Every year we try more things in the gardens, develop additional growing spaces,
and grow crops in different ways, with the aim of learning more and more about
growing vegetables, and there was a lot going on in 2022 to learn from.
And as always, things that happen that I didn’t expect offered a chance
to learn something new or gain a better understanding of a wide range if things.
In hindsight a lot of what I learned seems fairly obvious, but hadn’t really understood before,
or needed a better demonstration or simply another way of looking at it.
And as we are about to start a new growing season I think it is useful to look back at
a few of the wide range of things that I learned in the gardens last year.
I have been wanting to grow the Delicata variety of squash for a while, and I was
finally able to get some seeds for this variety from a supplier I don’t normally buy seeds from.
We planted 4 plants in the large bed of the Simple Garden, beside our usual Crown Prince variety,
but as the squash started to mature I noticed that they didn’t all look the same.
Only one of the plants seemed to be close to what I expected from this variety,
and the other three plants produced squash that were not as good, with different sizes,
shapes, and colours, and one had really hard skin.
It seems that whoever saved the seeds didn’t take proper precautions to keep the different squash
varieties far enough apart, and the seeds I bought were unfortunately cross pollinated,
and I was surprised that a professional seed supplier would make a mistake like this.
I have been using onions sets for years to grow most of the onions in the gardens,
partially because I thought it was easier, but also I have also not been impressed
with the small onions produced from seeds each season by the local community farm.
Last year I finally grew most of the onion from seeds, and sowed 15 different varieties
of onions as a big trial, hoping that a few of them would do well.
I was quite surprised that all of the varieties produced better than I had expected,
with some of them producing a huge crop, with a much wider range of shapes, sizes,
colours and tastes that are not available with onions sets.
I am not sure why the farm generally gets quite small onions, but I have been convinced that
growing onions from seeds is defiantly the way to go for most of our onion crops in the future.
Every season it is a challenge finding enough heated space for all of the young tomato plants
so that they can grow bigger in pots before they can be transplanted into the polytunels.
I have used electric soil warming cables in the past, but last year I tried using the warmth of
a compost pile to keep the plants warm enough so that they will continue to grow and to be
protected from the cold spring weather we can get. I made a long bin in one of the polytunnels,
filled it with a suitable mix of green and brown composting material,
set the plants on top, and then covered them with several layers of horticultural fleece
to further protect the tender plants from the really cold weather that was forecast.
But apparently the active decomposition process gave off problematic gasses that
were trapped in with the plants by the fleece cover, which seriously damaged
most of the leaves of all of the plants. Thankfully they continued to grow a few
weeks later, but this mistake almost killed all of our tomato plants.
We have had problems in the past with the germination of seeds that had been directly
sown into a layer of compost on the surface of no-dig beds in one of the polytunnels.
The compost kept drying and becoming hydrophobic,
which made it very difficult to water again, and led to inconsistent germination.
But I found that compressing the compost worked really well, either with a piece of wood,
or even by stepping on the beds. This ensured close contact between
the particles of compost and increased the capillary flow of water up through the soil,
like a sponge sitting in a shallow basin of water, and maintained better moisture around the seeds.
We used a lot of lower quality municipal compost in the gardens,
including adding a thick layer on the surface of the growing beds in the new polytunnel last year.
And after growing a full crop of tomatoes which struggled getting enough fertility towards
the end of the season, I dug a few trenches across the beds to see how much the compost
had integrated with the soil below. And I was disappointed to find that
there was still a very clear line between the soil and the compost,
even under the drip line stations where lots of water would have flowed down through the compost.
It seems that the compost needs a lot more time, and the action of a lot of
worms and other soil biology before there is the gradual transition between the soil and compost
that I have seen in the No-Dig garden outside. But that transition has taken years to establish.
We filled a lot of large grow bags with this same municipal compost,
which we amended in various different ways as a trial to see how this compost could be improved.
After growing a few potato plants in each bag, I was quite disappointed with
how low the yield was in general. It seems that the compost was not
mature enough to release enough nitrogen and other nutrients to keep the plants well fed.
The plants that produced the most had been regularly fed with a source of soluble nitrogen,
either top dressed with conventional fertiliser, or regular liquid feeding with dilute urine.
And the other forms of high nitrogen fertility that we had added at the beginning of the
season seems to have been absorbed into the biological processes within the compost itself,
rather than being made available to the plants.
In another large potato grow bag trial, we filled some of the grow bags with different
forms of carbon based growing medium that didn’t contain soil, and filled other bags with the local
topsoil that we amended in different ways. And in one set of bags I simply dug out the
topsoil from underneath the composting area, and the plants that grew in this soil produced
some of the biggest yields of the whole trial. After years of being covered with successive
batches of compost piles, this allowed the worms and flow of water to bringing down lots of organic
matter and nutrients from the compost above to really improve the fertility of the soil below.
I realised that this soil was a valuable resource, so we have been digging it out
for use to increase the depth of topsoil in other growing areas, then filling the hole
with lower quality soil from old piles, which will be amended in the same way over time.
Two years ago I grew bush beans for the first time in a polytunnel,
and found that the plants grew too big and heavy and fell over, which damaged the plants,
increased the amount of mildew and made harvesting a lot more difficult and time consuming.
I was looking for some kind of support structure,
and decided to try cutting up damaged security fencing panels, removing sections of wire to
make bigger holes and bending them into arches that could be placed over the beds.
This was a really easy and successful way to support the plants as they grew up through the
frame, and the easier harvesting and healthier plants made them a much more viable crop to grow.
We grew 10 different varieties of bush beans in the polytunnel last year,
with some being a lot more productive than others, and we also grew 9 different
varieties of climbing beans in the same tunnel. Even though I left a lot of the pods on the
climbing beans for seed saving and didn’t fully harvest the second flush of beans that appeared
later in the season, these climbing beans produced a lot more than the bush versions.
With about three times the yield, it makes a lot more sense to grow the climbing varieties,
at least in the polytunnel where they can easily climb
up a length of twine hung from the structure.
But in the outside gardens, perhaps the bush beans will be a better option, especially with
the higher winds in the area making any kind of vertical support system more difficult.
I have often noticed that not all of the flowers on the runner bean plants that we grow outside
each year developed into beans, and I wondered if this was a pollination issue, or something else.
Last year I grew a few runner bean plants in one of the polytunnels from overwintered
roots, and set out to try to get the highest number of beans as possible.
There were plenty of bumble bees pollinating the flowers and I also hand pollinated a lot of them
every day for a few weeks, and all the trusses developed all of the flowers into beans at first,
and then suddenly stopped, letting the flowers drop off without a bean forming.
The pollination hadn’t changed, but there might have been issues with water or too much heat,
but I think that the plants simply stopped producing more beans from the flowers after
a certain point, just as they always do outside, and I am not sure what I could do to change this.
We set up a trial of courgette or zucchini plants from which we harvested the fruit
at four different stages or sizes, from quite small to almost full grown marrows.
The plants that we harvested the smallest courgettes from grew the largest, which makes
sense as they had to continue to grow the vine to produce replacement flowers, and more courgettes,
which also meant producing additional leaves. But the overall yield was quite a bit lower,
despite harvesting twice as many courgettes, and the
plants grew so big that they got out of control. The plant that we had left the fruit to continue
to grow into large marrows produced significantly fewer fruit, but a much higher yield in total,
and the plant stayed quite small and compact, as it didn’t need to produce so many more leaves.
This makes sense, but the difference in the size of the plants was quite surprising.
I have always heavily pruned indeterminate tomato plants so that they only have a single stem,
which for many varieties I grow will continue to grow quite long,
requiring the plants to be strung up or dropped.
Last year I tried a few different methods of leaving one or more of the stronger side
shoots to develop, pruning the growing tips when they reached the top of the polytunnel,
and dropping or hanging the long single vines of other plants, all with different plant spacing.
I found that simply letting one of the stronger side shoots develop, and pruning the two leaders
on each plant when they reached the top of the Polytunnel, was the possibly the least amount
of work, especially as I didn’t need to grow as many plants or manage really long vines.
These double stem plants didn’t seem to produce as many tomatoes as the other methods,
but the tomatoes matured over a shorter time period, and the
plants could be removed earlier to make space for other overwintering crops.
We grew melons in one of the polytunnels for the first time last year, with quite
a few plants from 3 different varieties. It was great to be able to produce so many
tasty fruit, but the plants started to decay and die off before the season finished, starting from
one end of the row which was quite interesting. So I know that it is possible to grow delicious
fresh melons here in Ireland, at least under cover, but obviously something was wrong that
cut the season short, and it seems I have more to learn about how to successfully manage this crop.
Kris put in a lot of work last winter to dig over the ground and clear buried plastic from the site
of the new polytunnel, and to remove the root systems of the scutch or couch grass and bindweed.
And we decided to cover the ground with overlapping layers of cardboard,
before adding a deep layer of compost, to prevent the regrowth of any pieces of root
left in the ground from these pernicious weeds. I had hoped that the energy and nutrients
contained in the root fragments would be exhausted before the shoots were able to make it through the
layers of cardboard and up into the sunlight. But quite a few of them made it, and we had to
regularly pull out any of the green shoots that appeared to hopefully finally exhaust the roots,
but we probably still have some more work to do removing them next year.
Over the years, through trial and error, I have figured out different ways to deal with
some of the key pests that have been problematic in the vegetable gardens.
We have several strategies to reduce the population of slugs,
we use netting to prevent the caterpillar and bird damage to the brassica plants,
and have even figured out how to keep the rat population really low.
But we are still having problems with the carrot fly larvae, despite the use
of netting and setting up some trap crops, and need to be more careful with these strategies
in the future to ensure a clean crop. But last year we had a fair amount of
damage from cabbage root fly larvae on some of the brassica plants, which I hadn’t noticed in
previous seasons, so this is another pest we need to figure out the best ways to prevent.
There continued to be a lot going on in world outside of the gardens in 2022,
and so much to learn and keep up with, especially relating to the continuing global health crisis.
Living with someone who is high risk and immunocompromised has meant that I
continue to be cautions and put in the effort to try to understand how thing are changing,
and this has biased my view of so much that is going on.
And I am fascinated by the rapid evolution of the opinion and beliefs of so many people,
and how quickly ideas can spread and become widely adopted, especially when they allow
people to feel better about their own actions. And I have learned a lot observing the relatively
rapid adoption of some ideas, and rejection of other evidence that continues to build.
And this has helped me to better understand why some ideas about growing vegetables are so
persistent and easy to spread, and other ways of understanding what is going on or how to improve
our growing can be so much harder to accept. And all of this has given me better insights
about my own beliefs and ideas relating to producing our own food.
When I started really focus on producing videos for this YouTube channel, I wanted to get to the
point of producing 3 or 4 videos every month. But I found that difficult to achieve,
and for the last few years I have generally only upload a video every two weeks on average,
even though I had a lot of possible content, and I often went more than a month between uploads.
And this has really bothered me, and I have been struggling to find ways of getting into
better routines, and to get over some of the things that were preventing me
being able to upload more frequently. And earlier last autumn I decided to
set an overambitious schedule of producing a video every 5 days.
I didn’t think I would be able to sustain that level of content creation, but I surprised myself
by being able to upload 18 videos in a row on that schedule before taking a break for the holidays.
And with such a frequent schedule, the writing and editing is all gradually getting easier and
faster, which is great, and I have been able to work through a lot of the barriers that were
preventing me from producing as much as I wanted. And this really simple idea that practice
makes things easier is possibly the most significant thing that I learned in 2022.
So now I plan to continue with that much tighter schedule, even as the workload in
the gardens increases in the spring, but I might give myself an occasional break
from videos to catch up on other work. I hope that everyone who watches this
channel enjoys the extra content, and I expect that the infamous algorithm
will also like the more frequent uploads, which would be great and hopefully help
to sustain this project and the extra workload. If you would like to offer additional support to
this channel and to our continuing explorations, I have left links to my Patreon and PayPal
accounts below, but most importantly, I want to thank everyone for watching.