Growing your own ‘veg’ just got easy thanks to TV & radio gardener Pippa Greenwood
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
“Grow Your Own with Pippa Greenwood” will enable anyone, from the most inexperienced of gardeners with nothing more than a few square metres of garden, to enjoy all the benefits of successfully growing their own tasty vegetables from great quality plants, delivered direct to their door.
“Grow Your Own with Pippa Greenwood” is a flexible vegetable growing package which, unlike most “grow your own” packages, allows you to select exactly which combination of vegetables, salad leaves or herbs you want to grow. The package provides everything you need to grow your own bumper crop of delicious vegetables with no gardening expertise or experience is required; no difficult seeds to sow or seedlings to pot on; no need for propagators, greenhouses, a large vegetable patch or hours of work in the garden. Just great quality, robust plants delivered safely to your door, accompanied by regular emails from Pippa providing expert advice specific to the crops you have chosen to grow explaining exactly what to do and when to do it.
“Grow Your Own with Pippa Greenwood” enables you to grow vegetables with confidence, safe in the knowledge that Pippa will be guiding you through the whole process week-by-week. From preparing for the arrival of the first plants, to advising you how and when to plant out your peppers, or pinch-out your tomatoes, Pippa will provide photographs demonstrating how to do anything that looks remotely like needing green-fingers, right through to how and when to harvest your crop. And, in the unlikely event that you have any concerns or queries, you can get some free, personalised advice from Pippa via her “Ask Pippa” on-line advice service.
Even for experienced vegetable growers, the low cost and high quality of the plants supplied alone will make “Grow your Own with Pippa Greenwood” a really cost effective option. And, let’s face it, there is always something new to learn about any aspect of gardening. Having grown her own vegetables since she was a child, and written a plethora of books and articles about kitchen gardening, Pippa is a real ‘grow your own’ guru.
“Whilst growing your own vegetables is not hard, the snippets of advice about how and where to plant vegetables that you get on the back of a seed packet, or on a plant labels are not sufficient to ensure you have a reliably successful crop of vegetables. Similarly, scouring through books for all the information you need (which may not be appropriate to the area you live in or the variety you are growing) is just not realistic for most people’s ‘time-starved’ lifestyles. In the current economic climate, I want to make growing your own vegetables simple and straightforward for everyone so that they can save money, eat delicious, nutritious food and have some ‘low cost’ outdoor fun at the same time” says Pippa.
Growing your own vegetables successfully can provide you with vegetables at a fraction of supermarket prices, freshly picked which means higher vitamin contents and make festering vegetables in your fridge a thing of the past! Plus, as well as reducing ‘food miles’ down to ‘food steps’, it will provide everyone involved from individuals to whole families with lots of fun and a real sense of achievement.
Based on her experience with her own children, and having successfully introduced ‘grow your own’ in her children’s school, Pippa has found that children are far more receptive to trying new vegetables when they have grown and picked them themselves. She is hoping therefore, that the combination of great plants and great advice she is offering will encourage teachers around the country to introduce children to growing, and eating their own vegetables.
“Grow Your Own with Pippa Greenwood” can be ordered on-line at www.pippagreenwood.com where you can follow Pippa’s advice to select a range of vegetables to suit your taste, space, geographical location and lifestyle. So whether you have a balcony in London or an allotment in Aberdeen , you can select a package to suit you. You can also purchase Gift Vouchers for “Grow Your Own with Pippa Greenwood” which is the perfect way of introducing your friends or family to the delights of “Grow Your Own”!
Pippa is a regular panelist on BBC Radio 4’s Gardeners’Question Time. For over 13 years, Pippa was a regular presenter on BBC 2’s Gardeners’ World, presenting many items on garden pests and diseases, science and gardening, and creating and running her organic kitchen garden from her own Hampshire garden.
In 1988 Pippa began working for the BBC, joining Alan Titchmarsh for the gardening slot on BBC 1’s Daytime Live.
In 2000, 2001 and 2002 she presented her own series, ‘Growing Science’ on Radio 4
For several years Pippa was the Presenter on BBC Radio Solents’ ‘Topsoil with Pippa Greenwood’, a three hour gardening and music show.
Pippa has been a guest on a number of television and radio programmes including: Tomorrow’s World, You and Yours, Woman’s Hour, BBC Breakfast, This Morning, GMTV, Breakaway, Grass Roots and Call my Bluff. She was a judge for the BBC Gardener of The Year 2001 competition.
Pippa was the gardening consultant for the ITV murder mystery series Rosemary and Thyme starring Pam Ferris and Felicity Kendal, advising on the gardening sub-plot and other plant related matters, and the gardening personalities of the two actresses!
Pippa has several regular writing commitments including BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine, NFU Countryside Magazine, and is the gardening columnist for The Mirror newspaper. She also writes a weekly blog for BBC Gardeners’ World Website and has her own website, www.pippagreenwood.com where in addition to the ‘Ask Pippa’, a garden advice service, she has a gardening blog, and makes topical garden comment, and she lectures and gives gardening-related demonstrations all over the UK .
Pippa has written many books including the bestsellers, ‘New Gardener’ (in excess of one and a quarter million copies sold) & Pippa’s Organic Kitchen Garden, Gardening Hints and Tips, Garden Pests and Diseases, Garden Problem Solver, Flower Gardener, A Garden for All Seasons, Pippa Greenwood’s Gardening Year. She co-authored The Gardeners’ Question Time book. Her latest book is ‘1001 Ways to be a Better Gardener’ (Mitchell Beazley).
Pippa Greenwood trained as a botanist at Durham University (BSc. hons) and then gained an MSc. in Crop Protection at Reading University . In 2007 Pippa was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Science by The University of Durham. In 1985 she joined the staff of The Royal Horticultural Society’s Garden at Wisley in Surrey, where she ran the Plant Pathology Department, answering several thousand queries from gardeners every year.
It was great fun talking with Pippa at the Garden Media Guild's Garden Press Event 2011 at the RHS Halls in Westminster and I hope that at some stage I will be able to talk a little more with her on matter of gardening, and especially the food growing side of it.
Pippa lives in East Hampshire where she gardens on a windswept hillside with a strongly alkaline, heavy-clay soil, and talking about those conditions might be something that would be of great interest to reader of the GREEN (LIVING) REVIEW.
© 2011
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