- How you can make more of your space.
It's the middle of May
and we're busy planting, planting, planting,
but also we've planted a lot within the last two months.
And here's some examples,
and to show you how they all fit together.
So, this is potatoes.
It's a 1.5 metre, five foot bed,
and because potatoes take a while to get going,
I've done what's called a catch crop
of turnips between them.
And we're just harvesting the last turnips now.
They're multisown, so that's a final harvest,
and then the potatoes will take over and use all that space.
So four potatoes across each row.
Last year in that amount of space,
we got 13 kilos of potatoes, to give you an idea.
And likewise the spinach won't be here for that much longer.
Spinach tends to flower by early June
and by then the potatoes also will be doing this
so you can space things close
when you have an idea of how plants are going to develop.
Spacing is related to timing
and how plants subsequently grow,
and it's same story here with catch crop
of radish between carrots.
So we got a nice growth of radish,
and you see they're growing quite close to the carrots.
And we actually had a failure of the first carrots.
Well, not a total failure,
but you can see they're pretty patchy germinations.
It's been very difficult spring for carrots
and a lot of slugs eating them and things,
so we did a second sowing of carrots there.
And between the two sowings of carrots,
we're going to have a decent stand I reckon.
Here, this is an example of a problem.
I lost three cabbages and I'm still not too sure why,
and it's related I think to this variety being not good.
It's a not good seed, but there's also aphids
and all sorts of things going wrong.
I'll just mention that in passing.
Then we've got nice example of using multisowing
to increase your amount you can fit in,
because when you multisow,
that means you're putting in
quite a few little seedlings together.
They're using space.
You know, a little seedling, if that was one or two onions,
there'd be loads of onion space for quite a long time,
but they fill it out quite quickly,
like this beet root for example, also multisown.
So that was multisown late February.
We're now 10th of May,
so that's two and a half months of growing
and it won't be long before we have beet root there.
And the thing about the multisowing
is it's like a companionship,
so it's a kind of companion planting,
and that in a way is what companion planting is.
It's not about what vegetable likes what other vegetables.
It's more about proximity and using that,
being together to good effect.
You know, plants like, especially seedlings,
like being with their mates together.
Here you can see these beautiful lettuce,
which actually are not spaced as close as I could have,
and there's a reason for that.
We're picking the outer leaves of these lettuce
and that means after a picking, after each picking,
there's a bit more room.
And in about a month,
you can just do it with your finger,
I'll use my finger like that to draw out a drill
and I can drop carrot seeds in there.
Carrots come up and germinate
while the lettuce are still cropping for another month,
so that's another way of making more space,
by overlapping different plantings.
It works really well with no dig because with no dig,
you're not messing around the soil any time.
It's ready to receive new season plants at any time.
You can see how few weeds there are here.
We hardly are weeding to achieve this
once you've got your soil clean.
Check out my other videos for details about that.
And then this, this is a quite space-hungry planting.
I haven't really worked out with this one yet,
actually how to grow anything between it.
It won't be long though
before these sweet corn fill out this space.
You know, this mid-May now, they're really going to grow fast.
But I give them a good foot,
30 centimetres between each run.
This is actually baby corn,
so maybe I've given them a little bit more
'cause I hope they'll crop for longer.
We'll see.
And the badger won't be interested to eat these.
Here with the garlic, what I like to do
is to do it in rows across a bed.
So as well as the actual space between plants,
it's how you line them up,
and that means that you can, again,
we can sow or plant between.
I wonder how many you'd know this.
I hardly know it myself. It's a experiment.
I've planted cumin between the garlic.
And I've done it once before and managed to get,
you get the growth of the leaf in year one.
It's biennial, and then in year two it goes to seed
and that's the cumin seed for spice.
And I've brought these out of the greenhouse to show you,
to give you an idea.
So this is multisown chard.
This actually was two, I put two seeds in a cell.
And chard, like beet root, you get loads,
more than one from one seed.
So you've got options there.
If I was going to grow big chard leaves,
I'd thin them down to two plants
by taking out the plants I don't want until you've got two,
and then put that in.
Or you could leave more in there and have baby chard
say for salad leaves more and put them in more closely.
And they, you could, you can do this so easily.
Here's a sort of not so red chard,
so I'll take that one out.
So this is an example of putting in a chard.
I'd normally use my divot, but putting it in like that,
you know, between the garlic.
There were garlic roots there as I was doing that,
but that's fine.
So the point being that this garlic
is not going to be here for much longer.
It's five weeks maybe, especially if it gets some rust.
And then we'll harvest that,
and then you've already got your new planting developing
and using that space,
which has been freed up by the garlic harvest.
So it's precious.
You know, this time of year, the space in May,
full, like, we want to be packing it in as much as possible.
This little bed here I use as an example where
I'm looking to again use every bit of room all the time.
There's three cauliflowers there.
They've got plenty of room to grow on the end.
The carrots will get a little bit crowded,
but that's okay, beet root.
Just again, these need picking.
We're picking them tomorrow.
Lettuce and turnips.
You can see again multisown turnips there,
multisown onions, spinach needs picking,
and then peas on the end.
And again, the idea of the spinach is this will be gone
say within four weeks, so then that's when the peas
will be really going for it and motoring
and can make full use of that.
Here we've got more onion examples.
So different types of on onions.
You've got bulb onions.
So these will swell up to make four say medium size
and assuming they all go all right.
I never take anything for granted,
but we can have a lot of onions here at that spacing.
And for spring onions, we do it slightly differently.
I actually put in more than four.
And here for example,
you can see there's still six or seven there.
And what we've been doing is taking out the bigger ones
and harvesting them for spring onion.
Beautiful.
You know this is one of my favourite foods
at this time of year.
I get loads of spring onions
from a small area doing it like this.
They've been in there since September.
And you can use a similar method
over a longer term for leeks.
So that's multisown leeks, sown, oh, 12th of,
I'm reading it, 12th of April.
So that's only four weeks ago and they're looking good.
What we'll need to do with these
is actually keep them going by potting them
and putting them into a pot of compost to keep them going
'cause these are going to go in after potatoes.
So sometimes with your transplants,
you're working out when the space is going to be ready for them
that you can pop them in.
But the inter planting is, you know,
this is where you really go in with inter planting
'cause using that space kind of immediately.
And here's a variation of it,
where you've got garlic between in this case tomatoes,
but these tomatoes have only been in here
for less than two weeks actually,
and prior to that it was salad, like you can see
on the left hand bed there.
All winter this poly tunnel's been salad plants
that we've been cropping,
and I don't like taking them out actually
'cause you're kind of, they're like friends by the end,
but we twist them out and then spread this compost.
So this is actually a bit of mushroom compost
on top of horse manure,
and the horse manure came from the hotbed,
which you can see is beautiful.
Well, a nice mix of compost, basically.
We don't actually mix the compost
but we put the mushroom on top.
It's a nice weed-free capping.
And then I'm not going to feed these tomatoes.
Just do the normal side shooting
and train them up the string.
But the garlic was here all the time
between the salad plants,
rather like you can see it there along the edge,
and this will harvest within about a month.
So then we'll have space for the tomatoes to grow.
So the garlic is just a brilliant way
of using space kind of for free.
It's not taking up any room.
And the marigolds is a little bit the same.
So these are dwarf French marigolds
looking tiny at the moment, (rain patters)
and actually also look at that.
That one's been eaten there.
Wood lice, I think.
Wood lice really like these.
And so what I'm doing with the marigolds
is growing some on in pots
just to make sure I've got, can fill the gaps.
I'm always expecting to lose a few plants,
so I always have spare plants.
(rain patters) I hope you can hear me
above the rain, which is picking off a shower.
And then the marigolds make a fantastic ground cover
over the bed, 'cause when the tomatoes grow up,
they're not really using the ground level space.
And just to finish, there's a nice example here
of using over winter space
because we've been cropping salad underneath there.
I just took the plants out today, actually,
and that's going to have compost.
And then, oh yeah, I'll show you in a sec, actually.
But using this to grow, to raise transplants,
for one thing like tomatoes, but also look at these.
So, I'm really pleased with that.
This is a way of, you know, these I put in as runners
from outdoor strawberry plants last October
and filled this mushroom crate with compost,
and they've just been in here all winter,
no feeding.
That's just a bit of compost in there.
It's simple.
Yeah, this is just to give you the final example of spacing,
and if you've got a new bed like that,
we're going to put compost on it.
So this is what it looks like before the compost.
It's still pretty nice,
but this will have about just over an inch of compost,
three centimetres,
and there's a melon, there's a pepper.
So these side beds, you don't get quite so much value
of the space 'cause you run out of headroom,
but something like the melon,
I did here last year actually and it was very successful,
train them up a string.
But give them a good 60 centimetres, two feet.
So with summer planting, so the same with the tomatoes,
you know, I've given them enough room.
I've seen it in many greenhouses
where people put in too many.
Just don't do that.
I know they look so small when you put them in
but you've got to imagine this is a big tomato plant.
I'm on the limit here.
This is quite close for tomatoes, just so you know.
It's probably average,
if you take an average of all the distances,
about again, about 60 centimetres
and just under two feet,
and it's the height that we'll get from them.
So there you go.
I've given you some ideas.