You can grow quite a few winter veggies in a container, if you don’t have garden or allotment, or even if you do!

One great advantage to growing a few things close to the back door, or even inside the house, is that you don’t have to wander out into the weather, and the dark, to harvest some super-fresh and tasty additions to dinner.

Container vegetable gardening

Choose a roomy container, and make sure it has good drainage – it doesn’t much matter what you use, as long as it has at least ten inches of soil depth and you can stand it on those elegant feet that are sold in garden centres (or on a couple of old bricks or a few tiles, if you don’t care about aesthetics) to keep the frost from attacking at ground level.

Line the container with some plastic to provide a little insulation, but make sure you have good drainage holes in the bottom, then fill it with compost.

When positioning your container, try to find a sunny, frost-free spot. If you can’t , put a couple of tall canes at each end of the container so that you can drape horticultural fleece (or an old sheet) over it on nights that are frosty, to stop air-frost attacking above soil level.

What winter plants need

The first thing to remember is that even winter vegetables need around six hours of sunlight a day, so if sunlight is scarce (and where isn’t it, in a UK winter!) you may need to supplement with a grow light – most DIY stores sell them, as do virtually all online gardening suppliers.

Green winter plants aren’t so fussed about temperature, in fact lettuce and spinach like cooler temperatures and tend to bolt if it gets too warm, so positioning a container next to a radiator is a bad idea if you’re growing green rather than fruiting plants – also you’ll end up watering two or three times as often.

Starting conditions

You can use any good quality potting compost to grow winter vegetables, and it’s easier to maintain organic standards (if that’s important to you) when you control all the growing conditions.

You can start some plants from seeds, but it’s a good idea to try and see if you can get seedling plants instead: they grow more quickly and are less likely to suffer from damping off (damping off is where the soil temperature drops and/or the seeds are too close together and/or the soil is too wet and the seeds or seedlings rot) and – more importantly – they will be harvestable quicker than seed-grown plants.

Don’t overwater

In winter it’s really easy to overdo the watering. The simple rule with container watering is not to water plants until the soil has dried for the first inch. Seedlings are more tricky – if you don’t water them they die very quickly, so sometimes it’s best to give them a squirt of water from a spray twice a day for the first couple of weeks after germination, as they won’t be using the water in the soil until they get their roots down, so there’s enough of a reserve to keep them groing.

What to Plant

This is a good time to be growing spinach, broccoli, kale and winter lettuce. Kale can be a little difficult in containers, but there are dwarf broccoli that can be purchased as plug plants that do brilliantly in a pot. You can also try Bok Choy which grows readily and is great for stir fries and even radishes will come up if the soil is warm enough.

A few herbs, especially winter herbs like sage, which has a robust warming flavour, add flavour to your dishes. A sage, a thyme, and some chives will keep you going through the winter. I grow garlic chives and let some run up to seed in summer so that my container is pretty as well as being useful.