Find out more about the inspiration behind Sue Kent's Beautiful Border Sue Kent is an award-winning garden designer, TV presenter and RHS disability ambassador. You’ll be able to see her ‘My Escape’ Beautiful Border at BBC Gardeners’ World Live 2023. She first hit our screens in June 2020 as an amateur gardener when she featured on BBC Gardeners’ World, talking about the beautiful garden she has created at home in Swansea over the last 30 years. Sue’s upper body limb disability makes some gardening tasks challenging and she discussed adaptations she has made to make the most of her garden, like using her feet for weeding and planting. Sue’s home video proved such a hit that she is now a regular presenter on BBC Gardeners’ World.Sue has designed a headline Beautiful Border for BBC Gardeners’ World Live 2023. Unique to BBC Gardeners’ Word Live, Beautiful Borders are compact 9m2 spaces, packed with imaginative design features, planting and materials, and provide inspiration for small gardens and challenging spaces.Sue Kent’s Beautiful Border, In the Pink, will be at BBC Gardeners’ World Live at the Birmingham NEC from 15th-18th June 2023.You’ll find a bumper crop of twelve inspiring Beautiful Borders at the Autumn Fair this year, all themed ‘My Garden Escape’ Sue, the theme for this year’s Beautiful Borders at BBC Gardeners’ World Live is My Garden Escape. Your design pays tribute to three of your great loves: colour, scent and painting. Can you tell us more about it and about the ways that, for you, a garden is a haven to escape to?Pink is my favourite colour, scented flowers are my joy, and painting flowers is my escape. My Border will encapsulate all three of these things with bright pink flower colour fusing to white pink and many scented blooms. My Border will include glass art and an area for an artist to paint. I hope to include roses, perennials and annuals, possibly some grasses.A flower garden is a gift for the senses and becoming aware of scent, colour, texture and, in some cases, taste of a plant, together with the sound and sight of insect life that plants attract demands the attention and releases the mind. I like to pick flower heads to study and paint in detail. By doing this, I learn more of what their individual beauty can offer to a planting scheme. This creative process is fascinating and absorbing, and before I know it, the stresses of everyday life have disappeared.  Visitors to BBC Gardeners’ World Live come to the show with a keen eye for ideas and inspiration. Which elements of your Garden Escape Border do you think might attract visitors’ attention for their gardens at home? Colour affects our energies and emotions. By keeping to one colour in all its shades, I am creating a space for visitors to absorb and assess how that colour makes them feel. Pink always makes me very happy so if they’re looking for pink plants for a mixed border, my Border will be packed full of inspiring flower form, colour and scent. The Beautiful Borders competition is a great opportunity to gain first-hand experience of building a small show garden. What advice can you give any budding first-time designers out there that might be thinking of giving it a go next year? My advice is to be flexible on your plant choices with options available so that you can get the best plants in on the day. Plan on graph paper and make a sketch or painting for how you want it to look. If you’ve got the space, mock it up, and measure and measure again to get the proportions right. Before planting the border, put your glasses on and pimp your plants! Remember to include transportation and dismantling costs in your budget. For anyone keen to try designing a Beautiful Border, come and talk to me. I’ll be on my Border at various times every day during the show and will be doing a daily talk on the Let’s Talk Plants stage about my Border design and inspiration. You’re a keen veg grower with a strong history of veg growing in your family. What’s the appeal of growing your own food and what’s on the menu for the coming season? I’m an organic grower. I want my food free from pesticides and I want to know how it’s been grown. I also love to eat vegetables and the taste of fresh homegrown vegetables is second to none. As well as the usual suspects this year, I’m growing a lot of beans to dry so that I will have my own pulses through the winter months. I’m also trying hibiscus so that I can make my own hibiscus tea.  As a passionate advocate for inclusion and accessibility in the gardening world, what are some of the changes that you would you like to see in the coming years to broaden access to gardening to people living with disabilities? I am still researching this subject with the RHS but some of my initial thoughts are that I think there should be more journalism opportunities for people with disabilities in the garden publications to write about gardening. What suits them can often make gardening easier for others. At the garden shows, I’d like to see a quiet time set aside for people with physical disabilities, people with autism who don’t like crowds, and importantly, for wheelchair users, so they can get a good view of the gardens. Also trained volunteers to accompany people with visual impairment and provide descriptive input where necessary and the opportunity to touch the exhibits. On a personal level, I would like to work with tool manufacturers to improve designs of some of their tools and to create some new ones.  /*! elementor - v3.19.0 - 07-02-2024 */ .elementor-widget-divider{--divider-border-style:none;--divider-border-width:1px;--divider-color:#0c0d0e;--divider-icon-size:20px;--divider-element-spacing:10px;--divider-pattern-height:24px;--divider-pattern-size:20px;--divider-pattern-url:none;--divider-pattern-repeat:repeat-x}.elementor-widget-divider .elementor-divider{display:flex}.elementor-widget-divider .elementor-divider__text{font-size:15px;line-height:1;max-width:95%}.elementor-widget-divider .elementor-divider__element{margin:0 var(--divider-element-spacing);flex-shrink:0}.elementor-widget-divider .elementor-icon{font-size:var(--divider-icon-size)}.elementor-widget-divider .elementor-divider-separator{display:flex;margin:0;direction:ltr}.elementor-widget-divider--view-line_icon .elementor-divider-separator,.elementor-widget-divider--view-line_text .elementor-divider-separator{align-items:center}.elementor-widget-divider--view-line_icon .elementor-divider-separator:after,.elementor-widget-divider--view-line_icon .elementor-divider-separator:before,.elementor-widget-divider--view-line_text .elementor-divider-separator:after,.elementor-widget-divider--view-line_text .elementor-divider-separator:before{display:block;content:"";border-block-end:0;flex-grow:1;border-block-start:var(--divider-border-width) var(--divider-border-style) var(--divider-color)}.elementor-widget-divider--element-align-left .elementor-divider .elementor-divider-separator>.elementor-divider__svg:first-of-type{flex-grow:0;flex-shrink:100}.elementor-widget-divider--element-align-left .elementor-divider-separator:before{content:none}.elementor-widget-divider--element-align-left .elementor-divider__element{margin-left:0}.elementor-widget-divider--element-align-right .elementor-divider .elementor-divider-separator>.elementor-divider__svg:last-of-type{flex-grow:0;flex-shrink:100}.elementor-widget-divider--element-align-right .elementor-divider-separator:after{content:none}.elementor-widget-divider--element-align-right .elementor-divider__element{margin-right:0}.elementor-widget-divider--element-align-start .elementor-divider .elementor-divider-separator>.elementor-divider__svg:first-of-type{flex-grow:0;flex-shrink:100}.elementor-widget-divider--element-align-start .elementor-divider-separator:before{content:none}.elementor-widget-divider--element-align-start .elementor-divider__element{margin-inline-start:0}.elementor-widget-divider--element-align-end .elementor-divider .elementor-divider-separator>.elementor-divider__svg:last-of-type{flex-grow:0;flex-shrink:100}.elementor-widget-divider--element-align-end .elementor-divider-separator:after{content:none}.elementor-widget-divider--element-align-end .elementor-divider__element{margin-inline-end:0}.elementor-widget-divider:not(.elementor-widget-divider--view-line_text):not(.elementor-widget-divider--view-line_icon) .elementor-divider-separator{border-block-start:var(--divider-border-width) var(--divider-border-style) var(--divider-color)}.elementor-widget-divider--separator-type-pattern{--divider-border-style:none}.elementor-widget-divider--separator-type-pattern.elementor-widget-divider--view-line .elementor-divider-separator,.elementor-widget-divider--separator-type-pattern:not(.elementor-widget-divider--view-line) .elementor-divider-separator:after,.elementor-widget-divider--separator-type-pattern:not(.elementor-widget-divider--view-line) .elementor-divider-separator:before,.elementor-widget-divider--separator-type-pattern:not([class*=elementor-widget-divider--view]) .elementor-divider-separator{width:100%;min-height:var(--divider-pattern-height);-webkit-mask-size:var(--divider-pattern-size) 100%;mask-size:var(--divider-pattern-size) 100%;-webkit-mask-repeat:var(--divider-pattern-repeat);mask-repeat:var(--divider-pattern-repeat);background-color:var(--divider-color);-webkit-mask-image:var(--divider-pattern-url);mask-image:var(--divider-pattern-url)}.elementor-widget-divider--no-spacing{--divider-pattern-size:auto}.elementor-widget-divider--bg-round{--divider-pattern-repeat:round}.rtl .elementor-widget-divider .elementor-divider__text{direction:rtl}.e-con-inner>.elementor-widget-divider,.e-con>.elementor-widget-divider{width:var(--container-widget-width,100%);--flex-grow:var(--container-widget-flex-grow)} Find out more about Sue Kent here: www.suekent.com Find out what's on at the BBC Gardeners' World Autumn Fair Find out more about Sue Kent's In the Pink Beautiful Border

Find out more about the inspiration behind Sue Kent's Beautiful Border Sue Kent is an award-winning garden designer, TV presenter and RHS disability ambassador. You’ll be able to see her ‘In The Pink’ Beautiful Border at BBC Gardeners’ World Live 2023. She first hit our screens in June 2020 as an amateur gardener when she featured on BBC Gardeners’ World, talking about the beautiful garden she has created at home in Swansea over the last 30 years. Sue’s upper body limb disability makes some gardening tasks challenging and she discussed adaptations she has made to make the most of her garden, like using her feet for weeding and planting. Sue’s home video proved such a hit that she is now a regular presenter on BBC Gardeners’ World.Sue has designed a headline Beautiful Border for BBC Gardeners’ World Live 2023. Unique to BBC Gardeners’ Word Live, Beautiful Borders are compact 9m2 spaces, packed with imaginative design features, planting and materials, and provide inspiration for small gardens and challenging spaces.Sue Kent’s Beautiful Border, In The Pink, will be at BBC Gardeners’ World Live at the Birmingham NEC from 15th-18th June 2023.You’ll find a bumper crop of twelve inspiring Beautiful Borders at the Spring Fair this year, all themed ‘My Garden Escape’ Sue, the theme for this year’s Beautiful Borders at BBC Gardeners’ World Live is My Garden Escape. Your design pays tribute to three of your great loves: colour, scent and painting. Can you tell us more about it and about the ways that, for you, a garden is a haven to escape to?Pink is my favourite colour, scented flowers are my joy, and painting flowers is my escape. My Border will encapsulate all three of these things with bright pink flower colour fusing to white pink and many scented blooms. My Border will include glass art and an area for an artist to paint. I hope to include roses, perennials and annuals, possibly some grasses.A flower garden is a gift for the senses and becoming aware of scent, colour, texture and, in some cases, taste of a plant, together with the sound and sight of insect life that plants attract demands the attention and releases the mind. I like to pick flower heads to study and paint in detail. By doing this, I learn more of what their individual beauty can offer to a planting scheme. This creative process is fascinating and absorbing, and before I know it, the stresses of everyday life have disappeared.  Visitors to BBC Gardeners’ World Live come to the show with a keen eye for ideas and inspiration. Which elements of your Garden Escape Border do you think might attract visitors’ attention for their gardens at home? Colour affects our energies and emotions. By keeping to one colour in all its shades, I am creating a space for visitors to absorb and assess how that colour makes them feel. Pink always makes me very happy so if they’re looking for pink plants for a mixed border, my Border will be packed full of inspiring flower form, colour and scent. The Beautiful Borders competition is a great opportunity to gain first-hand experience of building a small show garden. What advice can you give any budding first-time designers out there that might be thinking of giving it a go next year? My advice is to be flexible on your plant choices with options available so that you can get the best plants in on the day. Plan on graph paper and make a sketch or painting for how you want it to look. If you’ve got the space, mock it up, and measure and measure again to get the proportions right. Before planting the border, put your glasses on and pimp your plants! Remember to include transportation and dismantling costs in your budget. For anyone keen to try designing a Beautiful Border, come and talk to me. I’ll be on my Border at various times every day during the show and will be doing a daily talk on the Let’s Talk Plants stage about my Border design and inspiration. You’re a keen veg grower with a strong history of veg growing in your family. What’s the appeal of growing your own food and what’s on the menu for the coming season? I’m an organic grower. I want my food free from pesticides and I want to know how it’s been grown. I also love to eat vegetables and the taste of fresh homegrown vegetables is second to none. As well as the usual suspects this year, I’m growing a lot of beans to dry so that I will have my own pulses through the winter months. I’m also trying hibiscus so that I can make my own hibiscus tea.  As a passionate advocate for inclusion and accessibility in the gardening world, what are some of the changes that you would you like to see in the coming years to broaden access to gardening to people living with disabilities? I am still researching this subject with the RHS but some of my initial thoughts are that I think there should be more journalism opportunities for people with disabilities in the garden publications to write about gardening. What suits them can often make gardening easier for others. At the garden shows, I’d like to see a quiet time set aside for people with physical disabilities, people with autism who don’t like crowds, and importantly, for wheelchair users, so they can get a good view of the gardens. Also trained volunteers to accompany people with visual impairment and provide descriptive input where necessary and the opportunity to touch the exhibits. On a personal level, I would like to work with tool manufacturers to improve designs of some of their tools and to create some new ones.  Find out more about Sue Kent here: www.suekent.com Find out what's on at the BBC Gardeners' World Spring Fair Find out more about Sue Kent's My Garden Escape Beautiful Border

Find out more about the inspiration behind Sue Kent's Beautiful Border Sue Kent is an award-winning garden designer, TV presenter and RHS disability ambassador. Her beautiful border, ‘My Escape’, was on display at Gardeners’ World Live 2023. In a recent podcast with the Gardeners’ World magazine, Sue gave some insight into her favourite colours for her garden: lots of pinks, whites, blues, greens, and purples. She’s a big fan of block planting, putting in big blocks of pink from August onwards, and yellows and blues in the spring. What are the hardiest plants, in her view? Well, Japanese anemones are “such thugs”…she has to dig them out, if she wants to get any earlier spring stuff in!More about Sue: she first hit our screens in June 2020 as an amateur gardener when she featured on BBC Gardeners’ World, talking about the beautiful garden she has created at home in Swansea over the last 30 years. Sue’s upper body limb disability makes some gardening tasks challenging and she discussed adaptations she has made to make the most of her garden, like using her feet for weeding and planting. Sue’s home video proved such a hit that she is now a regular presenter on BBC Gardeners’ World.Sue designed a headline Beautiful Border for BBC Gardeners’ World Live 2023. Unique to BBC Gardeners’ Word Live, Beautiful Borders are compact 9m2 spaces, packed with imaginative design features, planting and materials, and provide inspiration for small gardens and challenging spaces.Sue Kent’s Beautiful Border, My Garden Escape, was at BBC Gardeners’ World Live at the Birmingham NEC from 15th-18th June 2023. Sue, the theme for this year’s Beautiful Borders at BBC Gardeners’ World Live is My Garden Escape. Your design pays tribute to three of your great loves: colour, scent and painting. Can you tell us more about it and about the ways that, for you, a garden is a haven to escape to?Pink is my favourite colour, scented flowers are my joy, and painting flowers is my escape. My Border will encapsulate all three of these things with bright pink flower colour fusing to white pink and many scented blooms. My Border will include glass art and an area for an artist to paint. I hope to include roses, perennials and annuals, possibly some grasses.A flower garden is a gift for the senses and becoming aware of scent, colour, texture and, in some cases, taste of a plant, together with the sound and sight of insect life that plants attract demands the attention and releases the mind. I like to pick flower heads to study and paint in detail. By doing this, I learn more of what their individual beauty can offer to a planting scheme. This creative process is fascinating and absorbing, and before I know it, the stresses of everyday life have disappeared.  Visitors to BBC Gardeners’ World Live come to the show with a keen eye for ideas and inspiration. Which elements of your Garden Escape Border do you think might attract visitors’ attention for their gardens at home? Colour affects our energies and emotions. By keeping to one colour in all its shades, I am creating a space for visitors to absorb and assess how that colour makes them feel. Pink always makes me very happy so if they’re looking for pink plants for a mixed border, my Border will be packed full of inspiring flower form, colour and scent. The Beautiful Borders competition is a great opportunity to gain first-hand experience of building a small show garden. What advice can you give any budding first-time designers out there that might be thinking of giving it a go next year? My advice is to be flexible on your plant choices with options available so that you can get the best plants in on the day. Plan on graph paper and make a sketch or painting for how you want it to look. If you’ve got the space, mock it up, and measure and measure again to get the proportions right. Before planting the border, put your glasses on and pimp your plants! Remember to include transportation and dismantling costs in your budget. For anyone keen to try designing a Beautiful Border, come and talk to me. I’ll be on my Border at various times every day during the show and will be doing a daily talk on the Let’s Talk Plants stage about my Border design and inspiration. You’re a keen veg grower with a strong history of veg growing in your family. What’s the appeal of growing your own food and what’s on the menu for the coming season? I’m an organic grower. I want my food free from pesticides and I want to know how it’s been grown. I also love to eat vegetables and the taste of fresh homegrown vegetables is second to none. As well as the usual suspects this year, I’m growing a lot of beans to dry so that I will have my own pulses through the winter months. I’m also trying hibiscus so that I can make my own hibiscus tea.  As a passionate advocate for inclusion and accessibility in the gardening world, what are some of the changes that you would you like to see in the coming years to broaden access to gardening to people living with disabilities? I am still researching this subject with the RHS but some of my initial thoughts are that I think there should be more journalism opportunities for people with disabilities in the garden publications to write about gardening. What suits them can often make gardening easier for others. At the garden shows, I’d like to see a quiet time set aside for people with physical disabilities, people with autism who don’t like crowds, and importantly, for wheelchair users, so they can get a good view of the gardens. Also trained volunteers to accompany people with visual impairment and provide descriptive input where necessary and the opportunity to touch the exhibits. On a personal level, I would like to work with tool manufacturers to improve designs of some of their tools and to create some new ones.  Find out more about Sue Kent here: www.suekent.com Find out what's on at BBC Gardeners' World Live 2024 Read about the Beautiful Borders on display in 2024

An interview with Lucy Hutchings Lucy Hutchings is a couture jewellery designer turned edible garden designer, homesteader and gardening influencer (@shegrowsveg) with a passion for GYO, and designing The Secret Homestead at BBC Gardeners’ World Live. Lucy believes that the GYO movement needs a rebrand to encourage the Instagram generation to try their hand at growing their own food, and she’s here to help. With more than 167,000 Instagram followers, a sustainable gardening school, and an exciting edible Show Garden design for BBC Gardeners’ World Live 2023, Lucy’s on a mission to get Great Britain growing. Lucy and her partner, Arctic adventurer and chef Mike Keen, have transformed a tumbledown wooden 1940s house in Suffolk, restoring both the house and its 1.5 acre site into Cedarwood Homestead, an oasis of fruit and veg and a hotbed of culinary experimentation. But don’t mention the Good Life!  Lucy Hutching’s Show Garden, The Secret Homestead, will be at BBC Gardeners’ World Live at the Birmingham NEC from 15th-18th June 2023. Visit the We Grow Stage to see daily talks on all things grow your own. Find out more here. Lucy, the ethos you have created at Cedarwood is a wonderful fusion of you and your partner Mike’s careers in design, food and travel, and the hard graft of being self-sufficient. Will The Secret Homestead be a glimpse into what you’ve created in Suffolk – a mini Cedarwood perhaps? You will definitely see references to Cedarwood in The Secret Homestead garden and that was part of the reason I chose the name, to draw those parallels right from the beginning. Coming from a background in the fashion industry, the aesthetics of edible gardens have always been as important to me as their productivity. I don’t think they have to be purely utilitarian spaces, they can be beautiful, dreamy spaces too. That was the ethos I set out with when designing Cedarwood. Yes, we wanted to become more self-sufficient and live as sustainably as possible, but we also want to create a beautiful environment that we would enjoy spending time in.I approached the design of The Secret Homestead garden with the same goal in mind. I wanted the garden to at first appear purely ornamental, with dramatic black, purple and white foliage and pops of coral orange, hot pink and jet black from flowers and stems. On closer exploration you discover a mix of both conventional and lesser known edible plants proving that this garden does in fact offer an abundance of food as well as a feast for the eyes.  Just as the plants in the borders fulfil a dual purpose, so do the decorative elements of the garden, some of which are recreated exactly from what we built at Cedarwood. I have incorporated a wall sculpture mushroom garden, a mini version of our underground root cellar, complete with door painted by designer Lucy Tiffany, a sculpture come wildlife habitat I will be making myself. I will even be making jewel encrusted mosaic paving tiles inspired by the jewellery I used to create. Every part of the garden is beautiful and every part is useful. To get more people giving home growing a go, you’ve said that you think something has to change. What does next gen GYO look like for you? There has never been a better time for people to embrace growing food. It is real step in the right direction of a more sustainable life, reducing food miles, single use plastics and dependence on intensive farming. It also increases food security in a time of soaring food prices and shop shelves emptied by panic buying. All that before you consider the myriad mental and physical health benefits. Additionally, GYO is arguably the most accessible part of gardening, everyone can get excited about food, therefore everyone has the potential to get excited about growing some of it. GYO tends to be portrayed as having a fairly home spun and traditional image which is a lovely part of British heritage, Dig For Victory, the dungaree wearing allotmenteer, Tom and Barbara’s back garden Good Life. However, there are a huge number of people with whom this traditional vibe simply does not resonate at all.With that in mind, I think it’s time that GYO got a makeover or if not a makeover, at least have an alternative image presented that might appeal to a new audience, one that may not have considered it otherwise, after all only good can come from more people growing plants. If we are going to get more people growing food, we need to find a way to make edible gardens appeal to ornamental gardeners, house plant lovers, those with limited space who don’t want to have to choose between form and function, and let’s not forget the foodies. My aim is to try to break down the divide that so often seems to separate ornamental gardening with food growing and offer an entirely different view of what a food garden might look like. There are so many traditionally ornamental plants that also offer incredible and underutilized food crops as well as myriad highly ornamental forms of more conventional food crops. When you get rid of the idea of rectangular raised beds with rows of perfect cabbages, marrows and leeks, and start approaching edible planting just as you would an ornamental border, you can start to create some really exciting dual-purpose spaces For visitors to BBC Gardeners’ World Live that might be new to GYO, are there elements of The Secret Homestead that would be simple to try at home in the garden or for a small growing patch? I am approaching the creation of this garden in a very different way. I want to take the Gardeners’ World Live audience on this journey with me and show firstly just what goes into creating a beautiful garden for the show but mainly, by sharing this journey with me, I want people to see that it is possible to do a part or all of what I’m doing. I will be growing almost all the plants for the garden myself from seed and am sharing a weekly video diary on Instagram so that people can watch the progress of the plants, following their journey all the way from tiny seed to being planted up at the NEC in June. I will be building the sculptural elements of the garden myself and sharing how you can create something similar. I will even be building the garden myself including everything from laying slabs to planting semi mature trees. Yes it is going to be a huge amount of work, with many highs and lows, but this is what I love doing and I hope that by sharing my journey to BBC Gardeners’ World Live, I will get people just as excited as I am and hopefully give them the confidence to roll up their sleeves and create their own dream food garden. Heirloom veg varieties are one of your great loves, particularly tomatoes. Can you tell us more about the appeal of growing these old-fashioned veg, and will they be a feature of The Secret Homestead at BBC Gardeners’ World Live?As a general rule, if you are growing food, you are primarily doing it for the flavour. We all know nothing quite compares to the taste of a home grown tomato! Heritage crops have been grown for hundreds of years on the basis of how good they taste as opposed to modern hybrids which are generally designed to solve a problem such as disease resistance, early cropping or high yields. Yes, they can taste good but I’m yet to find a hybrid that tastes better than an heirloom variety. Hybrids will always have a place, especially in commercial food production, or for those living in parts of the country that offer a more challenging growing environment or short season. However, for the vast majority of people in the UK, heritage or heirloom varieties will perform equally well and offer advantages over and above their hybrid friends.Self-sufficiency does not just cover food, growing heritage and heirloom plants allows you to save seed. Sadly, you can’t save seed from hybrids (often referred to as F1s), it’s an unstable cross that will not be the same as the plant you saved it from and may grow to be something you really don’t like or does not perform well. Open pollinated heirlooms will grow true to the plant they were saved from. You are then in a situation where you can buy one packet of seed and then never have to buy it again, saving you money. It also presents the opportunity to swap and share with friends and the wider community so that others can grow a plant that you have really loved, and I think that is a really beautiful thing. Each heirloom comes with a history, a story, and when you start to grow one of these varieties you become part of that story. Plus, if we don’t grow these amazing plants, they will become extinct. You don’t generally associate the idea of extinction with the humble vegetable, but it is a real problem since the rise of the hybrid. This is why I have been proud to be an ambassador for the Heritage Seed Library for a number of years now. I want to help as many people as possible fall just as in love with heirloom varieties as I have. You’ll be hosting some fantastic talks from your show garden during BBC Gardeners’ World Live about the joys and the practicalities of growing your own food. You’ll be joined by a gang of gardening influencers that share your passion for GYO. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?I’m so excited about this part of the show and I can’t wait to share it with everyone. There is a whole new generation of gardeners that prefer to learn through knowledge sharing and personal experience on social media rather than traditional gardening book and print media. There is an incredible and very active global community of gardeners online that I feel privileged to be part of, with an absolute wealth of knowledge and experience they are hungry to share. It’s a bit like the world’s biggest gardening group but without the monthly village hall meetings. I’m really excited to be working with BBC Gardeners’ World Live to create this new area for talks right next to my show garden and give this community an in real life place to come together.   We will have a host of fascinating and well-respected people talking about subjects that possibly don’t get addressed as much at gardening shows, but that are hot topics of discussion online. We will be looking at everything from permaculture, mushroom growing and small space garden design, to foraging, no-dig, apothecary gardens and more. I will be hosting the stage and also talking myself so it should be a really exciting area to come, learn something new and chat to like-minded gardeners. In the current challenging economic times with food bills rising, is GYO a money-saver?We live in scary times at the moment, twice in recent history our food security has been threatened, with empty supermarket shelves in the pandemic and now with seemingly ever rising food prices. Growing some of your food can be really empowering and yes it can help to lower those grocery bills. It’s not going to be a complete solution to the problems we are facing but there is always a way to grow some sort of food, whether it be micros greens or window boxes full of salad and herbs. It is realistic, achievable and can be approached cheaply. Anything that people can grow for themselves increases their food security and puts them back in a little bit of control. Additionally, it is a genuine way to make life more sustainable which is another thing we are all looking for at the moment. Really there is no way to lose when embracing food growing, you just need to discover the way that fits best with your life, be realistic and find crops that work best for you. To find out more about Lucy, visit @shegrowsveg on Instagram, or visit https://shegrowsveg.com/ Sign up to the BBC Gardeners' World Autumn Fair newsletter Find garden inspiration from BBC Gardeners' World Autumn Fair 2022

An interview with Lucy Hutchings Lucy Hutchings is a couture jewellery designer turned edible garden designer, homesteader and gardening influencer (@shegrowsveg) with a passion for GYO, and designing The Secret Homestead at BBC Gardeners’ World Live. Lucy believes that the GYO movement needs a rebrand to encourage the Instagram generation to try their hand at growing their own food, and she’s here to help. With more than 167,000 Instagram followers, a sustainable gardening school, and an exciting edible Show Garden design for BBC Gardeners’ World Live 2023, Lucy’s on a mission to get Great Britain growing. Lucy and her partner, Arctic adventurer and chef Mike Keen, have transformed a tumbledown wooden 1940s house in Suffolk, restoring both the house and its 1.5 acre site into Cedarwood Homestead, an oasis of fruit and veg and a hotbed of culinary experimentation. But don’t mention the Good Life!  Lucy Hutching’s Show Garden, The Secret Homestead, will be at BBC Gardeners’ World Live at the Birmingham NEC from 15th-18th June 2023. Visit the We Grow Stage to see daily talks on all things grow your own. Find out more here. Lucy, the ethos you have created at Cedarwood is a wonderful fusion of you and your partner Mike’s careers in design, food and travel, and the hard graft of being self-sufficient. Will The Secret Homestead be a glimpse into what you’ve created in Suffolk – a mini Cedarwood perhaps? You will definitely see references to Cedarwood in The Secret Homestead garden and that was part of the reason I chose the name, to draw those parallels right from the beginning. Coming from a background in the fashion industry, the aesthetics of edible gardens have always been as important to me as their productivity. I don’t think they have to be purely utilitarian spaces, they can be beautiful, dreamy spaces too. That was the ethos I set out with when designing Cedarwood. Yes, we wanted to become more self-sufficient and live as sustainably as possible, but we also want to create a beautiful environment that we would enjoy spending time in.I approached the design of The Secret Homestead garden with the same goal in mind. I wanted the garden to at first appear purely ornamental, with dramatic black, purple and white foliage and pops of coral orange, hot pink and jet black from flowers and stems. On closer exploration you discover a mix of both conventional and lesser known edible plants proving that this garden does in fact offer an abundance of food as well as a feast for the eyes.  Just as the plants in the borders fulfil a dual purpose, so do the decorative elements of the garden, some of which are recreated exactly from what we built at Cedarwood. I have incorporated a wall sculpture mushroom garden, a mini version of our underground root cellar, complete with door painted by designer Lucy Tiffany, a sculpture come wildlife habitat I will be making myself. I will even be making jewel encrusted mosaic paving tiles inspired by the jewellery I used to create. Every part of the garden is beautiful and every part is useful. To get more people giving home growing a go, you’ve said that you think something has to change. What does next gen GYO look like for you? There has never been a better time for people to embrace growing food. It is real step in the right direction of a more sustainable life, reducing food miles, single use plastics and dependence on intensive farming. It also increases food security in a time of soaring food prices and shop shelves emptied by panic buying. All that before you consider the myriad mental and physical health benefits. Additionally, GYO is arguably the most accessible part of gardening, everyone can get excited about food, therefore everyone has the potential to get excited about growing some of it. GYO tends to be portrayed as having a fairly home spun and traditional image which is a lovely part of British heritage, Dig For Victory, the dungaree wearing allotmenteer, Tom and Barbara’s back garden Good Life. However, there are a huge number of people with whom this traditional vibe simply does not resonate at all.With that in mind, I think it’s time that GYO got a makeover or if not a makeover, at least have an alternative image presented that might appeal to a new audience, one that may not have considered it otherwise, after all only good can come from more people growing plants. If we are going to get more people growing food, we need to find a way to make edible gardens appeal to ornamental gardeners, house plant lovers, those with limited space who don’t want to have to choose between form and function, and let’s not forget the foodies. My aim is to try to break down the divide that so often seems to separate ornamental gardening with food growing and offer an entirely different view of what a food garden might look like. There are so many traditionally ornamental plants that also offer incredible and underutilized food crops as well as myriad highly ornamental forms of more conventional food crops. When you get rid of the idea of rectangular raised beds with rows of perfect cabbages, marrows and leeks, and start approaching edible planting just as you would an ornamental border, you can start to create some really exciting dual-purpose spaces For visitors to BBC Gardeners’ World Live that might be new to GYO, are there elements of The Secret Homestead that would be simple to try at home in the garden or for a small growing patch? I am approaching the creation of this garden in a very different way. I want to take the Gardeners’ World Live audience on this journey with me and show firstly just what goes into creating a beautiful garden for the show but mainly, by sharing this journey with me, I want people to see that it is possible to do a part or all of what I’m doing. I will be growing almost all the plants for the garden myself from seed and am sharing a weekly video diary on Instagram so that people can watch the progress of the plants, following their journey all the way from tiny seed to being planted up at the NEC in June. I will be building the sculptural elements of the garden myself and sharing how you can create something similar. I will even be building the garden myself including everything from laying slabs to planting semi mature trees. Yes it is going to be a huge amount of work, with many highs and lows, but this is what I love doing and I hope that by sharing my journey to BBC Gardeners’ World Live, I will get people just as excited as I am and hopefully give them the confidence to roll up their sleeves and create their own dream food garden. Heirloom veg varieties are one of your great loves, particularly tomatoes. Can you tell us more about the appeal of growing these old-fashioned veg, and will they be a feature of The Secret Homestead at BBC Gardeners’ World Live?As a general rule, if you are growing food, you are primarily doing it for the flavour. We all know nothing quite compares to the taste of a home grown tomato! Heritage crops have been grown for hundreds of years on the basis of how good they taste as opposed to modern hybrids which are generally designed to solve a problem such as disease resistance, early cropping or high yields. Yes, they can taste good but I’m yet to find a hybrid that tastes better than an heirloom variety. Hybrids will always have a place, especially in commercial food production, or for those living in parts of the country that offer a more challenging growing environment or short season. However, for the vast majority of people in the UK, heritage or heirloom varieties will perform equally well and offer advantages over and above their hybrid friends.Self-sufficiency does not just cover food, growing heritage and heirloom plants allows you to save seed. Sadly, you can’t save seed from hybrids (often referred to as F1s), it’s an unstable cross that will not be the same as the plant you saved it from and may grow to be something you really don’t like or does not perform well. Open pollinated heirlooms will grow true to the plant they were saved from. You are then in a situation where you can buy one packet of seed and then never have to buy it again, saving you money. It also presents the opportunity to swap and share with friends and the wider community so that others can grow a plant that you have really loved, and I think that is a really beautiful thing. Each heirloom comes with a history, a story, and when you start to grow one of these varieties you become part of that story. Plus, if we don’t grow these amazing plants, they will become extinct. You don’t generally associate the idea of extinction with the humble vegetable, but it is a real problem since the rise of the hybrid. This is why I have been proud to be an ambassador for the Heritage Seed Library for a number of years now. I want to help as many people as possible fall just as in love with heirloom varieties as I have. You’ll be hosting some fantastic talks from your show garden during BBC Gardeners’ World Live about the joys and the practicalities of growing your own food. You’ll be joined by a gang of gardening influencers that share your passion for GYO. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?I’m so excited about this part of the show and I can’t wait to share it with everyone. There is a whole new generation of gardeners that prefer to learn through knowledge sharing and personal experience on social media rather than traditional gardening book and print media. There is an incredible and very active global community of gardeners online that I feel privileged to be part of, with an absolute wealth of knowledge and experience they are hungry to share. It’s a bit like the world’s biggest gardening group but without the monthly village hall meetings. I’m really excited to be working with BBC Gardeners’ World Live to create this new area for talks right next to my show garden and give this community an in real life place to come together.   We will have a host of fascinating and well-respected people talking about subjects that possibly don’t get addressed as much at gardening shows, but that are hot topics of discussion online. We will be looking at everything from permaculture, mushroom growing and small space garden design, to foraging, no-dig, apothecary gardens and more. I will be hosting the stage and also talking myself so it should be a really exciting area to come, learn something new and chat to like-minded gardeners. In the current challenging economic times with food bills rising, is GYO a money-saver?We live in scary times at the moment, twice in recent history our food security has been threatened, with empty supermarket shelves in the pandemic and now with seemingly ever rising food prices. Growing some of your food can be really empowering and yes it can help to lower those grocery bills. It’s not going to be a complete solution to the problems we are facing but there is always a way to grow some sort of food, whether it be micros greens or window boxes full of salad and herbs. It is realistic, achievable and can be approached cheaply. Anything that people can grow for themselves increases their food security and puts them back in a little bit of control. Additionally, it is a genuine way to make life more sustainable which is another thing we are all looking for at the moment. Really there is no way to lose when embracing food growing, you just need to discover the way that fits best with your life, be realistic and find crops that work best for you. To find out more about Lucy, visit @shegrowsveg on Instagram, or visit www.cedarwoodhomestead.com Find out more about GYO inspiration at the Spring Fair Find out more about The Secret Homestead and the We Grow Stage

An interview with Lucy Hutchings Lucy Hutchings is a couture jewellery designer turned edible garden designer, homesteader and gardening influencer (@shegrowsveg) with a passion for GYO, and designing The Secret Homestead at BBC Gardeners’ World Live. Lucy believes that the GYO movement needs a rebrand to encourage the Instagram generation to try their hand at growing their own food, and she’s here to help. With more than 167,000 Instagram followers, a sustainable gardening school, and an exciting edible Show Garden design for BBC Gardeners’ World Live 2023, Lucy’s on a mission to get Great Britain growing. Lucy and her partner, Arctic adventurer and chef Mike Keen, have transformed a tumbledown wooden 1940s house in Suffolk, restoring both the house and its 1.5 acre site into Cedarwood Homestead, an oasis of fruit and veg and a hotbed of culinary experimentation. But don’t mention the Good Life!  Lucy Hutching’s Show Garden, The Secret Homestead, will be at BBC Gardeners’ World Live at the Birmingham NEC from 15th-18th June 2023. Visit the We Grow Stage to see daily talks on all things grow your own. Find out more here. Lucy, the ethos you have created at Cedarwood is a wonderful fusion of you and your partner Mike’s careers in design, food and travel, and the hard graft of being self-sufficient. Will The Secret Homestead be a glimpse into what you’ve created in Suffolk – a mini Cedarwood perhaps? You will definitely see references to Cedarwood in The Secret Homestead garden and that was part of the reason I chose the name, to draw those parallels right from the beginning. Coming from a background in the fashion industry, the aesthetics of edible gardens have always been as important to me as their productivity. I don’t think they have to be purely utilitarian spaces, they can be beautiful, dreamy spaces too. That was the ethos I set out with when designing Cedarwood. Yes, we wanted to become more self-sufficient and live as sustainably as possible, but we also want to create a beautiful environment that we would enjoy spending time in.I approached the design of The Secret Homestead garden with the same goal in mind. I wanted the garden to at first appear purely ornamental, with dramatic black, purple and white foliage and pops of coral orange, hot pink and jet black from flowers and stems. On closer exploration you discover a mix of both conventional and lesser known edible plants proving that this garden does in fact offer an abundance of food as well as a feast for the eyes.  Just as the plants in the borders fulfil a dual purpose, so do the decorative elements of the garden, some of which are recreated exactly from what we built at Cedarwood. I have incorporated a wall sculpture mushroom garden, a mini version of our underground root cellar, complete with door painted by designer Lucy Tiffany, a sculpture come wildlife habitat I will be making myself. I will even be making jewel encrusted mosaic paving tiles inspired by the jewellery I used to create. Every part of the garden is beautiful and every part is useful. To get more people giving home growing a go, you’ve said that you think something has to change. What does next gen GYO look like for you? There has never been a better time for people to embrace growing food. It is real step in the right direction of a more sustainable life, reducing food miles, single use plastics and dependence on intensive farming. It also increases food security in a time of soaring food prices and shop shelves emptied by panic buying. All that before you consider the myriad mental and physical health benefits. Additionally, GYO is arguably the most accessible part of gardening, everyone can get excited about food, therefore everyone has the potential to get excited about growing some of it. GYO tends to be portrayed as having a fairly home spun and traditional image which is a lovely part of British heritage, Dig For Victory, the dungaree wearing allotmenteer, Tom and Barbara’s back garden Good Life. However, there are a huge number of people with whom this traditional vibe simply does not resonate at all.With that in mind, I think it’s time that GYO got a makeover or if not a makeover, at least have an alternative image presented that might appeal to a new audience, one that may not have considered it otherwise, after all only good can come from more people growing plants. If we are going to get more people growing food, we need to find a way to make edible gardens appeal to ornamental gardeners, house plant lovers, those with limited space who don’t want to have to choose between form and function, and let’s not forget the foodies. My aim is to try to break down the divide that so often seems to separate ornamental gardening with food growing and offer an entirely different view of what a food garden might look like. There are so many traditionally ornamental plants that also offer incredible and underutilized food crops as well as myriad highly ornamental forms of more conventional food crops. When you get rid of the idea of rectangular raised beds with rows of perfect cabbages, marrows and leeks, and start approaching edible planting just as you would an ornamental border, you can start to create some really exciting dual-purpose spaces For visitors to BBC Gardeners’ World Live that might be new to GYO, are there elements of The Secret Homestead that would be simple to try at home in the garden or for a small growing patch? I am approaching the creation of this garden in a very different way. I want to take the Gardeners’ World Live audience on this journey with me and show firstly just what goes into creating a beautiful garden for the show but mainly, by sharing this journey with me, I want people to see that it is possible to do a part or all of what I’m doing. I will be growing almost all the plants for the garden myself from seed and am sharing a weekly video diary on Instagram so that people can watch the progress of the plants, following their journey all the way from tiny seed to being planted up at the NEC in June. I will be building the sculptural elements of the garden myself and sharing how you can create something similar. I will even be building the garden myself including everything from laying slabs to planting semi mature trees. Yes it is going to be a huge amount of work, with many highs and lows, but this is what I love doing and I hope that by sharing my journey to BBC Gardeners’ World Live, I will get people just as excited as I am and hopefully give them the confidence to roll up their sleeves and create their own dream food garden. Heirloom veg varieties are one of your great loves, particularly tomatoes. Can you tell us more about the appeal of growing these old-fashioned veg, and will they be a feature of The Secret Homestead at BBC Gardeners’ World Live?As a general rule, if you are growing food, you are primarily doing it for the flavour. We all know nothing quite compares to the taste of a home grown tomato! Heritage crops have been grown for hundreds of years on the basis of how good they taste as opposed to modern hybrids which are generally designed to solve a problem such as disease resistance, early cropping or high yields. Yes, they can taste good but I’m yet to find a hybrid that tastes better than an heirloom variety. Hybrids will always have a place, especially in commercial food production, or for those living in parts of the country that offer a more challenging growing environment or short season. However, for the vast majority of people in the UK, heritage or heirloom varieties will perform equally well and offer advantages over and above their hybrid friends.Self-sufficiency does not just cover food, growing heritage and heirloom plants allows you to save seed. Sadly, you can’t save seed from hybrids (often referred to as F1s), it’s an unstable cross that will not be the same as the plant you saved it from and may grow to be something you really don’t like or does not perform well. Open pollinated heirlooms will grow true to the plant they were saved from. You are then in a situation where you can buy one packet of seed and then never have to buy it again, saving you money. It also presents the opportunity to swap and share with friends and the wider community so that others can grow a plant that you have really loved, and I think that is a really beautiful thing. Each heirloom comes with a history, a story, and when you start to grow one of these varieties you become part of that story. Plus, if we don’t grow these amazing plants, they will become extinct. You don’t generally associate the idea of extinction with the humble vegetable, but it is a real problem since the rise of the hybrid. This is why I have been proud to be an ambassador for the Heritage Seed Library for a number of years now. I want to help as many people as possible fall just as in love with heirloom varieties as I have. You’ll be hosting some fantastic talks from your show garden during BBC Gardeners’ World Live about the joys and the practicalities of growing your own food. You’ll be joined by a gang of gardening influencers that share your passion for GYO. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?I’m so excited about this part of the show and I can’t wait to share it with everyone. There is a whole new generation of gardeners that prefer to learn through knowledge sharing and personal experience on social media rather than traditional gardening book and print media. There is an incredible and very active global community of gardeners online that I feel privileged to be part of, with an absolute wealth of knowledge and experience they are hungry to share. It’s a bit like the world’s biggest gardening group but without the monthly village hall meetings. I’m really excited to be working with BBC Gardeners’ World Live to create this new area for talks right next to my show garden and give this community an in real life place to come together.   We will have a host of fascinating and well-respected people talking about subjects that possibly don’t get addressed as much at gardening shows, but that are hot topics of discussion online. We will be looking at everything from permaculture, mushroom growing and small space garden design, to foraging, no-dig, apothecary gardens and more. I will be hosting the stage and also talking myself so it should be a really exciting area to come, learn something new and chat to like-minded gardeners. In the current challenging economic times with food bills rising, is GYO a money-saver?We live in scary times at the moment, twice in recent history our food security has been threatened, with empty supermarket shelves in the pandemic and now with seemingly ever rising food prices. Growing some of your food can be really empowering and yes it can help to lower those grocery bills. It’s not going to be a complete solution to the problems we are facing but there is always a way to grow some sort of food, whether it be micros greens or window boxes full of salad and herbs. It is realistic, achievable and can be approached cheaply. Anything that people can grow for themselves increases their food security and puts them back in a little bit of control. Additionally, it is a genuine way to make life more sustainable which is another thing we are all looking for at the moment. Really there is no way to lose when embracing food growing, you just need to discover the way that fits best with your life, be realistic and find crops that work best for you. To find out more about Lucy, visit @shegrowsveg on Instagram, or visit www.cedarwoodhomestead.com Find out what's on at BBC Gardeners' World Live 2023 Find out more about The Secret Homestead and the We Grow Stage

Time to sow: Spring Onions! Grow your own spring onions for a quick and easy way to freshen up your home cooking, with tips from our friends at BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine. Packed with flavour, we’ve got the perfect recipe to use them in, from the BBC Good Food Show Summer 2022.  This spring, make plans for your plot with spring onions. Perfect for salads, stir fries and much more, spring onions are an easy to grow, delicious crop to get growing, that take up a small space. Read below for garden know-how from BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine. What’s more, find out more about a tasty casarecce pasta with tomato sauce recipe, using your spring onions, from the BBC Good Food Show Summer in 2022. Sowing peas Sow your seeds straight into the ground in place that gets lots of sun and rich, well-drained soil. Clear any weeds, add a good fertiliser in advance. Before sowing, rake the soil to a fine texture.Seeds can be sown in drills 20mm deep and 10cm apart.You can also sow the seeds in trays and wait for seedlings to develop before planting out into the garden. When the seedlings begin to show, thin them out up to 5cm apart. Make sure they’re well-watered and don’t let the soil dry out. For harvests of spring onions through the year, sow a batch of seeds every few weeks from spring to autumn. Harvesting and storage You should be ready to harvest your spring onions eight weeks after sowing. Before pulling up the bulbs, fork the soil around the plants to ease up the soil.Once picked, eat your spring onions soon after being harvested for the best flavour. Casarecce pasta with tomato sauce recipe This recipe is from the BBC Good Food Show Summer 2022, as seen on the Italian Kitchen from Adam Bush, with a recipe from Olive Magazine. This recipe is vegan, and only takes 15 minutes to make. Serves 2Ingredients250g cherry tomatoes, halved3 spring onions, finely chopped4 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil3 tbsp red wine vinegar4-5 dashes hot sauce200g casareccea few basil leaves, torn MethodMix together the cherry tomatoes, spring onions, olive oil, vinegar and hot sauce in a bowl. Season with salt and pepper.Bring to the boil a large pan of salted water. Once boiling, add the casarecce and cook until al dente. Add 1-2 tbsp of the cooking water to your bowl of mixed ingredients before draining the pasta.Drain the pasta and toss in with the sauce. Sprinkle over the torn basil and serve. Sign up to the BBC Gardeners' World Autumn Fair newsletter Find garden inspiration from BBC Gardeners' World Autumn Fair 2022

Time to sow: Spring Onions! Grow your own spring onions for a quick and easy way to freshen up your home cooking, with tips from our friends at BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine. Packed with flavour, we’ve got the perfect recipe to use them in, from the BBC Good Food Show Summer 2022.  This spring, make plans for your plot with spring onions. Perfect for salads, stir fries and much more, spring onions are an easy to grow, delicious crop to get growing, that take up a small space. Read below for garden know-how from BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine. What’s more, find out more about a tasty casarecce pasta with tomato sauce recipe, using your spring onions, from the BBC Good Food Show Summer in 2022. Sowing peas Sow your seeds straight into the ground in place that gets lots of sun and rich, well-drained soil. Clear any weeds, add a good fertiliser in advance. Before sowing, rake the soil to a fine texture.Seeds can be sown in drills 20mm deep and 10cm apart.You can also sow the seeds in trays and wait for seedlings to develop before planting out into the garden. When the seedlings begin to show, thin them out up to 5cm apart. Make sure they’re well-watered and don’t let the soil dry out. For harvests of spring onions through the year, sow a batch of seeds every few weeks from spring to autumn. Harvesting and storage You should be ready to harvest your spring onions eight weeks after sowing. Before pulling up the bulbs, fork the soil around the plants to ease up the soil.Once picked, eat your spring onions soon after being harvested for the best flavour. Casarecce pasta with tomato sauce recipe This recipe is from the BBC Good Food Show Summer 2022, as seen on the Italian Kitchen from Adam Bush, with a recipe from Olive Magazine. This recipe is vegan, and only takes 15 minutes to make. Serves 2Ingredients250g cherry tomatoes, halved3 spring onions, finely chopped4 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil3 tbsp red wine vinegar4-5 dashes hot sauce200g casareccea few basil leaves, torn MethodMix together the cherry tomatoes, spring onions, olive oil, vinegar and hot sauce in a bowl. Season with salt and pepper.Bring to the boil a large pan of salted water. Once boiling, add the casarecce and cook until al dente. Add 1-2 tbsp of the cooking water to your bowl of mixed ingredients before draining the pasta.Drain the pasta and toss in with the sauce. Sprinkle over the torn basil and serve. Find out what's on at BBC Gardeners' World Spring Fair this April See who's on when at the BBC Gardeners' World Magazine stage

Time to sow: Spring Onions! Grow your own spring onions for a quick and easy way to freshen up your home cooking, with tips from our friends at BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine. Packed with flavour, we’ve got the perfect recipe to use them in, from the BBC Good Food Show Summer 2022.  This spring, make plans for your plot with spring onions. Perfect for salads, stir fries and much more, spring onions are an easy to grow, delicious crop to get growing, that take up a small space. Read below for garden know-how from BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine. What’s more, find out more about a tasty casarecce pasta with tomato sauce recipe, using your spring onions, from the BBC Good Food Show Summer in 2022. Sowing peas Sow your seeds straight into the ground in place that gets lots of sun and rich, well-drained soil. Clear any weeds, add a good fertiliser in advance. Before sowing, rake the soil to a fine texture.Seeds can be sown in drills 20mm deep and 10cm apart.You can also sow the seeds in trays and wait for seedlings to develop before planting out into the garden. When the seedlings begin to show, thin them out up to 5cm apart. Make sure they’re well-watered and don’t let the soil dry out. For harvests of spring onions through the year, sow a batch of seeds every few weeks from spring to autumn. Harvesting and storage You should be ready to harvest your spring onions eight weeks after sowing. Before pulling up the bulbs, fork the soil around the plants to ease up the soil.Once picked, eat your spring onions soon after being harvested for the best flavour. Casarecce pasta with tomato sauce recipe This recipe is from the BBC Good Food Show Summer 2022, as seen on the Italian Kitchen from Adam Bush, with a recipe from Olive Magazine. This recipe is vegan, and only takes 15 minutes to make. Serves 2Ingredients250g cherry tomatoes, halved3 spring onions, finely chopped4 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil3 tbsp red wine vinegar4-5 dashes hot sauce200g casareccea few basil leaves, torn MethodMix together the cherry tomatoes, spring onions, olive oil, vinegar and hot sauce in a bowl. Season with salt and pepper.Bring to the boil a large pan of salted water. Once boiling, add the casarecce and cook until al dente. Add 1-2 tbsp of the cooking water to your bowl of mixed ingredients before draining the pasta.Drain the pasta and toss in with the sauce. Sprinkle over the torn basil and serve. Find out what's on at BBC Gardeners' World Live 2023 Find out more about the BBC Good Food Show Summer