There are a lot of fast growing crops that we can grow in the gardens and I
am learning about more possibilities of crops like Pak Choi and Japanese turnip
that can do well in our climate at various times of the year.
However, fitting these fast maturing plants into our garden plans can be a challenge if we
want a continual supply rather than just a glut. And in the context of the RED Gardens Project,
where it is easier to compare the different gardens if I plant the same crops at the
same time in all of them, this would regularly produce way too much at once.
And with so many other things to plan for and keep track of, I’ve not been great
at fitting in many of these fast growing crops into the gardens, especially during
the busy main part of the growing season. But I have been developing an approach for
organising the planting of a wide range of these crops, that is easier for me to plan,
and able to produce more of a consistent supply, if we can set aside an area for fitting it all in.
I find it a lot easier to plan a full garden if the majority of the vegetable crops are
longer-season main crops, particularly if there is only one crop per bed or row.
This makes garden management a lot easier,
with fewer issues to plan around, and fewer tasks to remember to do.
In our temperate maritime climate it is often possible to plant some fast growing crops before
the main summer crops, especially as our growing season starts relatively early in the spring.
And with mild winters, we can extend the growing season through the autumn and even overwinter,
which can result in two or three crops per bed over the full year,
and a lot more is possible with intercropping, but then that starts to get more complicated.
With this general planting strategy, we typically end up with a lot of salads type
crops in the spring, particularly from the polytunnels, fewer in the summer,
and possibly more in the autumn and overwinter if we get around to sowing them on time.
I have been trying to find ways of growing these crops that works better, or at least
is easier to fit into the way we manage the gardens, to spread out the harvesting of these
types of salad and fast growing root vegetables over a much longer part of the growing season.
I have been interested in how a lot of the market gardeners deal with all of this,
where they seem to sow a full bed with each of these high value crops every few weeks,
depending on the demand and the growing season. And with experience, it becomes easier to plan
the number of beds that can be allocated to each of these crops, taking into account when
different crops will mature throughout the year and how much can be sold.
This approach is not really possible at the smaller scale,
particularly with so much of the area that we manage dedicated to other explorations.
However, I do like the idea of dedicating beds or whole growing spaces to this type
of cropping, planting a wide variety of crops in the same bed all at once.
Three years ago I planted the five beds of the larger polytunnel with
long rows of fast-growing spring crops. The middle row in each bed contained the quickest
maturing crops, which were then replaced by the longer season tomatoes, pepper and eggplant or
aubergine plants, and the outer rows were left to intercrop beside these summer crops for a while.
While this method worked reasonably well, we ended up with way too much of some of the crops
to harvest all at once, and the summer crops struggled for a while with the competition.
The following year, I divided each bed along their length, in line with the posts of the
metal structure, creating 10 sections that I sowed with 10 different quick-growing crops.
I tried to leave a few weeks between sowing each bed, to ensure a succession
of crops for a more extended harvesting period. Unfortunately I started too late, and mistimed
some of the sowings, so we ended up having to pull out some of the crops before they were
ready in order to make space for the summer crops. But we were able to harvest a lot of high quality
salad type vegetables for the first part of the season, and the method seemed to work quite well.
Last year we repeated the process with a few of the beds, exploring sowing some crops in modules a
few weeks earlier, and transplanting them out into the bed at the same time as the direct sown crops.
This evened out the harvesting times of many of the crops in each bed,
so that it would be ready to clear for the following crop at about the same time.
But we still had to remove some of the crops before they were mature,
and weren’t able to harvest as much as we could from some of the others as I wanted
to prioritise getting the tomatoes and other summer crops into this polytunnel.
Last year, I experimented with a similar approach for grow quick-maturing crops
in a few of the outside gardens. I reserved two beds in each of the
gardens, and sowed 8 different crops in each bed, repeating the sowing on
a regular basis throughout the growing season. The first bed was sown quite early in the spring
and covered with a moveable cold frame, with some of the crops getting a head start in modules.
The second bed was sown about 5 weeks later with the same range of crops, and then 4 or 5 weeks
after that, most of the plants in the first bed were finished, so this bed was cleared,
a bit more fertility was added, and the next batch of 8 crops were transplanted or sown.
We continued this process for the rest of the year, alternating between the two beds,
and we tried to time the next batch when the previous batch was mostly finished.
This was not so straightforward, as the plants took a shorter amount of
time to mature in the summer, and longer times to mature in the spring and autumn.
We managed to get 8 batches of these crops planted, 4 in each of the beds,
with the last batches overwintering under the cold frames again for harvesting earlier this spring.
Not all of the crops did well at the different times of the year, with some pest issues,
some plants struggling in the warmth of the summer and others struggling to grow over winter.
But, most of the time there was something to harvest, and at a scale appropriate for a family.
However, we found that growing these small batches of fast-growing crops across a few
gardens was time-consuming, at least within the context of this project,
so I decided not to grow these quick rotation crops in the family scale gardens this year.
Instead, we plan to consolidate these quick
growing crops into a new growing space this season.
This year, we are once again growing fast-maturing spring crops in four
of the beds of the larger polytunnel, with a new bed being filled every 2 or 3 weeks, and
hopefully planning the timing so that these spring crops are finished in time for the summer crops.
We have been adjusting the length of bed that each crop takes up,
with more space for popular crops like lettuce and spinach and less space to crops like turnip
that tend to produce a lot more than we need. We are also limiting the amount of space given
to carrots, as they may not be ready in time, but we sowed a few varieties, hoping that at
least one of them will produce a reasonable crop before the bed needs to be cleared.
I think this is a really interesting benefit of an approach like this,
to be able to use smaller sections of the beds to try things that might not work.
We are also trying different varieties for a few of the crops,
exploring the effect of different plant spacing, and testing the difference between direct sown
and transplanted versions of other crops. We have already harvested a fair amount,
mainly from the first two beds, but even the third bed has some crops reaching harvestable stage.
But it looks like we might be pulling out a few of the crops,
and even one full bed again, as there might not be enough time to produce anything before
we will want to get the summer crops into this protected growing space.
I always struggle with finding a balance between wanting to harvest lots of spring and early summer
crops from the polytunnel, and getting the main crops into the same space early enough.
To address this, and to be able to grow a more consistent supply of these salad type
crops through the summer and autumn, we're working to establish a dedicated growing
area for quick-rotation crops between the two larger polytunnels of the Black Plot.
This area use to be rough ground, with a fair amount of scutch grass and bindweed,
but it has been covered it with two layers of ground cover fabric for a year.
And now that the ground is cleared of almost all of the perennial weeds,
we are going to establish four long beds in this partially
sheltered space dedicated to growing a continual supply of fast growing crops.
As with any new growing space, we're a bit behind schedule, and there will be a gap in
harvests while we establish the new beds. But once the four beds are ready,
the timing between planting each of the beds will depend on the time of year.
In late spring and summer, I think that 2 weeks between sowing each bed will give enough time
for most of the crops to be cleared from the first bed before sowing it again.
In the autumn the period between sowings will lengthen as the growth slows down,
and it will be interesting to see what happens overwinter with crop covers to
protect the plants from the harsher weather. And we also plan to continue using a similar
planting strategy in one of the polytunnels from autumn through to spring, growing similar crops
both outside and under cover, and it will be interesting to see how they all compare.
This approach shares similarities with the methods used by many market gardeners,
but we are work with a smaller scale and fewer beds, and planting many crops in the same bed.
And there will still be a fairly quick turnover of crops, with each bed being planted 4 or 5 times
in a year, with up to 20 sowings in this new dedicated growing space, in addition
to the beds that are going to be sown in the polytunnel from the autumn through to the spring.
This will produce a lot of salad and fast growing root crops that have been missing
from our gardens for a lot of the year. And with the regular resowing of the same
types of crops it will offer a lot of opportunities to explore and learn.
It will be great to get a lot more experience about what crops will grow well at different
times of the year, and what ones are more popular, and this will change the amount
of space in the bed, if any, that is set aside for each crop within each planting.
This regular planting of smaller batches also offer a great opportunity to try different
varieties of crops, to see which ones do better at different times of the year,
and to find ones that grow fast enough to include in this type of quick rotation.
And it will be great to gain a better understanding of how the density of sowing
would depend on the expected size of harvest, and the length of time before harvesting,
which will of course change with the seasons. These are all things that I have been slowly
gained a better understanding of over the past few years.
And growing multiple beds full of quick rotation crops in this way, both under cover of the
polytunnel and in the new dedicated growing area, will definitely speed up this learning curve.
And we will be able to produce a much more continual supply of these fast growing crops,
that have been difficult to fit into the other gardens in the past.