A VEG PATCH UPDATE
If you’ve been following me since spring last year you might know that I dived headfirst into a new hobby — vegetable growing. I’m not sure I can officially call myself a proper grower yet or even an amateur gardener, which suggests I’m more serious than I am. For all my pootling and pottering in the garden and using the internet as a resource for expert information, Nick offered up Vegepreneur. I’ll take it.
LAST YEAR’S PREP
A year on from my first foray into the wonderful world of “growing your own” (or at least some of your own) I wanted to share a little update on this life skill. I’ve been following the “No Dig” method by Charles Dowding, who I discovered whilst researching Permaculture (a blueprint for living more sustainably and in harmony with nature). No Dig for me seemed the least back-breaking and most prosperous and eco-friendly way to make veggies appear on a small scale and is exactly what it says on the tin.
Right under our feet, deep down in the soil, truly is the garden of Eden — there is an incredibly stable infrastructure of flora and fauna including billions of fungal threads, nematodes, earthworms and beneficial bacteria. Rather than sticking your tools into the ground and breaking up this delicate system of natural soil fertility, the basis of No Dig is leaving these complex (mycorrhizae) fungal networks in place and allowing maximum nutrients to be available to whatever is grown in there, creating a highly productive garden with the least amount of work.
So, instead of digging in, you pile on a couple of inches of compost on top of the existing soil and start your plants off in there. As the plant grows, its roots make their way down into the soil and the compost feeds the soil, which in turn feeds the plants. What about all those weeds? Well weeds that appear in the loose compost topping are plucked out easily and if you have a bed of weeds to contend with at the start of growing, you just cover it with cardboard to block out their light source and stop them from thwarting your efforts, top it with your compost and continue with your planting. By the time the roots of your seedlings grow down, the cardboard has softened up and started decomposing. Using this method you can plant on the same day as takes your fancy! It’s also of course an excellent way of using up the cardboard boxes that everything was delivered in during lockdown.
Check out Charles Dowding’s, aka my heartthrob’s, Instagram and website where he keeps a “no dig” bed next to a “dug” bed every year featuring the same crops to prove a point — the no dig bed is always more abundant with quicker and heartier grown veg.
LAST YEAR’S SUCCESSES
After a successful first season, l was loaded with veggies and thus created veg patch soup to show off a medley of them — bright purple thanks to the beetroot which I found one of the most fun veggies to grow, harvesting a few of the delicious leaves at a time while the bulbs fattened up. There was also my veg patch quinoa risotto, which used up all the leafy greens from the garden plus a courgette which was also one of my successful crops.
When people ask what I’ve successfully grown, the two plants that I always suggest to fellow amateur foodie gardners are rhubarb (we inherited a plant with the house) and chard. We planted two types of chard, rainbow and Swiss, and this Swiss chard especially has been robust and grown continuously throughout the last 14 months. At some point in January we were disappointed to have not harvested our chard plants while they were still good, as one frosty morning we looked out and all had collapsed and ruined. A couple of days later though we looked out again and up they were — standing just as tall and proud, back to their glorious jolly selves and looking just as delicious. We have been enjoying the leaves and stalks this past year, and I love how easy they are to harvest and cook and that’s with no real love or attention other than a water during the summer and a cull of leaves that had wiggly white lines on that we found out were leaf miner (but that's another post).
We were also mega successful with tomatoes — which might have something to do with the fact that there were so many plants (I got carried away and planted two packets of cherry tomatoes’ worth, resulting in about 30 plants) — none of that tomato blight business that I‘d heard sorry tales of. Unfortunately, just as they were beautifully ripened I was super nauseous in the early stages of my pregnancy and couldn’t look at anything vaguely acidic.That meant tomatoes, lemons and even salt and vinegar crisps went out the window. Nick made a few tomato sauces for himself and then the rest went to (lucky!) friends.
THIS YEAR’S PREP
Now in 2021, with a new baby born late February, I didn’t get any seeds sown for this growing year. The last thing I was thinking about was working a veg patch, but by early April as I was out of the 42 days of postpartum Ayurvedic rest and recovery my mum (who was locked down with us) convinced me to grow just a few things in the empty beds that I’d covered over with cardboard to keep the weeds down. After I asked on my Instagram what veggies worked best, you suggested:
Courgettes (by far the most popular answer)
Kale
Tomatoes
Spinach
Runner Beans
Radishes
We visited a local garden centre and picked up marrow seedlings (courgettes were all gone), beetroot, turnips, radishes, kohlrabi, pea, runner beans and radicchio seedlings plus a few more varieties of strawberries to add to our existing plants. After growing a billion cabbages last year and with so much chard already in the ground I felt like kale and spinach was covered. I also had lots of dill seedlings from a friend. In terms of tomatoes this year we’ve tamed it right back with just three tomato plants of different varieties that I picked up from the local church fundraiser. These young plants then all sat in my makeshift greenhouse for weeks before I was in the mood again to put them in the ground.
Shortly afterwards we went to Devon, and when we came back after more or less three weeks of rain half of the seedlings had been munched away by slugs and snails (many of you I’ve spoken with via Instagram found this was a real issue as well). Disappointed and tired, it took me another two weeks to do something about it and by then everything had been eaten, bar the tomato plants that stayed in the greenhouse, as well as half the the radicchios and runner bean plants that were just about hanging in there, and our strawberries which hung well out of reach (the rhubarb and chard by the way were still going strong and are seemingly invincible).
THIS YEAR’S PREP, ROUND 2!
Mum came to stay again and again we went out to buy some seedlings. This time we found the courgettes we were originally after, plus cucumber, sweet potato and more beetroot. Another friend gave me some pea and nasturtium seedlings. Nick, mum and I planted everything out, picked off any slugs and snails we could find while we worked in the garden and surrounded the seedlings with scraps of wool from eco packaging, feeling like this time we had it covered. The seedlings enjoyed a couple of days of sun and then the beginning of June saw a whole day of downpour again. Innocently we congratulated ourselves for not having to water that day or worry about the seedlings getting scorched. Little did we know that the rain brought an absolute party, or perhaps “rave” is more accurate, of molluscs into the beds for an all-you-can-eat buffet. By the time we realised many of the seedlings had once again been munched, we pulled off all the snails and slugs we could find, left them by the pond for the frogs and retired for the day. That evening Nick checked again, and this time he discovered teeny tiny slugs coming in from under the wool via the gap around the stem. They were so small you could easily miss them if it weren't for the telltale gaping holes in the plants. He then did a round of the entire garden by torchlight and if you’ve been following my stories on Instagram you’ll see that we filled the bottom of numerous buckets. This went on for three days — Nick reckons he rounded up around 400. We had a problem. We had an infestation.
At first Nick was dumping the slugs and snails by the pond for our resident frogs who have been chilling since their arrival in February, and the goldfish liked them too. Then he started taking them to the other side of the garden, hoping that they would be satisfied with all the established bushes that wouldn't mind losing their bottom leaves. Then he got desperate, even dreaming about them (nightmares, I’d call it) and popped in some beer traps — but still they were there. What had we done wrong? One of the bonuses of the No Dig method is that it’s not so tempting to slugs and snails (I won’t try to explain why here!). Unfortunately it looks like we had bad luck perhaps due to the combination of not tending to the veg patch when I was pregnant in autumn plus the heavy rain from April to May, which seemingly created the perfect condition for a spring snail and slug festival, which we really needed to get on top of.
Having lost all of our cucumbers, the courgette plants and chunks out of our sweet potato, we promptly took action — recently you will have seen some posts on my blog and newsletter on pest control written by Tessa Cobley of Ladybird Plant Care, the first being about slugs and snails. On her recommendation we ordered nematodes (in short nematodes are microscopic eelworms that are natural predators and infect/kill slugs whilst they are underground, whilst being safe for other wildlife and your plants). A week last Tuesday Nick painstakingly watered the beds, the troughs, the hanging baskets and everything in our veg patch with them in the hopes we’d be able to save the rest of our plants for a bountiful summer. So far so good… another update if we have any success!
Wish us luck!
P.S.: I should mention that in the main image, I am standing with some extremely leggy fennel plants. I planted them amongst the cabbages mid-summer in 2020 but they never really took off and I forgot about them. They survived winter and come spring they shot for the sky! Looks like all their energy went into the stalk rather than the bulb so I’ve instead had the pleasure of enjoying the subtle freshness of aniseed by incorporating the fennel fronds in my cooking...and they look pretty as a garnish too!
For more gardening ideas, check out the following posts:
