How to Grow Food in Your Polytunnel ─ All Year Round

Are you using your polytunnel to its full potential? If so, not only will it provide you with tomatoes and cucumbers in the summer, you’ll also be harvesting fresh crops all year round, even when the ground outside is frozen. You could be harvesting sweet potatoes and late celery in November; winter radish, baby carrots and celeriac in early February; salads leaves right through the winter; and even in the “hungry gap” you’ll have a choice of new potatoes, pak choi, broad beans, peas, tender cabbages, cauliflower, beetroot and more.

How to Grow Food in Your Polytunnel has all the information you need to make the most of this precious covered space, including;

• A crop-by-crop guide to the growing year
• A dedicated chapter on growing for the “hungry gap”
• A cropping chart to help with planning
• Your tunnel’s first year--timely advice for new tunnel gardeners

Andy McKee first grew vegetables with his father at the age of five, and since then he has grown food in situations ranging from a seventeenth-story window box to guerrilla gardening in the middle of a Christmas-tree plantation. McKee had his eyes opened to the potential of polytunnels during a visit to one featuring a hot tub warmed by a clay oven. He lives with his wife and family in rural Dorset, England, and is entirely self-sufficient in vegetables.

Mark Gatter began growing vegetables while homesteading in north California in the early eighties and has been a keen gardener ever since. He is a firm advocate of an organic, raised-bed approach and relies on a polytunnel to keep fresh food on the table right through the winter. He and his wife share their smallholding in Wales with 11 sheep, several chickens and two dogs.

Mark and Andy are also the authors of The Polytunnel Handbook (2009).