Course overview

Expert vegetable gardeners Sally Nex will teach you how to grow vegetables in your garden all year, including winter vegetable gardening and plant ideas. As you learn you'll be designing your vegetable garden and producing your own planting plan.

Choose Expert option for personal feedback from Sally on your vegetable garden design and planting plans.

This course takes you right through the growing year, and explores the best ways to make the most of your garden so you can enjoy home grown fruit and vegetables, no matter what the season.

Sally will teach you crop and vegetable selection, successional planting, managing your land and garden and ways to avoid the ‘hungry gap’ in early spring. You'll also learn how to manage pests and disease and keep your vegetables and plants healthy.

Wether you're just getting started with growing your own vegetables or looking to expand the amount of vegetables you grow, Sally's course will teach you how to plan your garden and plant choices.

You'll learn:

how to eat vegetables by season
planning the right vegetables to grow in your garden
timing your vegetable harvests
how to keep your vegetable plants healthy
which vegetables to grow and harvest in winter

Time to complete this self-sufficient vegetable gardening course:

Every student is different but in general we think the whole course will take around 13 hours 45 minutes to complete including:

Video lessons: 1 hour 45 minutes in total
Course notes: 30 minutes per lesson
Assignment: at least 2 hours per lesson
Interactive classroom time: 15 minutes per lesson
tutor feedback review (Expert level): 15 minutes per lesson

The course includes:

On-demand video lessons - presented by Sally Nex
lifetime access to the video, notes and interactive class
flexible classes - join and learn when and where you like
downloadable lesson notes
practical (optional) vegetable garden planning and planting projects
access on your mobile, PC, Mac or laptop
small interactive online classroom chat online to students from around the world

Ready to get started?

Just add the course to your basket above - choose the 'Expert' option for personal feedback from Sally on your vegetable choices and garden plans.

Any questions? Contact us by clicking on the orange speech symbol - we'd love to hear from you.

Watch course trailer

Lesson summary

The Self-Sufficiency handbook

In this lesson you will cover the basics of becoming self-sufficient. How much land do you need to be self-sufficient (less than you'd think); what you'll need to get started and ways of getting more land if you don't own much yourself. You will also learn about managing your time and how to eat with the seasons to plan the perfect veg-growing year.

Keeping It Growing

The secret of self-sufficiency is to keep a steady harvest of something to pick every day of the year. This lecture is all about getting the timing right, planning your sowing so you never go short, with sucessional sowing (and never have too much of a good thing, either). You'll learn how to choose your veg varieties cleverly so you get the longest possible harvest, as well as some good tricks for coaxing extra crops from your space, giving you even more to pick, with clever techniques or using the space under slower-growing crops. We'll also be looking at how to look after and boost your soil and some more advanced techniques and growing methods to keep your crops healthy and guarantee the very best results.

What to Grow

There's a bewildering range of vegetable varieties out there, so this is your guide through the maze of choice you'll need to make to ensure your veg garden is well stocked every day of the year. I will pass on my recommendations for really high-cropping, long-lasting vegetables no kitchen garden should be without. And you'll discover some less commonly-grown veg which give spectacular savings and liven up your dinner menu, from artichokes and asparagus to perennial onions, yacon and traditional heritage varieties. Include sweet, juicy fruit and aromatic herbs in your day-to-day harvest and your year of plenty is complete: learn which it's worth growing, and how.

The Winter Veg Garden

Most gardeners retreat indoors with the first frost – but if you're putting something on the plate every day of the year, winter is as important a season as any. In this lecture we'll look at how to beat the cold and grow a spectacular harvest of winter crops, from gorgeous crinkly kale to fat Brussels sprouts for Christmas lunch. You'll learn how to extend the seasons at both ends so you start as early as possible and pick till the snow lies on the ground. You'll also find out how to face up to the biggest challenge the year-round veg grower faces, the Hungry Gap in early spring