A New Vegetable Garden
With the worst of the winter weather and cold conditions behind us, Chris takes us through his planning for the upcoming growing season. He rotates a variety of vegetables on his ‘Oddball’ plot, and shows us how to get the best out of a small, but well placed patch of land.
Spring Sowing
Although Mid-winter has only just gone by, there is now definitely a hint of spring in the air, with the last few days of January been very mild the grass on the lawn has now noticeably started growing, snow drops are blooming and as I write this on January 28th, a pair of Robins are busy nest building in my Ivy on the shed with a blackbird already sitting on eggs in the leylandii hedge, you could be fooled to think spring is in full swing.
There is still plenty of opportunity though for cold weather at this time of year and for this reason I don’t sow anything until mid-February with the first batch of young plants going outside in mid-March.
I used to sow the first lettuce, spring and bulb onions and summer cabbage in January, but have found over the years that crops sown in February are cheaper to produce as less heat is needed, they grow more vigorously as there is stronger daylight and to be honest, they quickly catch up with those sown earlier so I see no benefit with January sowing in the midlands, but realise that may change with your location.
This year I am going to grow more early crops due to an exciting development – a new vegetable garden.
Combining Existing Plots
Affectionately named the ‘Oddball Bed’ this new garden will combine all the produce currently grown on three other small beds.
These either don’t fit into one of the four-year rotation blocks on the main garden, are early or late in their cropping cycles or are not grown in sufficient quantity and are therefore more of a nuisance on a large garden where they perhaps only take up part of a row. There will also be a few other thing I have not grown before, particularly for winter salads.
Located in the sunniest part of the garden. Which is ideal for early and winter crops The Oddball Bed faces south to its long side and is backed by a grass path and beech hedge.
It will be 8.25 metres long and 1.65 metres wide with each of the five rotation beds being 1.65 metres in length. The whole bed will be surrounded by lawn so access will not be an issue with the majority of works undertaken without ever having to tread on the bed.
It is currently part planted with the old strawberry beds which are to be removed, and part, a very weedy lawn which I treated last Autumn with Glyphosate to kill the very extensive colonisation of creeping buttercup.
As the diagram shows each of the beds will be cropped at least twice in each year and will allow me to grow a much broader range of salad crops than I currently do especially early and winter crops, whilst still maintaining at least a five-year gap between potatoes and carrots for nematode control and club root prevention in cabbage.
I will be growing conventionally for at least the first couple of years as I want to get the nutrition reserves improved in the soil, but after that for the type of crops to be grown I think there is some real scope for a no dig approach which will definitely help with the intensive cropping schedules.
Now that planning of the Oddball Bed is complete, putting it in place is the next step, one of the first jobs is to determine the soil pH and the relative amounts of available Phosphorous, Potassium, and Magnesium from which to base all future fertiliser requirements, for this I shall take some soil samples and send them off to a laboratory for analysis. Then as the weather improves the bed will be marked out and dug over ready for the first sowings of carrots in early March and plantings of salad modules.
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