With nature, wellbeing and simple living at the core of the Hygge & Cwtch ethos, we consider outdoor spaces as part of the home. Embracing the concept of biophilia, connecting home and nature for true indoor-outdoor living.  As such, we’re always looking for new ways that we can incorporate our outside spaces into our daily life. Right now, we’re feeling particularly inspired by the talented gardeners who share their journeys of growing their own food produce. So this month we’re sharing with you five of our favourite kitchen gardeners and growers to follow on social media.

Firstly though, let us explain what we know about kitchen gardens and good old vegetable patches…

Veg patch or kitchen garden?

A vegetable patch is probably what most of us visualise when we think about home-grown food. Typically, a veg patch or garden is home to food requiring intensive care over a long period of time. Planting, tending, harvesting and storing considerable amounts of food, from beans to potatoes, corn to cabbage. Often, but not always, taking up a fair amount of space and a good chunk of time a few times a week.

A kitchen garden, on the other hand, feels more integrated into daily life. Usually kept closer to the house, it’s used as an extension to the kitchen, where you might pop out to multiple times a day when preparing meals. Herbs, berries, tomatoes, even root vegetables can be grown in a kitchen garden, which can be in planters or borders lifted higher off the ground for easy regular access. Less intense periods of tending and harvesting, more small doses of daily care and eating.

Why we want to learn more about kitchen gardens

There’s no denying that with the current cost of living situation, and the desire to improve self-sufficiency and wellbeing, producing your own food is an appealing prospect. So informative and relatable gardening and ‘grow your own’ influencers are very welcome on our follow list! Many of our favourite kitchen gardeners – who have varying audience sizes – work in their own allotments, enabling them to scale up their work to create more content for sharing with their audience. But what we see, and want to share with our readers, are those nuggets of inspiration and ideas that we can use in our own way, in our own gardens, no matter how big or small they may be.

Home-growing kitchen gardeners that we love

Diary of a Lady Gardener

Shannon, otherwise known as @diaryofaladygardener, has a successful Instagram account, podcast, runs workshops and generally helps us learn how to grow plants and food.

While Shannon is not exclusively a kitchen gardener, we love her real and rustic style and tips for growing a thriving garden. Her herb spiral made from bricks would make a lovely feature in a rustic garden! Shannon’s podcast is very informative on subjects ranging from allotment life to land diversification and everything in between. A great follow if you have a general interest in gardening and horticulture.

Just A Garden Bee

Probably one of the most relatable gardeners that we’ve come across on Instagram lately, @justagardenbee is a kitchen gardener right there in her own back garden. No allotment or manor house-size grounds, just an average garden with your less than average produce! Showing us how it’s done with limited space, one of her posts was captioned ‘Nipped out to get dinner (peas, courgette, potatoes)…’. That’s exactly what kitchen gardening is all about!

Homegrown Garden

Katrina, aka Homegrown Garden, has a You Tube channel filled to the brim with gardening and growing tips. We love her monthly allotment tours and seeing how the plots change and her planting progresses throughout the seasons. Katrina elevates her content by providing tips from beginning to end of the growing journey, which can of course be applied regardless of the space we have. Think planting and growing potatoes in pots through to harvesting and cooking them using her favourite summer-time recipes. Anyone who can combine IKEA hacks with growing squash is a worthy account to follow in our eyes!

Rob’s Allotment

Another account bridging the gap between growing and using is the wonderfully bright Instagram account @Robsallotment. Growing all types of produce, we love how Rob shows us how he makes use of everything he grows. From sweet pickled chilli peppers to basil pesto, creating oils, preserving and freezing produce. This is the kind of real life, useful content we need to encourage us into a spot of kitchen gardening.

Sow Much More

We came across Becky’s Instagram account @sow_much_more via her guest video on the Huw Richards’ kitchen gardening You Tube channel. The video featuring Becky was titled ‘Massively productive small-scale suburban vegetable garden: Backyard self-sufficiency on a budget’, which really says it all! We love poring over beautiful allotments but the reality is that most of us don’t have that kind of space. So watching someone with a similar set up to us – with knowledge and a winning personality – is a breath of fresh air. Not only making our own kitchen garden dreams seem achievable, but enjoyable too.

We’re just starting out on this journey of creating outdoor spaces which are not just aesthetically at one with our homes, but which can be practically integrated too. We hope you’ll stick with us as we learn more. Find more inspiration and ideas on our Kitchen Gardens Pinterest board.