Planning your vegetable garden - part 3

The next part to consider with your plan is the timings of when your vegetables, salad and fruits will be ready to harvest. Obviously you don't want everything ready at the the same time. You need to be able to plan your freezer space for your peas, carrots and spuds and your barbeques for your tomatoes, cucumber and lettuce :-)

Seed catalogues (available from places like Marshall's Vegetable Seeds) all have charts in them that show when the plants are ready to harvest. For example you can grow potatoes in a fairly small area a few feet square such that you can harvest a few pounds of spuds every week from early May to late September. Strawberries however have only a short harvest season of a couple of months around June and July.

The trick to having a long harvest is staggered growing and re-using ground that has already been used that year. Although you shouldn't use it for the same crop. For example you can grow peas from May to late August and then plant spring cabbage in September in the same vegetable plot to overwinter and be ready from February onwards.

Use the charts and try and plan it as best you can. Don't forget you can use additional space on your patio using products like potato growbags, trailing tomatoes from hanging baskets and also growing tomatoes in growbags against a warm house wall.

Paul