urban vegetable patch

Spring plan 2010

So this is my big plan for Spring. As you can see, I’ve got a good selection of my summer favourites; Ha-ogen melon, Beetroot, Tomatoes & Pok Choy! I am also trying out new crops such as capsicum, turnips and pumpkins. On top of just growing vegetable, I am also going to try out some growing technics I have read over winter.

Tomatoes – Quality not quantity

With all the problems and troubles I had last year with my tomatoes, this year I am going to be super duper disciple with them. That means picking out lateral growth and only keeping 4 truss of tomatoes per plant. The theory is that this will encourage bigger fruits, which is what I want.

Deep watering

I am guilty of that sporadic watering, which I find is doing more harm than good. Deep watering mean water last often but for a longer period of time. With deeper watering what I want achieve is a deeper root system that helps my plants to cope with the hash summer heat.

Seaweed application fortnightly.

Seaweed is just a general good guy to have around. It is a tonic food for plants and encourages root growth (and many other things). Together with the practice of deep watering, what I hope to see is a overall healthier crop for the season.

Vegetable bed in rest

I drove my patch very hard with last year’s spring/summer crops – no resting in between harvest, just constant churning for a full 5 months. With this in mind, I have decided to clean up my winter crops much earlier than usual; I just wanted to give the ground a rest before the busy warmer months kicks in. I started sowing my green manure sporadically around the patch probably around July. By mid August, I started clearing all the winter crops and give my green manure a good bashing and dig-in before applying palletised manure. After this, I just let mother nature do it’s thing with the green manure and really, leaving the ground to rest and have a breather.

With the recent constant rain, I find the soil to be more acidic than normal (PH test came back to be 5.5 ~ 6). To finish the bed preparation, it rake in some Trace element and garden lime. The early signs are very encouraging; While raking in the lime, I find there is so much more earthworms activity than before! On top of that, with all the constant compost and manure I am adding into the patch during the growing the season, the topsoil is all nice, crumbly and yummy looking too. Looking back, I can truly say the soil is in a much much better condition. I just cannot wait for the weather to warm up and the growing to begin.

Tip: I went really easy on adding blood and bone into the patch. The reason being that fruiting crops (i.e: Tomatoes, Rock melon, zucchini, etc) will spend all it’s energy producing lots of forage and less on flowering if the ground is too rich in nitrogen. I find by digging in palletised manure well before the growing season is usually more than sufficient.

Propagated from last season's mint. All lush and ready for some summer love!

I love herbs. They are what I call quiet achievers. They don’t really require much attention and if you do plant the correct ones near your vegetables, they can be your plant saviour!! In this instalment of our alphabetical count down, instead of giving you a list of “you should plant X next to Y“, I really want to give you some tips on how I practise my companion planting. Hopefully you can get some ideas on how you  too can make companion planting work for you.

With companion planting, I find it very difficult to practise in a small vegetable garden. For me, I’ve only got 1 bed and space becomes a very priced commodity. For the smaller, soft stem herbs such as basil, it’s easier for them to be planted  amongst the taller tomatoes. But what about the perennial such as thyme and rosemary? If I plant them amongst the main vegetable crops, what do I do with them when it’s time to clear the patch for a new season of crops? It will be such a waste of resources (& money) to buy new herbs every time.

Rosemary for those hard to reach places
Do you have a hard to reach spot in your patch? I do! When we designed my patch, I made it a little to deep. I can hardly reach the far side without the help of a ladder. This makes it a perfect spot for my rosemary! Rosemary are really hardy, once you stab same cuttings into the ground, they will just grow, grow & grow! The best part is when you do clear the patch for next season’s seedlings to go in, you can give the rosemary a nice haircut & it good to go another year!

Herbs loves pots
So do I. I read in a gardening book about planting mint in the ground. It talks about planting mint in a plastic container and then submerge the whole container into the ground, in an effort to contain the invasive nature of mint. Presto! This gives me an idea – why not plant all my herbs in plastic punnets and pop them straight into the patch? When it’s comes time to clear the patch, I can dig the herbs up (container and all) and easily move them to a new spot. How good is that! Not to say that it will also be a good use for those plastic punnets that are slowly filling my shed.

Everyone has got different way of making their companion planting work; Some intentional, some accidental; Some fantastic, some not quite. As long as you keep trying, you will get there. Eventually.

The crop of my wonderful winter vegies is almost done, only a few random brussel sprouts left to harvest, a cauliflower that is still a little undersized and a couple of womboks. This year was the first time I had managed to grow cauliflower, I had tried a few times in the past but they never really flourished, but with the new garden bed that was built at the end of last summer and loads of compost & blood and bone mixed in, plus a regular feed of potash,  I feel that this certainly made a huge difference.

The Brussell sprouts grew wonderfully and while not all of them manged to be tight, it didn’t really matter as they were still delicious and made it into several different dishes. They were full of flavour and while not as large as the store bought ones they were still good. And that brings me to the wombok, Corine started them off as seedlings for me and I nurtured them into really good looking and tasty fat womboks. I did have some issues with millipedes, but they didn’t destroy the crop which was the main thing.

I still have the onions growing that I planted amongst the cauliflower and Brussel sprouts, they will be a little bit longer before they are ready.

Now for Spring!