Winter is coming

I'm always a bit ambivalent about this time of year - it's sad to be throwing away hard-grown plants and acknowledge that there will be no more courgettes this year, but it's also the time of planning for next year and clearing out soil for potential new crops.

Most of the beds have gone from this:

to this:

There are a few vegetables left from this year's planting, mostly the long-growing ones that get planted at the start of the year and don't come up until November/December time. The brussels sprouts, leeks, parsnips and Christmas potatoes are looking very promising indeed, whereas I suspect the swedes and jerusalem artichokes have decided against forming any kind of root in protest at being shoved at the back of a bed and ignored. It's the problem with root vegetables - you can't predict whether you've got a bonanza or bugger all until you dig them up, meaning "What's for dinner?" doesn't really have an answer until Schrodinger's vegetable is unearthed.

Still, even without those two, I'm confident of surviving winter. There is a whole freezer drawer packed full of frozen vegetables, even if half of it is my sister's courgette. Plus almost all of the winter vegetables are now properly planted in their rightful positions (finally!), although whether any of those will produce anything is a different matter altogether: I've never tried growing purple sprouting broccoli before, my cauliflower record is shoddy regardless of the season and my previous attempts at kale and spinach have proven delicious to the slugs and snails. Ah well, it's part of the adventure.

Part of putting the winter vegetables in has been drawing up the plans for next year. My gardening schedule is relatively intensive on the soil, but because I use raised beds that are on a concrete base and have year-on-year expanded my operations by handing over my paycheques to the garden centre for more dirt, it's not proven a problem as it's practically new dirt every year. Next year is going to be different, as I'm reaching the practical limits of how many beds can be fit in the garden and so I need to make sure I'm not overtaxing or building up diseases in the soil. A bed which grows broccoli from April to September, purple sprouting broccoli from September to April and then more broccoli the next year is soon going to run out of the minerals that make broccolis and be full of the germs and pests that like to live off them.

The answer is crop rotation where you grow a different thing each year to give the soil time to recover, but unfortunately a lot of my favourite vegetables all belong to the same plant family of brassicae, which makes it hard to move things around. Traditionally, you're supposed to replace brassicae with root vegetables the next year and put the brassicae into the space vacated by legumes (green beans, mange tout, et al), which wouldn't really be plausible in my garden. I'd have 5m² worth of onions and carrots, with 1m² in which to fit all my broccoli, cauliflower, swede, brussels sprouts, cabbage and kale. Not really going to happen.

So I've decided to set to one side the two oldest brassica beds, as they have grown the same crop family two years in a row, and turn them into something else next year. The other two are going to grow brassicae again next year, but they'll get a green manure of field beans (which are a legume) grown on them over the winter to replenish the soil and also have a top-up of new compost to hopefully keep them happy.

As such, the winter veg is being grown solely on the to-be-retired-from-brassicae-beds, as the others need to be left unproductive to replenish them for next year. Which is hard to remember when I'm trying to find a position to home for all of my kale seedlings.

PJW

More preparations and first sowings

The best news of the week is that the indoor carrots are not only surviving, but thriving.

Live! LIIIIIIVVVE!!!

All the sprouts are now pointing straight up, as opposed to desperately lunging sideways towards the window for sunlight. That suggests that the sunshine lamp is performing as planned, which means two successful experiments in one. Plus, the possibility of tasty early carrots, which is kinda the aim of the game.

Buoyed by the fact that the rain and wind have eased off somewhat and so we're unlikely to need to gather up two of every animal in the near future, I've spent most of the weekend preparing for the new growing season.

The garden is structured around four main 1.25m² growing beds, which will be used for brassica (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, etc) this year which need a lot of nitrogen for the leafy growth. I could have just piled a tonne of artificial fertiliser on, but I found out about green manure last winter and thought I'd give it a go. Green manure is a winter-growing crop that covers the ground, suppresses weeds and takes nitrogen out of the air and fixes it in the ground for the next year. Once winter is done, you chop it down, dig it into the ground and it provides the nutrients for the next year's crop.

Bit cruel when you think about it - a crop that you raise for the sole purpose of killing it and mutilating its body.

Incidentally, if anyone is going to be doing any gardening that involves weeding amongst plants or features, I can thoroughly recommend acquiring a Dutch Hoe. One of my father's mottos when it comes to DIY is that it's always best to take the time to get the right tool for the job, instead of trying to bodge it with the almost-right tool, as you'll just end up having to get the right tool later after wasting a load of time. The same appears true in gardening. Weeding those field beans would've taken me a half hour with a trowel, yet took three minutes with a hoe.

In terms of things to put in those beds, the first seeds of the season have been sown and are sitting atop the boiler. First up are early cauliflowers and cabbage, which should in theory be ready for May, when the no-buying-of-vegetables-for-a-calendar-year challenge* begins.

 I bought special plant labels this year. They're made of slate and you write on them with a wax pen that will only come off with white spirit. The idea is that they're impervious to water, which makes them perfect for being outside. Not quite so good for the idiot who doesn't have any white spirit in the house and requires three attempts to draw the diagram on. Thank god I was only doing one.

I had a couple of spaces in the seed tray which I've filled with lettuce for my next project - vertical gardening.

PJW

*Needs a better name.