Grow Your Own Magazine

Marshalls Gift Vouchers

Planning your next harvest can be as much fun as growing it. With new seed catalogues pouring through your letterbox and plenty of goodies to look at online, picking next season’s sowing and plantings is a task to look forward to.

And the good news is that kitchen garden specialist Marshalls Seeds is giving more than 150 Grow Your Own readers the chance to splurge on seeds and plants – without having to worry about their bank balance. We’ve got more than £1,000 in gift vouchers to give away on their behalf, with a first prize of a whopping £100-worth – enough to keep a plot well stocked with fruit and veg right through the coming year. A lucky dip with wins of anything from £5 to £50 will give 150 runners up extra seed spending-money.

Marshalls’ 2009 selection features top-selling favourites such as the impressive, heavy-cropping ‘Marshmello’ strawberry as well as brand new varieties of fruit and veg. Additions include two tasty Italian tomatoes – densely-fleshed and aromatic ‘Battito’ and the delicious plum type ‘Lucciola’. Both grow multiple fruit-bearing trusses, and so need support and training into a central stem, pinching out any side growth. The peppers ‘Diablo’, which is sweet and red, and smooth-fleshed, green ‘Ringo’ are also new to the catalogue, as are ‘Tolpepo Rosso’ and ‘Giallo’. None of the four have the familiar ‘bell’ shape – the first pair resemble long, thin ‘horns’ and the second look similar to beef tomatoes.

With easy-grow varieties taking centre-stage, new introductions such as summer Cabbage ‘Candisa’ have already been a success. Trialled by Marshalls customers earlier this year and given glowing reports, the crunchy, compact cabbage has a sweet flavour and can be cooked or used raw in salads and coleslaw. For more kid-friendly veg, to get youngsters interested in the plot, try growing brightly-coloured squashes. ‘Sweet Lightning’ has creamy-orange striped skin and a super-sweet flavour and ‘Summer Ball’, a bright orange pumpkin, can be harvested at a tender courgette-size or grown large enough for a Halloween lantern.

Searching the catalogue for best-buys or easy-grow edibles won’t have to be hard work, either. After winning the 2008 title of ‘Garden Catalogue of the Year’, Marshalls has made extra improvements for 2009. Marketing manager, Jo Griffiths, said of the new edition: “It contains even more information to help and encourage gardeners to grow mouth-watering vegetables and fruit. To make it a truly essential gardening guide we’ve included planting and harvesting calendars as well as growing and cooking tips.”

For your chance to win, tick the box under the image, then fill the form below.

Home on the range

Having already tackled the problem of unhealthy school dinners and taught families to feed themselves on a budget, Jamie Oliver has turned his attention to growing his own. The mouth-watering winter recipes in his new Jamie at Home DVD include plenty of cold-weather comfort foods, from roasted, fried and grilled leeks to eggy-bread made with help from the new members of the Oliver family – his free range hens.

For gardeners with a surplus of autumn and winter veg, the DVD also includes useful tips that will keep your storage spaces groaning under the weight of your harvest. Or just get stuck into cooking with recipes for hot, crisp roasted veg, vitamin-packed coleslaw and winter salads. If this all sounds a bit meat-free for you so far, then the lamb-based dishes should be more to your taste. Jamie chats to sheep farmer Daphne Tilley to find out how rearing happier sheep will also mean taster meat for his recipes.

Jamie at Home, Series 2: Winter Recipes (Cert E.) costs £7.99 and is available to buy from WH Smith, HMV, play.com, amazon.co.uk and Zavvi. Alternatively you can enter to win one of the 35 copies we have up for grabs, by ticking the box under the image, then filling in the form below.

Rack them up

If this year’s harvest has left you with more apples than you can eat right now, don’t start giving away your surplus stock just yet. Late apples picked before the first frosts can be squirrelled away, lasting you for months – even until spring in the right conditions. Harrod Horticultural’s traditional wooden racks are a labour-saving option for gardeners with a large apple haul. The six drawers slide out separately – making it easier to check fruit regularly than if they were kept in stackable containers – and the spaces between them lets air circulate around the apples, helping to prevent them from spoiling.

Store fruit that is unblemished or only has mild insect damage on the surface to stop any problems or infections moving to the rest of your kept-crop. Place the apples in the tray’s grooves, without their skins touching, so if one does have brown rot it’s less likely to spread to others. If you’d like to be extra careful with your crop, lay newspaper inside the trays to keep the fruits apart and stop any rotten apples from staining the wood. The racks are best kept in a cool (3–7°C), well-ventilated cellar, shed or garage with a moist atmosphere.

One pine, six-drawer traditional apple rack (80cm high, 58cm wide and 47cm deep) costs £135. To order call 0845 402 5300 or go to harrodhorticultural.com. Alternatively you can enter to win one of the two we have to give away by ticking the box under the image, then filling the form below.

Leaf in a hurry

Is a messy plot driving you to distraction? The Makita BHX2500 blower blasts out air at 145 miles per hour, letting you shift fallen leaves in double-quick time. A good-sized pile will make a great mulch or soil conditioner – just put them into a suitable container for use in a year or two when they’re well rotted. You can also add small amounts to the compost heap, as dry leaves help to balance out wetter materials such as raw kitchen scraps.

The four-stroke blower runs on unleaded petrol, so your autumn clear-up won’t be limited by your plot’s distance from an electricity supply. Weighing just 4.4kg, the handheld machine is easy to transport around the fruit and veg patch and has an easy-to-use thumb-control throttle. Its fourstroke engine emits less pollutants and is quieter than two-stroke variants. To make tidying even easier, additional nozzles and a vacuum kit can be bought separately and will suck leaves straight into a bag.

One Makita BHX2500 leaf blower costs £145 to order phone 0845 009 9870 or go to hobuk.co.uk. Alternatively you can enter to win the one we have to give away by following the simple instructions below.