Tag: Rotation

Veg Beds

A sketch to remind me where we’re planting things this year. We always struggle to remember exactly what we planted where when the new season starts.

British summertime started today; the days are getting longer, the soil is warming and, over the past week, the hawthorn hedge has turned bright green as the leaf buds open. We’re getting ahead with the garden; I put the Vivaldi second early potatoes in yesterday and we put the Stuggarter Riesen onion sets in earlier in the week. The alkathene piping and netting are there to stop the blackbirds pulling them up. In a few weeks, once the onions have started to put down roots, we’ll be able to remove the netting.

As we planted the onions two pairs of buzzards circled above us, calling occasionally, in what looked like a minor skirmish over territory.

Broccoli

IT’S SURVIVED frost and snow, it’s been pecked to tatters by Pheasants but I’m afraid what finally did for one of our purple-flowering broccoli plants was the bonfire we lit yesterday afternoon near the the compost bins, just beyond the cabbage beds.  I hope that two or three of the plants will recover sufficiently to give us a small supply of broccoli florets in a month or two.

We’ve found that you can’t be in a hurry when it comes to purple-flowering broccoli. We had no florets in the autumn when you might have expected a first crop. Ours always does better in the spring, which is good time to have it as there’s a bit of a lull in the supply of garden veg at that time. We did harvest kale and cabbage – both red and winter varieties – from this little cabbage patch in the autumn.

Veg beds as they were in 2009, which, as that's 3 years ago, is the way they will be again this year.

This spring, because of the rotation system we’re using, the cabbages and the potatoes that we grow alongside them will move onto the next bed in a clockwise direction, ousting the beans which will in turn move on to the bed where we grew root crops (and had a rare success with carrots last year) which in turn will move on to the bed where we grew the beans.