It feels like spring is just around the corner,
or at least it does here in Ireland with the relatively mild winters we get.
And we have already started sowing spring crops as well as the slower growing summer crops,
and finalising plans for this season. Every year I try to grow more,
and to explore more, and to develop additional growing spaces, while trying to maintain and
hopefully improve the existing gardens and other developed parts of this RED Gardens Project.
Some years I am more successful at that than others.
This season, with the help of Kris, most of the existing growing spaces are in great shape
already, and we have a plans for significant new developments, as well as strategies for refining
and progressing all of the existing gardens. And assuming we aren’t taking on more than
we can manage, it is going to be a busy and interesting season of exploration.
We will continue to grow a wide range of vegetables in each of the family scale gardens,
which is the most established part of this project, including the Extensive Garden,
which is one of the original gardens that I started with all those years ago.
The method that I am following for this 100m2 growing space is focused on improving
the nutritional quality of the vegetables, by giving all of the plants lots of space,
and a lot of focus on providing them with balanced and abundant fertility.
And although I have been managing this garden for quite a few years, I was finally planning
to try out a version of the recommended fertility that I though was more suitable to this context.
But, some additional information has me questioning that strategy, which has prompted a
last minute change, and we are going to include a trial of 4 different primary sources of fertility,
integrated into a variation of the usual planting plan that I have been following for this garden.
This trial will complicate the management and record keeping for this garden quite a bit,
but hopefully it will provide some insights into which one of
these forms of nitrogen fertiliser is a better one to use, at least in terms of
how it benefits the crops, or if there is any significant difference between them.
The Intensive Garden is right beside the Extensive Garden, and is also one of the original gardens,
but follows a very different focus of trying to grow as much as we can within this limited space.
A key focus this year with these intensively cultivated fixed beds is to increase the use
of the moveable cold frames I built last year, for extending the cropping into the shoulder seasons,
as well as a focus on getting better at growing a succession of the quick rotation crops.
I have found it difficult to integrate these relatively fast growing crops into planting
plans for the past few years, especially making sure these is space for successionally sowing
these crops every few weeks, and I think the plans for this season will work much better.
The No-Dig Garden is right beside the Intensive double dug Garden
which its radically different approach. This no-dig garden was problematic for
quite a few years, but we recently made a shift to a different no-dig method,
and it seems that the soil is starting to settle into greater productivity.
This season we are shifting the layout and planting plans for this garden to more closely
match that of the Intensive Garden so that these two gardens can be more directly comparable.
Now that we seem to have finally gotten rid of a few problematic weeds,
including some persisting patches of scutch grass, it will be interesting to
see how well this no-dig garden method compares to its double dug neighbour.
I think the Polyculture Garden is going to be the garden with the most learning possibilities
this year, and will likely continue to be the garden with the most failures,
but that is to be expected with so many variables and options,
combined with a lack of experience of others that I can build on.
This clustered approach to integrating a diverse range of crops that we started using
last year, was a definite improvement over the more random plantings of previous years.
We have also developed the soil quite a bit more, but still need to manage the fertility
a lot better in order to reduce competition and possible stress within these densely planted beds.
It will be really interesting to see how well the garden produces,
and the diversity of interactions and conditions that are created, as well as
the increased possibilities of trying a lot of different things within the numerous clusters.
The Simple Garden, is right beside the Polyculture Garden,
and is at the opposite ends of the spectrum, being specifically designed to reduce the amount of work
and attention that it needs over the full year, while still harvesting a lot of food out of it.
There are a few questions that I am hoping to answer this season, especially relating
to the problematic carrot crops that I have been harvesting in the past few years.
And it will be interesting to see if the squash and potato crops continue to improve, but the
biggest change this season is the large trial of numerous different varieties of onions grown from
seed, replacing the usual crop of onions in previous years grown from one variety of sets.
The Polytunnel Garden is the most productive out of all of the family sized gardens,
with the simple strategy of using a big sheet of plastic covering a
steel frame to create a much more productive growing microclimate.
It does require a lot more work and attention, and the focus this year
will be on improving the productivity of key crops, while making their management easier.
This garden usually produces significant amount of vegetables in the spring, summer and autumn,
but in the past few years I haven’t been great at focussing on the overwinter
and early spring crops that are possible in a space like this.
But the plan this season is to keep up with the plantings and management right through
the entire year, to further improve the yield and success of this garden.
There is a 7th family scale garden, the Perennial Garden, which I rarely talk about because it
has essentially failed, or I have failed to adequately manage it, and it has become overgrown
with scutch grass and other persistent weeds. So this year I am going to transplant many of the
fruit bushes, globe artichokes, rhubarb and other perennial plants to more appropriate locations,
and then edge and cover the full garden for at least a year to eliminate the weeds.
My plan for the next year is to start to use this growing space to explore methods of managing a
garden with the bare minimum of external inputs, where all of the fertility and soil building is
done through green manures and cover crops, but we need to get rid of the weeds first.
But while this area is covered, I plan to use the space for a large pot trial, exploring different
amendments, growing medium and fertility managing methods, in a fairly controlled exploration.
I invested in a lot of very large plastic grow bags, which will be filled with soil,
compost and different types of amendments, and for the first part of the season they
will be growing the same variety of potatoes. These heavy bags will weight down the ground
cover fabric on this garden, and hopefully start to provide me with some answers about the relative
value of using different composts, biochar, concentrated amendments and soil conditioners,
as well as the possibility of non-soil based growing medium.
In addition to the dedicated gardens,
which are part of a larger allotments area for the community,
we have access to a few other growing spaces and run a couple of side projects in this area.
We will be continuing with the One-Rule Community Composting Facility, recycling material from the
gardens and the biodegradable wastes from quite a few households in the community.
This works quite well and provides quite a bit of the fertility for the gardens,
but there are a few things that I want to adjust to make it easier to manage,
and to continue to increase the throughput. We have also started to build a covered
propagation space that will be hopefully heated by a large compost pile,
following on from my successful compost heated shower installation last summer.
This will reduce the need for grow lights inside the house, and the dependence on an electric soil
warming cable to provide better growing conditions for seedlings in the spring
and especially for the young heat loving plants such as tomatoes.
We also have access to two spaces of ground beside the Polytunnel Garden.
The area on one side has been dug and cleared of weeds and debris, and part of it is currently
occupied with overwintered leek and beetroot plants that we are growing for seed saving.
The rest of this long bed will be reestablished as a strawberry patch on one side,
and space for a large trial of quite a few different varieties of beetroot on the other.
The space to the west of this polytunnel is very overgrown with grasses and a few
pernicious weeds, which is going to take time and effort to clear fully.
The plans, if we have time, is to add a lot of finished compost or to sheet compost with
a lot of biomass, cover the whole area with ground cover fabric, and to plant squash over all of it,
similar to what we have done in the Simple Garden. In addition to getting a yield out of the space
while it is being cleared, I have seeds of a lot of different varieties of squash and pumpkins
and this is one of the two semi-sheltered spaces that I want to do a variety trial in.
So there is a fair amount going on in this one area, mostly focused on smaller scale growing,
but we are also developing a larger growing space on the other side of
the road, which I call the Black Plot. This space has a lot of possibilities, but of
the past few years I have only been managing and growing in the one larger polytunnel, focusing on
a large crop of tomatoes, with a range of other spring and warm season crops fit in around them.
This year the plan is to grow succession of spring and early crops in this polytunnel,
followed by a lot of cucumbers, beans, and other vigorous plants that benefit from the
increased warmth and more sheltered microclimate,
including sweetcorn and melons which I don’t have a lot of experience in growing.
The large crop of tomatoes, as well as the closely related aubergines or eggplant and the peppers,
will be grown in a new polytunnel of the same size, that we put up last autumn,
with Kris putting in a lot of work over the winter to clear and established the beds,
and to cover them with a deep mulch of compost. Rather than planting these beds with spring
crops, we decided to keep them empty for the next few months,
keeping them covered with ground cover fabric, to make sure any remaining weeds don’t regrow.
This will allow us to transplant the warm season crops into the ground much
earlier than we have been able to in the past,
and it will be interesting to see how this affects their growth and their yield.
The three central beds will be planted with a range of varieties of tomatoes, and we will
be trying out and comparing several different methods of pruning and supporting these plants.
The two side beds will be growing a range of different varieties of aubergines and peppers,
to see which ones are more suitable to this context, and which ones we like to eat.
Apart from the two fully established polytunnels, there is a lot of other space
that we can grown on in this area, but which first needs to be cleared or heavily mulched,
and all of this depends on the amount of time and capacity that we have.
In the past few years, developing and managing these larger spaces of the Black Plot had a
lower priority for me and I preferred to spend my time on managing the family scale gardens,
as I haven’t felt that I’ve had the capacity to to be able to deal with these larger spaces.
But with everything else largely under control, and feeling enthusiastic about the season,
we have already started working to bring new areas into production.
We have covered the space in between the two polytunnels with ground cover fabric,
held down with more of the large grow bags. The plan is to convert the space between
the two polytunnels into a series of no-dig beds for quick rotation crops, but I am not sure that
we are going to be able to do that this season. For the time being it will be the site of another
pot trial, with another set of large grow bags filled with leftover municipal compost,
to hold down the ground cover fabric. We are planning to experiment with
adding different types of concentrated amendments, fertilisers and liquid feed, in order to see which
ones are more effective at boosting the growth potential of this fairly low quality bulk compost.
For the first part of the season we will be using these bags to grow early seed potatoes
that are leftover from the other gardens, some of which we will start inside the polytunnel.
After the potatoes are harvested we might empty the grow bags and use the compost in the bags to
establish the no-dig beds in the space between the two polytunnels, or we might decide to continue
to grow other vegetables in these grow bags, with the same material, to continue to explore
the possibilities of using these large moveable containers as part of a larger growing operation.
On the other side of the new polytunnel is a large area that
we hope to get established for crops this season.
On one part of this space, closest to the polytunnel, we are planning to grow the
other half of the squash variety trial, using sheet composting and ground cover fabric to
see what squash varieties produce well in this climate, while clearing the ground for next year.
In the other half of this space we are going to set up a proper trial of different methods of
establishing and managing a no-dig growing space. I have wanted to do this for a few years but
finally feel we have the capacity and have collected enough of the different
mulch materials to adequately prepare 5 sections with different no-dig methods.
The plan is to establish 4 or 5 long beds across all five methods,
which will be planted with a range of crops later in the season, and for the next few years
In addition to hopefully growing a lot of high quality vegetables,
this side by side comparison should provide us with a much better understanding of the
benefits and issues of this range of different no-dig approaches, at least in this context.
So, that is a lot of different stuff that we are planning to do this year.
I usually don’t make videos about what I am planning to do in the different parts of this
RED Gardens Project, preferring to focus on the things that I’ve already done and experienced.
But with so much more going on this season, I though it would be useful to give an overview
of all the key parts that we will be managing this year, or are at least planning to manage.
It may turn out to be too much for this season, and something will likely drop,
especially if I am also going to try to continue to make videos about it all.
I hope to be able to upload more videos this year than I have been able to in the past,
as there is so much more going on. But there is a natural conflict within
this project, between focusing on growing and exploring more, and taking the time to properly
document everything and to make videos about it all to share with anyone who is interested.
Hopefully I will be able to find an appropriate
balance between those two critical aspects of this project this year,
and that I won’t be too distracted by the broader events in this crazy world that we live in.