Growing organic fruits and veggies at home in a polytunnel - even melons in the colder English climate! Got tips & questions?

I have been vegan for 10 years and part of that is for health reasons, so I need to eat and therefore also grow the most nutritiously dense and healthy food I can. Since my home is currently in England and the weather here is not the best for growing food, I have needed to adapt and so built a polytunnel in our front garden. Here I will give you an overview of what was involved and what I've been growing - I trust it might inspire some to have a go too.

I bought the frame for the tunnel from Ebay, secondhand from someone nearby who had moved into a house and didn't want the one that the previous owner had left behind. I then bought the plastic covering, sponge tape (used to protect the plastic from hot metal in the summer) and the wood, hinges and door handles needed to construct the doors. After a couple of weeks of preparing and building, it was finished. The process could be sped up by using a more modern kit version of a polytunnel, but my one is an older design and I needed to dig a trench around the outside of it to use to bury and weight down the plastic covering with soil. In total it probably cost about £600 - including the irrigation system that i added in later, which is on a timer to ensure the plants get watered regularly.

In the first year i successfully grew a lot of crops in there, including melons, cucumbers, carrots, tomatoes, beans, beetroots, peppers, kale, chard and some herbs. I generally source heirloom seeds that are rare and from family lineages to avoid genetic modification.

Various heirloom cucumber varieties

Some beetroot and rainbow chard

eirloom purple carrots

Tomato plants

Early on - some lettuce and other seedlings just getting going

The only melon that grew well that year (I didn't realise I needed to allow insects to pollinate the melon plants)

There's a lot to say and learn about growing organic, high quality food - I will explain more of what I have learned from some of the world's best researchers in the topic in future posts here. In short though, the idea is to use zero synthetic fertilisers and that can be done by a combination of rockdust and compost tea - the two secret weapons that most still know nothing about near me here.

Have you got any tips or questions? Let me know in the comments below.

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