| How to - tips and techniques for growing better vegetables |
|---|
|
How to Plan
After a season or two in the garden or allotment you might begin to realise that planning ahead might be a good idea. There are a number of things to consider:
- What do we like to eat? - no point growing things that no-one wants
- What sort of quantities do I need? - some crops are more prolific than others
- When do I need particular vegetables - fresh vegetables all year?
- Keeping down pests and diseases - a look at crop rotations
I'll look at them in turn below. A little planning can bring great rewards and help you get more returns for your efforts.
|
A certain software can help you plan ahead |
|
What's your favourite? |
What goes down well?
I've always been tempted by 'new' vegetables and want to have a go at growing them. However, they are not always well received by the rest of the house. I like growing Jerusalem Artichokes - but after harvesting
they sat in a bucket in the garage all winter and no-one showed the slightest bit of interest in eating them. So, knowing that you probably don't have unlimited growing space its best to start narrowing down your choices to only grow the vegetables
that are going to be really appreciated.
Start a wish list
When you get some time, sit down and make a list of favourite vegetables. Try to think of all the vegetables that you might eat in a year.
The next thing to do is to put a 'value' to each. Value here might mean the fact that its scarce in the shops, a good winter crop, expensive to buy, great taste and/or versatility, etc.
Now you can reorder the list with the most 'valuable' crops at the top - make sure you grow these first.
|
|
More crops in a year
You would have to work really hard to produce all the vegetables a family needs from an allotment sized plot.
But there are several ways that you improve the take:
- Protect early & late crops - if you can protect early and late crops (using cloches) you can extend the growing season by a few weeks at either end of the season.
- Following on - make sure that when one crop ends another is ready to take its place so you don't leave valuable ground empty.
- Pots, Pots and more Pots - just about everything can be started in pots (ideally under cover) and there are
some real benefits in doing so. Firstly, the plants can get off to a good start as you can protect them from slugs, etc.
Secondly, you can then plant out only the healthy specimens - so you get no gaps in the bed.
- Hold that pot - create a 'holding area' (like a cold-frame or sheltered corner of the garden) where your pots can sit prior to planting into their permanent spaces. You can use this time to harden them off/thin out where needed.
- Sow little and often - Making weekly sowings of a mixture of crops can avoid wasteful gluts where food is given, left to go to seed or thrown away.
|
Cloches can add weeks to the growing season... |
|
Main vegetable families |
Rotation, Rotation, Rotation
If you going to follow one crop with another over the seasons, you need to avoid planting crops that share common pests and diseases one after another.
Traditional crop rotations dealt with this problem by dividing the growing area into 4 sections and rotating the crops from one section to another each season.
This traditional approach meant that it was difficult to follow one crop directly with another as everything had to be cleared for the start of the next season.
This meant that large parts of the sections stand empty over autumn, winter and early spring. Essentially its a sow once/harvest once system.
However, if you take advantage of the fact that pests and diseases tend to be specific to botanical families,
you can have a much more flexible rotation system. Here is a list of herbs and vegetables grouped in their families.
|
| If we have an example of a bed that has been used for growing a crop of Purple Sprouting Broccoli over winter. Prior to the Broccoli the bed was growing Broad Beans and peas the previous year. The Broccoli will be finished by the end of April. What can we follow it with? |
 |
| Broad Beans belong to the Leguminosae family, Sprouting Broccoli to Cruciferae. Keeping to our rule that we must not follow any crop with another from the same family, we can safely grow anything from the following families:Chenopodiaceae,
Umbelliferae, Solanaceae, Cucurbitaceae or Compositae. |
 |
| So in this new rotation system we manage follow on crops on a bed by bed basis - as long as we keep families apart by at least 2 seasons we will minimise the build up of pest and diseases. What do you think you could grow from September? |
|
|
|
