Charlie Dimmock will be among gardening stars heading to the Lowry Outlet Mall’s Garden Party
Celebrity Gardener Charlie Dimmock knows just how we can meet new health recommendations that we eat SEVEN fruit and veg a day – by growing our own.
Charlie will be heading to Salford at the weekend to share her green-fingered tips alongside fellow TV gardener Carol Klein at the Lowry Outlet Mall’s Garden Party event.
And among those tips will be how to grow your own fruit and veg as a cheap and easy way to get more greenery in your diets after that latest advice that it should be seven, not five, that we munch daily.
She says: “People think you’ve got to have a separate plot just for veg in the garden, but quite often they can look very pretty bedded in with your plants, you can put runner beans up against your roses and they flower all summer long.
“I’ve seen lettuce used as bedding plants around borders, things like Kale, lots of varieties and they can look really pretty.
“There’s no reason why you can’t incorporate them into the garden. It’s very straight forward and easy and if you have children growing their veg, they’re much more inclined to eat them if they’ve grown them themselves.”
Charlie, hailed “horticultural viagra” in her Ground Force heyday thanks to her earthy charms and titian wavy hair, has no trouble eating seven-a-day from her garden.
She laughs: “Last year I couldn’t give away for love nor money all the chillis I grew last year! I do have quite a big vegetable patch, I grow swedes and turnips, and the garden is heavy on runner beans and soft fruit.
“I truly believe there’s nothing as tasty as a home-grown tomato.”
Charlie says veg is always one of the hot topics when she does live Q&As, as well as troubleshooting garden problems.
And while we all know and love her from the TV, she says she has no plans to return to the box anytime soon.
She says: “It’s all about baking these days on TV. But if they did bring back Ground Force it wouldn’t be with me and Tommy [Walsh] doing it – we’re all too old!”
Surely not Charlie! She even insists she’s not a sex symbol these days.
She groans: “I’m well into my 40s and if you could see me now, my hair is in a tight bunch and I’m out in the garden doing compost. The whole sex symbol thing was a bit silly really.”
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