Sidmouth gardening guru Stefan Drew has partnered up with Nub News to give green-thumbed gardeners in the town the best tips and tricks on gardening in the local climate through a series of regular bi-monthly columns.

Stefan is a former market gardener and college horticulture lecturer. Here is his first column:

At the beginning of the year, I had no intention of writing this column. I had no intention of setting up gardening groups on Facebook and I didn't expect a pandemic.

Then suddenly the world changed. There were queues in supermarkets, panic buying, and a lockdown.

With many people working from home, or not having work to go to, and an unspoken worry about food security people started to think about gardening.

Suddenly online seed companies had more customers than they could cope with and had to implement queues on their websites. Gardening hadn't had such a boost since Winston Churchill spoke in the House of Commons on November 5th 1940.

In his speech Churchill said: "Every endeavour must be made to use the time available to produce the greatest volume of food of which this fertile island is capable and so liberate our Navy and our merchant shipping for the movement of the considerable armies which will certainly be required in those years, if the enemy do not surrender or collapse in the meanwhile."

Earlier this year our concern was for the collapse of the NHS and not a foreign power. But the sense of urgency was the same.

Help Was On Hand.

During World War Two the Government produced posters, guides and other advice, but not so this time!

So, prompted by my wife, I decided I should do something to help the number of first time and more experienced gardeners.

I'd previously owned a market garden and made my living out of growing salads and veg, and I'd taught horticulture and agriculture, so I reasoned it wouldn't be that hard and maybe a few dozen people would read what I wrote.

Posters and guides didn't seem as appropriate as they were in 1940, so I went online and created a Facebook group.

What amazed me was the level of interest. Forget a few dozen people, over a thousand gardeners joined in the first month or so. Hundreds were from Sidmouth and the Sid Valley. And the enthusiasm was incredible.

Feeling Good About Gardening

Of course many people wanted to grow fruit and veg because they'd always planned to one day and suddenly they had time to devote to it. But there were other, deeper reasons for gardening.

A few months ago I carried out a poll in which I asked a simple question, "Why do you enjoy fruit and veg gardening?"

The most popular answer from people was that gardening relaxed them. And I can relate to that.

Gardening is incredibly relaxing and the ten-minute job I was going to do frequently leads to another ... and another .. and another ... as I enjoy being in the garden.

And that brings me on to the next most popular comment. A lot of people said that gardening helped them connect with nature.

They told me about the robin eating worms as they dug and the fact they suddenly started to see hedgehogs and were now aware of more butterflies and birdsong.

These delights are easy to miss if we spend no time in the garden, but are simple pleasures when we spend time outside.

Of course, not all gardeners have a large garden and many of the people that took up gardening this year only have a very small patch. In some cases, they only have a concreted area and have had to grow in containers, troughs, growbags or even on the kitchen windowsill. But however little space they can access, they tell me that they still enjoyed connecting with nature.

Third place on the list was about how gardening had helped so many people through lockdown.

When normal life was disrupted they found that being able to garden, however modestly, kept them grounded. Some told me it had kept them sane.

The fact that gardening was also regarded as a great family activity by so many people was also high on the list and I know that many children were involved with their families in growing food for the first time.

The garden is a great classroom for kids and so many of them enjoyed sowing seeds, watching plants grow, plus observing worms and a host of other garden life.

One lady told me how her children really hadn't realised that food could come from a garden, they thought it all came from supermarkets! I'd heard this sort of folk story before, but never first hand from a parent.

Sustainable Gardening

For some people gardening was as much about sustainability as anything else.

High on the list of reasons to garden was the saving in food miles, decreasing carbon footprints and healthy diets.

Others spoke about knowing what they were eating and how it tasted so much better.

More About Gardening

I've been lucky in that I learnt how to garden from my grandfather and father and have gardened commercially.

It's given me an insight that has been nurtured over decades.

On my market garden I grew 10,000 tomato plants every year, would pick a ton or more of tomatoes every day during the summer months and also managed to grow half a million lettuce each year. Plus I dabbled in peppers, chilis, cucumbers, leeks and a lot more.

Doing things on such a scale means I have learnt every trick in the book when it comes to being efficient.

As a grower, I practised being a 'lazy' grower. Every legitimate and sensible shortcut was put into practice because time was money. And with more time I could focus more on quality, flavour and the environment.

Eighteen months ago we moved to our present Sidmouth home and I started a new garden. It was a bit of a shock in some ways. Everything had to be done on a small scale and I discovered that being a gardener is very different from being a commercial grower.

Suddenly I was growing four tomato plants and not 10,000. Instead of harvesting lettuce when they were mature I started to harvest a few leaves each meal and discovered how they will yield much much this way than when I left them to cut once when fully mature. I started to harvest celery by the petiole (stalk) rather than as a head.

The most fundamental change I made, however, was in keeping with me being a lazy grower. I stopped digging the garden and went down the No-Dig route. It's so much easier, the soil responds positively to NOT being dug, yields increase while pests and diseases decrease.

If you'd asked me as a grower about No-Dig I would have been dismissive of the idea. Now I'm a convert. On a garden scale, it has so many benefits. If you want to know more about how I converted a patio into a No-Dig garden then follow the link.

This one small area of the garden has been so productive. We've grown a succession of crops, broad beans followed by baby leeks, then carrots and it now has a second crop of leeks that will last us most of the winter.

Another idea I've repeated this year is growing crops in large containers. I started off the year with very early potatoes being planted in large containers in my small greenhouse.

Once they were a foot high I moved them outside under a layer of horticultural fleece which kept the frost at bay.

Once they were harvested very early in the season I planted a crop of Nipper leeks. Started as seed in modules these were planted when 4-5 inches high and were harvested as baby leeks 4-5 weeks later.

Then in went some carrot seed and we are harvesting them now. So those containers grew three crops between spring and November. Others have grown four crops in the same timescale and I'll explain how to do this in a future Nub article.

And it's not been just about veg. Fruit is a key par of our garden. This year we've had a bumper crop of cherries. And the apples, rhubarb, raspberries and strawberries have yielded well.

What has surprised many of the people in my Facebook group is that gardening isn't just a summer activity and that we can grow crops all year around. Many plants that many gardeners regard as delicate are actually very hardy and tolerate heavy frost and snow.

For example, I've just harvested some pea shoots that are quite happily growing outside. They've been frosted twice but are still very tasty.

And in the greenhouse, we have Chinese cabbage, mizuna, Lamb's lettuce, coriander, basil, radish, lettuce, dwarf beans and more peas.

Finally, a few words about gardening advice. There's lots of it available. From seed packets and TV stations to podcasts and books. It's everywhere.

But there's a snag with gardening advice. It's often very generic. When on TV they say to sow at a particular time of year they haven't thought about the gardeners in Sidmouth.

Our climate is just a bit warmer here. We get fewer frosts and our last frost is much earlier than over 90 per cent of the country. That means we have a long growing season and can break a few rules.

For example the seed packets tell me to sow rhubarb in the spring. I sowed mine a few weeks ago and it's doing very well.

The chances are I'll be harvesting a small crop next summer and a huge one the year after. If I followed the advice on the seed packet I'd sow next year and not start harvesting until 2023. I'm too impatient for that ... and far too lazy a gardener not to break the rules that can be ignored in Sidmouth.

My fruit and veg group on Facebook is open to anyone interested in fruit and veg gardening. Just click the link HERE to discover more.

And if your gardening interests are trees, shrubs, herbaceous or cut flowers, there will be some articles on them very soon.

Enjoy your garden.