I’m often asked which of the 6 vegetable gardening methods that I've been trialing
is the best, and I find this a difficult question to answer, as so much depends on context,
the resources that are available, as well as the preferences and biases of the grower.
And I've also bene able to grow good quality vegetables in all of these gardens.
There are of course differences between these gardens, as well as different criteria for
determining what best would be.
One garden could easily produce the biggest yield of a particular crop, and possibly even
the largest individual plants.
But would the same garden also require the least amount of time?
And would they also be good quality, well shaped vegetables, that are free of pest damage
and perhaps most importantly taste the best?
If one garden produced a crop that was better than the other gardens in all 6 of these factors,
then perhaps I could say that this garden produced the best crop, at least for that
season.
And that seems to have been the case with one crop of main crop carrots that I grew
last season.
The first way I would evaluate a crop like this, and perhaps the easiest, is to compare
the yield or total weight of the carrots that were harvested, divided by the area of the
bed they were grown in.
For the variety of main crop carrots that I grow every year for storage, the Intensive
Garden produce the biggest yield this season, and the Extensive Garden was a very close
second.
The No-Dig Garden and the Simple Garden both produced a decent yield, but quite a bit less
than the other two.
The harvest from the Polytunnel Garden was unexpecredly poor, though I did sow these
seeds later in the summer.
The Polyculture Garden also had a poor crop of carrots, mainly because I failed to thin
the seedlings enough.
But it's also difficult to determine the area devoted to carrots within this mixed cropping,
so it is impossible to accurate compare the yield of one crop from this garden.
So, with this fairly comparison of yield, two gardens did really well, two gardens were
ok, and the yield from the last two were quite poor.
The size of the individual carrots is less important, but larger roots are generally
a sign that the carrot plant was strong and healthy.
And the purpose for growing this particular variety of carrot was to produce a large crop
of big roots for storage, providing that they still tasted good.
The average weight of the individual carrots harvested from the Extensive Garden was highest
of the lot, and the average weight from the Intensive Garden was about half that, even
though it had similar high yield, and this makes sense with the significantly higher
density of a lot more plants in the same size of growing space.
The carrots from the No-Dig Garden were the second largest, probably due to there being
more space per plant because of gaps in germination.
And the average size of the roots from the Simple Garden were about the same as in the
Intensive Garden, and the Polytunnel Garden produced significantly smaller roots
The carrots pulled up from the Polyculture Garden were also quite small, but this garden
also had the largest range or root sizes, with most of them too small to bother with.
Another factor to consider is the amount of work that it took to produce the crop of carrots
in each of the gardens.
By this metric, the Extensive Garden was by far the most efficient, with almost 25 kg
of carrots harvested for each hour of work that I put into the crop over the full season,
including the preparation of the bed.
The Polyculture Garden was the worst, with a lot of work but very little return, mainly
because I didn’t manage the thinning of the crop very well.
The other 4 gardens all produced roughly the same, with a good yield for the effort I put
in, through there was quite a difference between the gardens.
The Intensive Garden had a higher yield but with more work, especially with all the weeding
I had to do because I imported a lot of viable weed seeds in the compost I used.
The Polytunnel Garden on the other hand had a low yield but also a lot less work as there
was very little bed preparation and minimal weeding required.
The No-Dig Garden was second highest out of the six gardens, and would have been better
with higher yields.
And the Simple Garden was a lot less efficient than the others, mainly due to the time that
I put into sieving the soil of this carrot bed.
These first three factors are the only quantitative or measured comparisons that I can make based
on the records and measurements that I took, but there are 3 other more qualitative factors
or observations that I can use for comparison.
The first of these is what proportion of the harvested roots were forked, misshapen or
cracked.
While many of these carrots are still edible, they can be much more difficult and time consuming
to process, and produce more waste.
Interestingly I found that almost all of the carrots from the Polyculture and Polytunnel
Gardens to be long and straight, probably because the soil in these beds had been undisturbed
for quite a while before the tender carrot roots started to grow.
Three of the other gardens all had a number of forked or cracked roots mixed in with lots
of straight, well shaped roots.
But the No-Dig Garden definitely had with highest percentage of severely forked and
misshapen roots.
It seems that the thick layer of compost added to the surface of this garden hadn’t had
enough time to settle in, and quite a few of the delicate roots of the carrot seedling
were damaged or forked as a result.
Another factor was the amount of pest damage, and while I was quite successful at avoiding
slug damage when the plants were young, damage to the roots by carrot fly larvae was an issue
once again this season.
With the Extensive, Intensive and Simple Gardens the mesh that I used to cover the crop, worked
for the most part.
The protection in the No-Dig, Polytunnel and Polyculture Gardens wasn’t so successful,
mainly due to my failure in preventing any gaps at the edges of the mesh, or not putting
it on early enough, and they all had quite serious infestation of many of the roots.
An additional possible factor in the Polyculture Garden was that the mesh was removed much
more often to tend to and harvest the other crops that were growing in amongst the carrots,
and it was also off for longer during the time consuming weeding and thinning.
The idea that intercropped onions would keep the carrot fly away didn't seem to help at
all.
Unfortunately a significant number of carrots in the Simple Garden were eaten by rats before
I got around to harvesting them, so in the end this large crop didn't escape pest damage.
Perhaps the most important factor is the taste of the carrots from each of the gardens.
I'm quite impressed but the flavour of this variety in general, and how tasty the roots
can be even when they've grown quite big.
But in order to compare the carrots that were grown in each of the different gardens, I
decided to have a taste test when a lot of friends were over in our house for a big lunch.
I cut up parts of 3 good quality carrots from each of the gardens and placed the pieces
in a bowl without identifying which garden each bowl came from.
I then asked everybody to taste them all, and to mark each sample on a scale of 1 to
5, with 5 being the tastiest.
Most people were quite surprised that the same variety of carrot could taste so different
when they were grown in different gardens, some people had definite favourites, and others
seem to like them all despite their differences, or had trouble ranking them.
The results were quite interesting, with most people giving their highest preference to
the carrots from the Extensive and Polytunnel garden, with a few preferring the Polyculture
Garden, and two people liking the carrots from the No-Dig Garden the best.
The carrot samples from the Intensive and Simple Gardens were not selected as the favourite
by anyone.
In terms of the average taste score given to each garden, the Polytunnel Garden was
really good even though the carrots were quite small and badly affected by carrot root fly,
and the Extensive Garden was even better despite having the largest roots.
These two gardens have quite different different soil preparations and growing conditions,
but they are the only gardens that I have put in the effort over the years to remineralise
the soil based on detailed soil tests.
This positive result from both of these gardens could be seen as reinforcing the idea that
adequately remineralised soil produces the tastiest crops, or there could be other, completely
unrelated factors.
The carrots from the Simple Garden were definitely the least preferred, which is a shame as this
was the largest crop.
I'm not sure what’s really going on here, but it could be due to the fact that this
is the newest garden, and the soil fertility and organic matter hasn’t had a chance to
really improve enough yet.
I find it interesting that the Intensive and the Extensive Gardens both had large yields,
indicating that the plants grew quite well this season, but their taste preference was
significantly different.
And I am a bit surprised that the roots from the Polyculture Garden were ranked third,
despite their poor growing conditions.
I do need to remember that this was from a very small sampling of carrots, and there
could be significant variability in the flavour of carrots even from within one garden, which
could change the results quite a bit.
But on the basis of this one taste test, the carrots from the Extensive and the Polytunnel
Garden were defiantly considered tastiest, the ones from the Simple Garden were least
preferred, with the Intensive, No-Dig and Polyculture Gardens all in the middle.
Looking at all of the different factors, the Extensive Garden seems to have produced the
best crop of storage carrots this season.
The yield was almost the highest, as well as producing the largest carrots on average
as there was a lot of space for each root to grow into.
The crop in this garden definitely required the least amount of work, or I was able to
get the highest yield for my efforts.
There were a few forked roots, and some split or damaged roots, but there was also lots
of long, straight carrots, and there was minimal damage from carrot root fly or slugs.
But perhaps most importantly, they were considered the tastiest of the lot, which was quite surprising
given that they were so big.
So, it seems that this Extensive Garden produced the best crop of carrots, and apart from the
forking of some of the roots, this crop was as good as, if not better than, all the other
garden, with all of the factors that I was able to evaluate it with, and that’s really cool.
Of course one crop in one season doesn’t prove anything, and it will be interesting
to see if this garden can produce the best crop of carrots in the next few years.
But instead of seeing this as just a competition, I see this great crop of carrots from the
Extensive Garden as a new high bar, something to aim for, and it leads me to think about
what I can do to improve the crops from the other gardens.
The carrots from the Intensive Garden were probably second best and even though this
soil has been well worked with lots of compost added over the years, I suspect that taking
a soil test and amending any mineral deficiencies might really help, especially to improve the
flavour.
With the No-Dig Garden, it will be interesting to see how this crop does next year now that
the large addition of compost has had a chance to settle in.
The biggest issue in the Polyculture Garden is to thin the crop much more effectively,
and earlier, in order to give each plant more space, and hopefully this will dramatically
improve things.
It will be interesting to see how much better the crop in the Polytunnel garden does if
I manage to prevent any carrot root fly getting in, and the same can could be said for the
Polyculture and No-Dig Gardens.
And perhaps the soil in the Simple Garden needs a few more seasons to develop, especially
as I don’t add compost to this part of the crop rotation.
All of these things could produce better crops, closing the gap with the Extensive Garden,
and perhaps one of these gardens may produce a better overall crop next year.
But it's also possible that the Extensive Garden might just have the right combination
of techniques and methods that will consistently produce the best crop of carrots, at least
within the context of the climate, and the soil that I have to work with.
And it’s also possible that I might not be able to grow another crop of carrots that
is as good as the one that I grew last year, but I hope not, and I don’t really know
how good a crop of carrots can actually get.