Growing a vegetable jungle

One thing which I didn't mention in my previous round-up post was the latest on the Three Sisters bed. That's because that's where most of the interesting things have happened in my absence and I felt it deserved a post (and a pic-spam) of its own.

For those who don't have a slavish devotion to my back-catalogue, the Three Sisters is based off an Iroquois tradition of growing corn, squashes and climbing beans together. The idea is that the beans fix nitrogen from the air into the soil, benefiting the corn and squash, the squash covers the ground with big leaves, preventing weeds from impacting the tall beans and corn, and the corn provides a climbing frame for the beans and a windbreak for the squash. It's a win-win-win. In theory.

Last year was a qualified success. The inter-connectedness of the three plants didn't really work out. I was worried about the English climate resulting in the beans overshadowing the corn and so chickened out by planting them up bamboo canes, which turned out to be pointless after I discovered I'd actually planted a non-climbing dwarf bean by mistake. Plus the pumpkins were an utter failure that not only failed to produce any fruit, but also broke out of the bed and attempted to throttle half the garden in a bid to survive. Said bid to escape meant it did very little shading. Still, I got both corn and beans out of the bed and the nitrogen fixing presumably worked, so, yeah, qualified success.

This year is so far a different story:

I think that is the most concentrated greenery I have ever accomplished in my limited gardening career.

I'll take you through the story so far. I started with my plan of attack, scribed in that most notable of tools, MS Paint.

Copy-pasted from the much larger garden diagram found here, cause I can't be arsed to draw it again square.

First off, I ditched the pumpkins of last year for courgettes, on the basis that a) I've had success with courgettes before and b) I actually like courgettes, which is more than can be said for squash or pumpkins. I also made the decision to go all-in and grow the beans up the corn instead of on a separate bamboo wigwam.

The bed is 1.25m x 1.25m and I started working on the basis that last year's efforts showed I could get good results from sweetcorn that was planted about 40cm apart, while my sister's garden showed that courgettes required room to spread when planted in the ground rather than a pot. So, I put the courgettes in the corners and worked out the tightest arrangement of corn/bean planting possible to squeeze in as many plants in as I could. This turned out to be 7 - two lines of three flanking the courgettes with one in the middle for luck.

Growing the beans up the corn introduced the issue of timing into the mix. The traditional Iroquois method sees all three seeds planted simultaneously, but the cooler English weather would mean that the corn would grow too slowly to support the beans and the leaves on the beans would grow so thick and so fast that they'd shade out everything else. After a small false-start with switching type of corn and a failure of the initial courgettes seedlings, I ended up doing the initial planting of the bed mid-May, with the beans not going in until a month later to give the corn and courgettes a head start.

Don't mind the oca that's appeared at the back, or the dwarf bean that's appeared at the front. Gardening plans are always flexible and I'm never immune to the urge to try and squeeze an extra plant into the space that's not really available.

From there, it's just been a case of letting it grow up and training the beans to grow up their appropriate corn stalks.

For scale, the tallest sweetcorn plants at the back are well over 6ft and still going.

However, the training effort went on the back foot pretty much from the get-go - the close-planting of the corn/bean units and the location in a corner has meant that it's become more and more difficult to get access to some of the sections of the bed as the foliage thickened. In addition, my attention to the garden suffered a bit from the impending arrival of Daughter II (The Daughtering) and the climbing beans were left to fend for themselves for the past few weeks as other things more urgently required my attention.

That has resulted in... well, neither words nor a still picture can do it justice.

Whether I'll see any beans from this bed is, as I said in the video, slightly up in the air (which is more than can be said for some of the beans' growth habits). However, I have already got significant courgette success and the corn is looking promising. With luck, the bed should provide a lot more than just "a valuable learning experience". And hey, at least it's been fun.

PJW

Finally, cauliflower!

Only two and a half months late cauliflowers, but never mind.

I finally got head! Wait, let me rephrase. My cauliflowers have finally produced something edible and I have eaten it!

This is a major first for me - I did plant some cauliflowers last year and did technically get something onto my plate, but it could by no stretch of the imagination be called edible. It was yellow, riddled with holes, infused with a dozen horribly invasive pest-killer sprays, covered in the mucus of a thousand pests that apparently didn't care and it looked like it had partially rotted. It tasted like despair. I tried eating it anyway - it was my garden dammit and I was at least going to eat as much of it as the pests did - and I only stopped trying to choke it down when I realised I was physically retching after every mouthful.

Have I mentioned how much I love my brassica cages? There's no way I would've got a successful cauliflower this year without them. Life becomes a heck of a lot easier when all you have to defend against is ground-based pests and even they have trouble getting in.

As if this two-portion head of cauliflower wasn't enough reward for my work, a couple more have decided to get in on the act and start creating heads. I don't think I'll have enough to freeze some for the winter, and sadly none of the interesting coloured ones seem to be producing, but it's a hell of a lot more success than I had a few weeks back!*

A lot of my gardening thoughts are going towards the plan for next year already, as harvesting creates spaces that will either need to be filled or protected from weeds. While I can't purchase vegetables until next June in order to complete the challenge, I don't think I'll be keeping up such stringent rules after the challenge is over, so I'm looking at my plans for next year with an eye to whether it's better to grow something or buy it.

I like cauliflower as a vegetable, but it's taken up a phenomenal amount of space in my garden for an awfully long time and so far has produced two portions of vegetables. The stuff that I ate was nice, but I couldn't really say it was a significant amount nicer than one from the grocers or farmer's market. And while it's relatively expensive to buy in the shops, one can't say that my garden produce is in any way designed to be thrifty, especially with the amount of dirt I have to buy each year.

The major merit of growing cauliflower at home is the chance to get interesting colours and types that are rare and/or expensive in shops, but so far this year those varieties have produced sod all. So, right now, cauliflower is sitting right on the line of "Can I be bothered" for next year, especially since crop rotation and better planning for winter veg means I'll likely have less space for summer brassicae next year. Maybe I'll just try the interesting colours and not bother with any white ones.

This eventual cauliflower harvesting has allowed another sprouting broccoli to finally take its place in the ground, probably just in time. The orphanage for displaced brassicae was an utter failure and I eventually gave in, dismantled it and attempted to squeeze the potted denizens into spaces inside the brassica cages (after, of course, having made sure that they'd been thoroughly deloused. Didn't want to go to all of the trouble of protecting my brassicae all year only to introduce a Typhoid Mary at the last minute).

It provided as much protection as an out of date condom that's been attacked by a porcupine. This is what happens when you don't have a brassica cage!

I harvested the last of the onions that had been in a bed next to the orphanage, topped up the bed with spare compost from the harvested potatoes and then inverted the orphanage netting to create a new covered bed.

It's covering a smaller, squarer and shallower shape than the orphanage was and is naturally given shape by the trellis that lines the bed. All things told, I'm hopeful that this will actually be fit for purpose this time.

I give it a week.

Although there is one definite winner in this debacle. When I inverted the orphanage netting, I discovered that, not only were there two butterflies under it (whom I swear mocked me as they flew away, but they didn't come back when I challenged them. Yeah, you'd better flutter, you loud-mouthed punks!) and a veritable colony of snails, but there was also tangible results from my devoured sprouting broccoli.

I was going to kill it out of revenge, but realised how churlish that was. Far better to take it like a man -  well played caterpillar, good game, I was well beaten, I'll get you next time (Gadget).

At least someone's going home happy because of my poor construction skills.

PJW

*And to think you wanted me to sacrifice them Bexx! For shame! Actually, you were probably right, but hey - edible cauliflower!