h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Hypatia

Oh, this topic really lies close to my heart. You're absolutely right: planning is everything with the veggie garden. I have a map on my kitchen wall for next year already, showing what's going where. Are you going to talk about crop rotation? That's the main reason I have to have an annual plan, to make sure the right things follow each other into the ground.

Remember though there are h2g2 readers and researchers south of the Equator, for whom this is spring! And they need veg plots to face north for lots of sunshine.

Great article as ever.


F/b

It's so cold and drizzly here today that I coiuld use a little spring sunshine.

Good old crop rotation. It really does make for better gardens. I can talk about it when I discuss succession planting. And I'm thinking about mentioning cover crops, but it's hard to do that in most backyard gardens.

Do you use straight rows, wide rows, square foot gardening?

H

Hello Hypatia

I use a mixture of different types of gardening, to suit the crop. Runner beans, for instance, I have in a long straight row, climbing up bamboo canes.

Carrots, on the other hand, get scattered into their allotted square of space and have to fight each other for light and soil.

My veg beds are 1m wide and 15m long, with a path down either side. I started off with no-dig, and that width meant that I never have to tread on the beds (crucial for no-dig).

However, I've had to abandon that method, thanks to the population explosion of voles (wee mice), which resulted from all that lovely undisturbed mulch I was spreading thickly onto the beds! They ate all my brassica seedlings, all my beetroots, carrots and peas, a couple of years ago.

So now I dig and I have to protect all those crops with cut-down plastic bottles, which prevent the little rodents finding their favourite dinner!


f/b

Cut-down plastic bottle work a treat against all kinds of pests then. We've been using them to stop slugs getting at the lettuces and beetroots and found they work a treat.
Hypatia's dead right about the temptation of the seed catalogues and leaving space for a few 'gifts' from gardening friends. We've been brutal with the wish-list and only allowed the orders to be placed for stuff we could agree on a planned site for. If nowhere suitable or still available then sorry but we can't have it. Not easy decisions but better making them now than in spring when the seed packets are already open!

Hi MF

I always end up with far too many seedlings too. I'm sure all gardeners are the same.

But I do it partly on purpose, so that I can spread the word by giving away the spares. Several folk on whom I've off-loaded cabbage, capsicum, tomato plants now grow their own from seed.

I count that as a success, although it does mean that the number of people I can share with is reduced and I have a bigger problem each year! Mind you, it all makes good compost.


Frenchbean

Oops MC, not MF

F/b