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Hello and welcome to the BBC Gardner's World magazine podcast, brought to you by the team

here at the magazine. Join us as we chat all things gardening with the nation's favourite experts.

Growing veg in a small space is one of the first ways many gardeners get into growing, from a handful of radish or cut-and-come-again salad leaves in a container, to a pot of herbs on a window-sill or new potatoes grown in a sack.

It seems like everyone these days is having a go at growing crops at home, and there's no denying that homegrown always tastes better.

Hello, I'm Adam, and today I'm chatting to Rukmini Ayah, a keen home veg grower who knows all about homegrown flavour.

Rukmini is the author of the best-selling roasting tin series of cookbooks. Her latest, India Express, is inspired

by her Bengali and South Indian heritage, and she's busy working on a new vegetarian and vegan

cookbook. Since summer 2022, she's also had a regular series in Gardeners World magazine called

Small Space Big Flavor. Her series is all about growing really flavorsome veg in a small

garden and sharing delicious recipes and inspirational tips on what to do with your harvest.

I visited Rookmini in her South London Garden to chat about how her growing adventures have unfolded

so far, and we started by going back to her earliest memory of growing her own veg at home.

During the summer holidays, I was a teenager with not enough to do, and I think my parents were on holiday,

and I just got it into my head that I was going to nip down the garden centre, get some seeds, and plant something.

So my parents came back to find that I dug up a bit of their orchard and turned it into a carrot patch.

And I had no idea what I was doing. It's really heavy clay soil in Cambridge. And I just sort of

very optimistically planted these carrots. And amazingly, I did get a harvest, but they were the

wonkiest looking carrots, but I was very proud of them. And then later I learned you put a lot

of sharp sand in. And since then, maybe 10, 20 years, but I was very proud of them. And then later I learned you put a lot of sharp sand in.

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