Opinions on My Vegetable Garden Layout and Plan for 2014

I suspect it might be this (what I call offset planting)



Pour some ball bearings or marbles into a tray and see how they arrange themselves

 

@Jungle Jane ....Re my Parsnips....yes they forked...well those that actually bothered to grow bigger than a Radish....even though i went to the trouble of 'dibbing' holes with a broom handle and filling with finer soil....plus i'd grown them in root trainers first and transplanted...i know others with more experience have success with transplanting but it just doesn't work for me

 

Also re growing first early potatoes in the greenhouse. Could I get away with using white woven sacks that are used for builders rubble? I've got some brand new ones I was intending to use to store excess compost from my bin but ended up using ex compost bags instead.

When would be a good time to buy the tubers? I'm hoping to go to the garden centre this weekend or would this be too soon? Should I be looking at late January rather than early January?

Also I have an old plastic laundry basket very much like this one knocking around in the garden. Could I grow anything in this? Perhaps if I put a sack in it first to stop the soil drying out too much?

 

THey are BIG bags. You won't be able to lug one in & out of the greenhouse, and I think greenhouse gets too hot for them in Spring, so I put mine out. Other thing to consider is harvesting them. A potato growing bag you can tip out and harvest, and you get enough for a meal or two. A really big bag you might need to harvest all in one go, and then you've got to store the spuds which, to my mind, defeats the object as you start the sugar-turns-to-starch cycle and what I am aiming for is to cook them immediately after harvest.

Having said that, sometimes 1st early spuds fall to bits on cooking, and the standard fix for that is to leave them for a few days before cooking

Now! Suppliers run out of stock. If you buy online make sure you buy from someone who knows about shipping spuds. The big seed companies ship them with all their other orders - i.e. they arrive anytime - including in dire cold when they may well sit overnight in a courier company's freezing cold warehouse or even a van ... and be ruined.

I get mine from JBA. They don't ship during really cold weather.

However, if you don't have particular preferred varieties in mind then my advice would be to go to garden centre and get a few tubers , loose, of several varieties you want to try and make a note for next year of the ones you like. A standard potato growing bag needs 32 tubers, a really large pot will take 4. I recommend some granular Potato fertiliser too - I put that in the compost with the spuds and then forget about feeding them thereafter.

We like Arran Pilot as a 1st early - but a lot depends on personal preference, of course, but also the soil and growing conditions in that season. I grow one bag of Rocket too, as they are the fastest maturing (that I know of). Flavour isn't the best IMO.

 

I think your white plastic basket will rot in the sub in no time. Plus you will have to line it to keep the water in. And I doubt it will be strong enough to handle that amount of wet compost - e.g. if you try to lift / move it.

 

Getting the balance of plants right is important.

First year I tried, corn was not tall enough (as you mentioned) and runner beans scrambled rather than climbed, I had too many squash plants in and they went beserk.

Second year, I put a wigwam of garden canes over the corn, (about 2ft apart at base) and grew one bean plant per cane (8 total), and I planted one squash plant in between each cane (8 total), too many squash plants..they went beserk!

Third year I got it right, corn in block, 8 cane wigwam, 8 bean plants and two squash plants, and I got a great harvest of all. The corn could ripen as beans where kept tied to the canes and the squash still went beserk but mulched the bed.

But the best bit of all is in the bed prep, dig out your bed and fill it from your compost bin, compost does not need to be ready, when the plants have been harvested, your left with a cracking bed and your compost/soil is in great shape for next year, just turn it over and dig in all the remaining plant matter, chopping it as you do with a spade. By next spring you have a brilliant humus rich bed with added nitrogen from the bean haulms.

I now grow my sweetcorn in the polytunnel at the allotment and have tried growing the indian long beans up them a couple of time without success.

Steve...

 

Thanks Steve. Sweetcorn is Nitrogen-hungry and I assume that Beans will be fixing Nitrogen in time for the Corn to feed on, which is a decent bonus. I'm never sure if leaving roots of Peas and Beans in the ground, to retain the nitrogen fixing bacteria "Nodules", is actually any good as they have to sit around for 6 months at least until the next Spring-sown crop is ready to make use of them.

Does the foliage of the beans get in the way of the pollination of the corn? I suspect pollination occurs early enough that it is done & dusted before the Bean foliage is significant?

 

It didn;t get in the way for me, your supposed to plant seeds of corn, then wait a whle, plant bean seeds, wait a while then plant squash seeds.

I planted out greenhouse raised corn plants, then bean seeds then greenhouse raised squash plants, so the corn had a good head start and where pollinated long before the beans got that high.

Steve...