OUR garden is usually taken up with flowering plants and shrubs. I feel that in its limited space, there isn't room for fruit and vegetables.

However, this year I relented after being given three tomato plants by a friend, and sowing swiss chard seeds after admiring some plants in a garden last summer.

The tomatoes haven't taken any space out of the garden because they have been grown in bags put against a sheltered wall.

I put two peat-free grow bags on top of each other, making a long slit across the top of the bottom one and a corresponding cut across the base of the top one, which was then was quickly flipped over on to the first bag, a rather tricky operation.

Then three cuts were made in the usual way in the uppermost bag and the plants put in at the beginning of June.

I had waited until the first flowers appeared before putting them outside permanently and slowly hardened them off at the end of May.

The tomatoes are cordon types, that is ones that keep growing upwards rather than forming bushes. They cannot support themselves and need to be attached to tall canes from an early stage.

I have used six-foot canes and nipped the top of each plant once it reached to just above its support. Because they are growing outside, I wanted to stop them growing any taller and producing flowers by August and concentrate on ripening the fruit they already had before the weather got cooler.

It is also important to remove any side or lateral shoots from the plant as soon as they start to grow. They grow between the stem and leaves and are very vigorous, diverting energy into plant growth rather than fruit production.

The tomatoes have been easy to look after and being grown near the house are a source of interest to all the family, each of whom update me on their progress daily. They have been fed with tomato feed weekly and watered regularly although not as often as I had thought would be necessary - this is probably because of the weather as well as using double growbags.

The first few are beginning to ripen and will soon be ready to pick but most are still green - they are in a warm spot but there just hasn't been enough sun this year. Hopefully there will be enough time in the next month to get them ripened.

Swiss chard 'Bright Lights' is an attractive foliage plant worthy of a place in the garden. Planted towards the front of a sunny bed the stems and leaf veins catch the light, glowing in shades of yellow, pink and deep red. Seeds should be sown between April and June either 23-30cm apart directly into the soil or into small pots.

I put mine into pots and grew them into fairly large plants before transplanting them into spaces in the flowerbeds.

Young leaves can be washed and added to salads without cooking while larger, tougher leaves are better cooked.

The stems and mid ribs take longer to cook and need to be cut off the leaves and started first before adding the shredded foliage.

Chard can be treated as a cut-and-come-again vegetable, which means that leaves are cut from the plant leaving the central growing point intact to produce the next crop. The only requirement for this plant is regular watering in dry periods to stop it going to seed. In sheltered gardens it may overwinter.

Updated: 08:36 Saturday, August 28, 2004