Why gardens are never too small for growing vegetables

Unless we have a dry summer, vegetable gardening is still the art to master. Long hot summers reduce most of us to growing courgettes by the dozen. The past two years have been kinder and have reiterated the lesson that truly fresh vegetables are far too delicious to be left to supermarkets.

Never complain that your garden is too small for you to bother with growing food. Everyone is learning that vegetables in containers are healthy, easy and out of the reach of wildlife. Dustbins, buckets, cheap pots from mass stores are excellent homes for a kitchen garden. Do not worry about the brash colour of a cheap pot. Paint it whatever colour you like when you get it home. In it, you can control the soil and the watering and catch the first pests before they catch the lettuces. Sequential cropping is easy in a container near the house. Remember that the master-chef, Raymond Blanc, uses vegetables of a far smaller size than the shops readily offer. Even the display beds in his restaurant garden at Le Manoir in Oxfordshire are cropped when the carrots are tiny. Container gardeners can imitate his preference. Even without the Blanc magic, a mini-carrot tastes exquisite.

Catalogues are reluctant to press the idea. The way to sell carrot seed is to show pictures of plants with long, thick roots which Blanc would throw in the shredder. In this year's essential Thompson & Morgan catalogue, the hybrid carrot Flyaway is shown, coated in earth, at a diameter that would never make it on to a Manoir plate. Actually, Flyaway is an excellent choice as it has considerable resistance to the dreaded carrot fly. I pair it with the early maturing Adelaide, a first choice for late starters as it is edible very much sooner than other varieties. I tried out purple carrots again last year on lunch guests after visiting the Prince of Wales's kitchen garden at Highgrove where they are a favoured crop. One guest wondered if I had dropped my biro into the cooking pan by mistake, but the inky carrots disappeared soon enough. Purple Sun is this year's top purple-rooted hybrid and gives a summer lunch a new spin.

Now that the container message is spreading, more vegetables are being stocked for the purpose. You have to order via mail delivery to get Thompson & Morgan's remarkable selection of dwarf runner beans in mixed colours, bred in Britain and which crop at a height of less than 2ft. They describe Jackpot Mixed as "strong-stemmed and determinate", and promise that they will crop freely in a big pot. As the taste of the first young runner beans is one of the supreme tastes of late summer, this handy variety is great news. Just imagine: runner beans, not dwarf French beans, without any need for those long beanpoles and a big area of flowerbed.

I do not remember seeing a cherry tomato in catalogues 30 years ago. The race was for fatter and juicier forms, sometimes with yellow skins. When did you last meet a beef tomato on a plate in London? Micro cherry tomatoes are available as seed from Chiltern Seeds (chilternseeds.co.uk) and will thrive in a container where they crop densely. Thompson & Morgan offer Tomato Romello with a big write-up this year. It even resists the late-season blight which sabotaged my cherry tomatoes in August 2013. The clusters are extremely sweet but, amazingly, the entire plant is only about 1ft high. It will crop on until October. Again, it is only available by mail order, but if you miss it, try the remarkable Sweet Aperitif, an exceptionally sweet little tomato which crops heavily in a greenhouse all summer. "Up to 500 tomatoes" are said to be the yield from one plant, but even if you do not hit that target, this cherry variety is far sweeter than any you will find in a superstore.

Guests are interesting to watch with lettuce. Crunchy Iceberg varieties never fail, though they are said to be less nutritious. The silly Lollo Rosso varieties are avoided by gardeners at table and nobody goes for a dark-coloured Cos. The problem outdoors is to avoid downy mildew, but the variety to choose here is the one honoured in the Royal Horticultural Society trials, Lettuce Chartwell. Upright, firmly ribbed, green leaves surround a heart that is even sweeter than old Iceberg's. Mildew resistance is built in and so is the ability to grow on in a dry summer. For Iceberg, read Chartwell nowadays and you will be up with the game.

What about turnips? Refined French chefs love them, whereas they despise our beloved winter parsnips. Caramelised turnips, or navets au sucre, are their best hope of breaking down British prejudice about cow fodder. The young little turnips go into a pan with olive oil and about two tablespoons of caster sugar per pound of turnips. When the sugar has been watched until it caramelises, add water to cover them, then some nutmeg and then, simmer the turnips for about half an hour.

Once you have crashed that barrier, you are ready for my favourite, a hot Tunisian compound of chillies, tomatoes, young turnips and pieces of young squid laced with cayenne pepper. The good news, therefore, is that turnips are now bred to flourish in pots. Market Express, available from Chiltern Seeds, will crop in just over a month after sowing when the roots are the size of ping-pong balls. With turnips, the Blanc rule applies: pick them young, pick them small. The RHS trials recommend Primera, a white and purple-topped variety with stamina. If you grow your own, you can avoid those shop turnips the size of croquet balls, which no French chef would consider.

Lastly, chervil. I greatly like this spicier, nuttier substitute for parsley, especially on last-minute scrambled eggs. Chiltern Seeds will sell you a packet and it is gratifyingly easy to grow. During the recent FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival, only one reader recognised me as I daily skirted past the lecturers' tent. She credited me with changing her life, not with Alexander, not with Travelling Heroes nor with any of my books, but simply by recommending chervil. The small things in life last longest. Chervil is the thinking woman's herb, and she will not fail to grow the dark-leaved Vertissimo well.

Photographs: Lee Avison/ Gap Photos; Maddie Thornhill/ Gap Photos; Howard Rice/ Thompson&Morgan; Gary Smith/ Gap

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