep it simple. Choose three to five foods your household genuinely eats, find the best growing space you have and start with a few relatively easy crops.

As you gain confidence, learn what can follow each crop, experiment with extending the season and gradually add new crops. Keep a simple record of what worked and what didn't. You don't need a complicated spreadsheet; a notebook with a few notes about sowing dates, varieties, harvests and problems can become extremely useful after a few years.

You also don't need to turn your garden into a smallholding. Growing food for resilience is really about building useful skills and producing something worthwhile. Every salad picked from the garden, every bag of potatoes stored for later and every jar of sauce made from your own tomatoes represents a small step towards being able to provide at least some of your own food.

I've found that sharing my own gardening experiences on YouTube has become part of that learning process for me. It gives me a reason to document what I'm doing, share what I've learnt and hopefully encourage other people to have a go themselves.

Start with what you have, grow things you will actually eat, learn from the failures as well as the successes, and let the garden develop from there.