Green (Living) Review: 5-a-day Garden

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

A handy planting calendar from the folks at Burgon & Ball and the Royal Horticultural Society (UK) is available for download.

The nice folks at B&B have teamed up with the Royal Horticultural Society to create a handy vegetable planning guide and calendar for container gardeners.

The calendar lists when to plant and harvest a variety of vegetables (and a few fruits) with the objective of giving gardeners the 5 vegetable servings a day that is recommended by nutritionists.

And the calendar and planning guide are specifically designed for vegetables that grow well in containers, and is part of the Burgon & Ball 5aday garden, designed together with the RHS Wisley and of which a half-size one can be found at Wisley Gardens and a full size on from July 6-11, 2010 at the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show.

Burgon & Ball of Sheffield, England makes beautifully crafted gardening tools and aside from looking beautiful they should, properly cared for, last for generations. I shall, hopefully, be able to review some of their tools in due course. The first one will be their Potato Harvesting Scoop from their Harvest Range of products.

One thing is worth mentioning as regards the calendar: It is designed for gardeners who live and grow their produce in England, so you may need to adjust the timing to suit your location.

Most of England is considered to be located in hardiness zone 8, with the last and first frost dates reckoned to be March 15 and November 15 respectively. But there is no guarantee that frost will not strike later in spring or earlier in fall, as spring 2010 proved only too well.

If you live in Zone 8 in the US, you may not need to make any such adjustments, but if you live in a different hardiness zone, the recommendation would be to adjust the calendar a few weeks based on the first and last frost dates in your area.

You can download the calendar here.

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

The Royal Horticultural Society together with Burgon & Ball, renowned manufacturer of garden tools and equipment, have devised a plan to grow enough fruit & veg to meet the “5 a day” guidelines for two people, or 2 a day for a family of five...from just 10m² of raised bed planters.

By carefully selecting the most productive varieties and using the principles of the ingenious 'Deep Bed' method, plants can be spaced more closely so a planting area can achieve yields up to 400% greater than more traditional methods. Burgon & Ball's Home Allotment® Raised Willow Planters can replicate the deep bed conditions and have many other benefits of growing above ground – such as increasing the amount of light reaching the plants.

Using a series of Burgon & Ball Planters to accommodate almost 50 different varieties of the Nation's favorite fruit and vegetables, the 5-a-day Garden is both attractive and incredibly space-efficient.

To compliment this stunning garden an information packed wall chart is available to help families achieve their goals by becoming self sufficient in fruit and vegetables and living the 'Good Life'.

The 5-a-day Garden provides fresh and nutritious food, with no additives or preservatives, excess food miles or unnecessary packaging! It's simple, fun and immensely rewarding and very, very tasty.

The RHS has be nurturing a half scale version of this unique, edible and healthy '5-a-day garden' at the RHS Plant Center in Wisley and the full sized version can be seen in all it's glory at the RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show 2010.

Visitors to the RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show 2010 and/or RHS Wisley can pick up a FREE '5-a-day Garden' planting guide, full of advice and instructions on how to schedule plan ting to maximize the potential of each planter.

Those that cannot make the show can download the planner from www.5adaygarden.com