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

Planning your vegetable garden - part 1

Although spring has not quite sprung yet here in the UK, it's still worth planning your vegetable garden for the coming year. Over the next few days I'll be writing a paragraph or two on how to use your time wisely in planning your veg garden. Yes I'm afraid I did say "planning your veg garden". Fail to plan means plan to fail is a fairly fundamental principle in most projects and you should draw on your vegetable garden experience of past years if you have any or just keep reading on how to plan and grow the perfect vegetable garden.

Begin to plan your next garden by considering your past gardens. What varieties did you like well or not at all? Would several small staggered plantings be desirable? Would you like to extend the harvest season or increase or decrease the amount of your harvest? Do you want to preserve more or less food this year? Did you try to grow a new vegetable last year that you want to include again this year? Is there something new that you want to try this year?

Also don't forget to order your seed and vegetable plant catalogues. I've included a couple of links below to garden companies that I use for vegetable seeds and plants

• Marshall's Vegetable Plants
• Marshall's Vegetable Seeds
• Thompson Vegetable Seeds
• Veg Plants from Suttons

Here's to a wet spring and a warm summer and watching that veg garden grow.

Paul.