One of the great things about gardening is there's always more to learn, especially if
you have a crazy project like I have, with 7 family scale gardens each following a different
methods, and a much larger Black Plot, that has so much more potential.
Every season offers new opportunities for learning, and last year was no different.
Looking back at the season, I think that some of the things that I learned, or perhaps relearned,
were quite general, and perhaps bit obvious, whereas other things were fairly particular
insights tat offered me a greater understanding about what was going on.
And I think reviewing an eclectic mix of a range of these things offers an interesting
insight into what happened during the season.
This past year I have had a total of 1800 square meters of space to potentially grow
in, which is almost a half an acre.
So, it's not surprising that this ended up being way too much, and I didn’t grow anything
in more than half of the available space, with most of the 1000 square meter area of
the Black Plot remaining uncultivated.
When I first took on this larger space a number of years ago, I had intended to get the help
of interns, or wwoofers, or other volunteers to help with the workload, but this past season
I decided to go it alone, for a variety of personal reasons, and so I just didn’t manage
to get the work done.
So, this coming season, I need to either get more help, or put in a lot more work, or reduce
the amount of space I'm trying to grow in, or find ways to more efficiently manage the
space that I do have.
The most prominent weather event of the season was the unusually long dry period, with almost
no rain in the 8 weeks between the end of May and the last week of July.
In Ireland we are generally not prepared for extended periods without rain, especially
when associated with a heat wave, and problems with the water supply on my site made it even
worse.
Getting enough water to all the plants absorbed way too much time and effort, which caused
me to cut back on the amount of land I was trying to cultivate, and I also dropped a
lot of my planting plans for later in the season.
If I had been better prepared, or had made the effort to quickly set up better infrastructure,
the impact would have been much less, and I could have grown a lot more vegetables in
what otherwise woful have been very good growing season.
I dug a few test holes during the drought and found that the soil was really dry to
the full depth of the plant roots, but patches of bare soil without plants seemed to have
retained a lot more soil moisture.
A bit of research confirmed that in many cases the amount of water sucked out of the soil
and transpired into the air by the plants themselves often greatly exceeds the amount
that is evaporated from the surface of the soil.
This means that mulching the surface of soil in the garden to conserve water will only
help so much, and that perhaps the only options for conserving water deeper in the soil is
to grow fewer plants.
Digging those exploration holes, and some research I did into potential evapotranspiration
rates made me realise that I should have been watering a lot more than I did.
A common approach across many of the gardens is to try to be more productive, to be able
to harvest more from a given area, generally by taking a more intensive approach and planting
plants closer together.
But this can be problematic if the plants can’t get the resources that they need,
including enough fertility, sunlight and most importantly this season, a consistent supply
of water.
The Extensive garden takes a different approach, with a lot more space being given to each
plant, and this definitely paid off in this stressful season, with some significantly
better crops from this garden, especially the beetroot and cauliflower.
The extra space allowed the individual plants to grow much bigger, and I was surprised how
much tastier the beetroot and cauliflower from this garden was, compared to the other
gardens, and I think the extra space made all the difference when the soil moisture
was scarce.
I had big plans for growing a succession of crops in my relatively new polytunnel in the
Black Plot last year, including lots of tomatoes, cucumbers and other heat loving plants.
But by late spring I realised that I was facing a lot of issues in this high value growing
space, including poor soil fertility, not enough compost, a few problematic diseases
and not enough time to look after everything adequately.
So I made the really radical decision to abandon my plans and all the plants that were ready
to transplant, to clear out the weeds, to properly remineralise the soil, and then to
sow a green manure and start again next season.
I hadn’t done enough work to properly establish the soil in this polytunnel when I set it
up, and restarting seemed a better approach than trying to catch up, which ended up being
a really good call with the drought and water supply issues later in the season, and the
extreme heat event that happened later on.
I used to think that the only real threat to a polytunnel a was high winds, and I've
seen the impact and potential destruction of this first hand.
What I hadn't considered is that the plastic of a polytunnel is also easily damaged by
fire, which may be a more common threat in some of the drier parts of the world, but
it’s not here in damp Ireland.
But last autumn, a raging fire close to my new polytunnel caused huge sections of the
plastic to melt, severely damaging the structural integrity of the polytunnel.
I ended up having to replace the entire sheet of plastic, as I knew it would not stand up
to the winter storms, but after all this work this polytunnel is now in much better state
for the future.
A few years ago I had built a simple and robust compost sieve, but this past season I realised
just how useful and adaptable it can be.
I found that by adjusting the slope on it, it became a lot more useful in different situations
and for sieving compost with different qualities.
I also found that it was really useful in clearing new ground, especially in really
rough sites with lots of perennial weeds, and other soil debris.
It was a lot of work to dig out and sieve all of the weed roots and stones, and to break
up all the clumps, but it left behind a lovely loose soil that will be so much easier to
manage for many years to come.
I used to mainly grow lettuce and other salad greens as larger widely spaced plants, and
then harvested the whole mature plant or individual leaves.
But this year I tried a few other methods I’ve seen used by market gardeners, and
found them to be much easier, more productive and with a faster crop.
I was quite surprised that a bed of greens grown in the polytunnel this past spring could
produce between 3 and 5 kg of really nice salad leaves per square meter of bed, with
harvesting lasting over many weeks.
I used to think that greens like this were a low yielding, or infill, or secondary crop,
but now I see that they can be an easy and highly productive crop, which should probably
be a bigger focus of what I grow and what we eat.
With the extended drought, work pressures and my frustration with the season, most of
the gardens produced a lot less than they could have, but Simple Garden produced the
best results out of all of them.
Although the yield was less than it was the previous season, I still have a load of squash,
potatoes, carrots, and onions from this garden to see me through the winter, while there's
very little left to eat from the other gardens.
Apart from a lot of watering, these four main crops only needed a little bit of care during
the main part of the season, when I had the least amount of time.
This made this garden much more resilient, in my opinion, while the other gardens really
faltered as I didn’t have the time or focus to keep going with the production that I had
planned, and the management and timely harvest of the greater diversity of crops.
In contrast to the Simple Garden, the Polyculture garden was perhaps the least successful this
season, mainly because I failed to focus enough time, to thin and manage the dense polyculture
sowings.
The competition between too many young plants for space, fertility and soil moisture, was
really compounded by the dry conditions, and excessive heat, and I just didn’t get enough
water into the beds.
The theory and possibility of abundance associated with this polycrop method, with plants finding
different niches within the soil, the intercropping and the potential benefits of companion planting,
was overrun by resource scarcity, and lack of focus on my part, making this garden a
lot less resilient.
Most of the crops yielded worse than they did in the other gardens, and even worse than
they did the previous season, except for the overwintering garlic and onions, which were
widely spaced and well established and mature before the competition from the intercropping
of carrots and parsnip would have had any impact during the drought.
When I originally established the locations of these family scale gardens, I set them
out alphabetically, as I couldn't think of another reason for organising them.
A few years later I moved the Polyculture garden to a new space at the other end, and
replaced with a Perennial garden, when I realised that the polyculture method required much
more attentions and daily focus and it needed to be closer to the entrance path so that
I would pass it more frequently.
This year I realised that the No-Dig garden would also have benefited from being further
down the slope and much closer to the road, or rather I would have benefited from not
having to haul so much compost the longer distance up the hill.
Since I have switched this garden to following Charles Dowding’s method of mulching with
a thick layer of compost, getting the 60-80 wheelbarrow loads of imported compost up to
the gardens was by far the biggest and hardest task of the season.
For several years now I've had issues with carrot fly in my carrots, with their burrowing
larvae severally damaging and stunting many of my crops.
I’ve tried using garlic sprays, low barriers, interplanting with onions, and a variety of
different covers, and now won’t grow them unless they're completely covered for the
whole season with high quality, and reasonably expensive mesh.
But even then, several of my carrot crops had been badly affected, and a few carrot
flies seem to have been able to get into all of the crops.
It seems that these tiny flies are able to find any small hole in the mesh, or to get
in under the edge, and if they get into the crop early enough, they can multiply fast
enough to be able to damage almost every carrot in the batch.
I had heard about the possibility of growing microgreens from a few market gardens that
I’ve learned a lot from, but I thought that they were only useful to grow if you had access
to high value urban markets, or sold directly to high end restaurants.
I was also a bit wary about the amount of growing medium needed and the cost of the
seed, and felt that it was perhaps a bit of a waste to get so little out of the precious
seeds.
But I tried growing a few batches and realised that harvesting baby plants at a microgreen
or mini-leaf stage can produce a decent yield of a high value crop in very little time.
I ended up increasing my production to partially make up for the gap in availability of other
crops from the gardens, when I realised that microgreens would make a really useful crop
to grow to help fill the hunger gap, even for people growing only for themselves.
One of the benefits of keeping detailed records of everything harvested, and all of the time
I spend managing each of the family scale gardens, is that I can get broad generalised
data out of all the details.
One calculation that I made last year was the gardens in 2017, which was a reasonable
year for growing, produced an average of about 5 kg of mixed vegetables per square meter
of garden, or 10 kg per square meter in the shelter of the polytunnel.
I was also able to calculate that each of the gardens took one hour of work over the
entire season to produce 5 kg of vegetables, with surprisingly little variation between
the gardens, except for the Simple Garden which was much more time efficient.
I think that the calculations of 5 kg/h and 5 kg/m2 and the related 1 hour/m2 are all
useful metrics or general rules of thumb, and I have found myself using them quite regularly ever since.
Looking back at the season it’s easy to blame a number of different events or factors
for all the things that didn’t go so well, but I think a lot of it comes down to how
well I was able to keep up with the workload.
Other growers may be able to focus a lot better, but I found that my work output definitely
declined at key times during the year, and the gardens suffered as a result.
It seems that when I become demoralised with what's going on, I tend to abandon crops,
or gardens, or fail to keep up with all the work that needs to be done.
This is perhaps a common and natural response, but I've come to realise that my morale is
perhaps the most valuable resource in the gardens, and I need to find ways of being
better able to manage it in the future.
Although it's not related specifically to the gardens, another key thing that I learned
last year was that building a YouTube audience and raising ongoing funding through Patreon
can be difficult.
I'm really delighted with the response that this YouTube channel has had so far, and want
to thank all those people who have watched, and shared, liked and subscribed, and commented
on all the videos that I’ve uploaded.
And I especially that smaller group of people who have taken that extra step to support
this project, by contributing to my Patreon page.
Looking back at the growth rate of views and pledges, I had hoped there would be much more
steady growth, so that I could more quickly reach a point where this project could start
paying for itself.
But sometimes things take longer to develop and grow, and I realise that I need to pay
more attention to producing more videos on a regular basis.
That's perhaps my biggest goal for this coming season, and I hope you'll continue watch the
videos that I do upload, and thanks so much for watching this one, right through to the very end.