Keys to success with Vegetable growing
The first daffodils of early February may tempt us to think that spring is just around the corner and for many gardeners that means one thing: the start of the Vegetable growing season. But we all know that there is plenty of scope for wintry weather through February and March, and even here on the Kent-Sussex borders the last frost may well be in early May in exposed areas. It is important not to get carried away and start sowing too much too early. But this is certainly the moment to settle down with a cup of tea to plan what to grow in the coming summer. So particularly for anyone just starting with vegetables or thinking about giving them a go, here are a few guidelines to make your first year of growing your own, the best it can possibly be.
The question is what to grow when we are not growing solely for sustenance. The simple answer is to grow what you like to eat but one of the joys of GYO is to grow things that are not widely available in supermarkets. So if you like tomatoes then maybe look for more unusual varieties. It is very easy to buy round salad and cherry tomatoes but there are rarely more than one or two different varieties on offer. When you grow from seed there are dozens of choices of tomato from the size of a cherry to the size of a cauliflower and every colour from yellow, striped, green, red and black. Then come the much more unusual and, dare I say it, rather trendy vegetables such as tromboncino squash and cucamelon, certainly if you want to eat these then you need to grow them. One word of caution, as well as encouraging you to grow the unusual and the fun, is just to be aware that many of these are exotic and need special conditions. They may be hard to germinate, need heat in the early days and a long growing season so success is not guaranteed. Give them a go but if you are new to veg growing then I suggest that you also grow something that may not be particularly exciting, but is pretty resilient. Then you know that you are going to get a harvest, maybe not the greatest on record but you will experience the immense satisfaction of picking and eating without a lorry, shop or fridge in between. A young salad potato straight out the ground, cooked and eaten really does taste different from those you buy. Potatoes are a good starter crop because you do not have to germinate seeds, pot on and plant out. Just plant a potato, usually a seed potato, in the ground, a deep pot or in bottom of an old compost bag, cover with compost and away you go.
With a long list of plants that you would like to grow, the next stage is planning and this is about deciding what is achievable with the space and time that you have to offer. You need to know how long from planting to harvesting and how much of the crop you will get from each plant or each square metre – the yield. The best place to start with both of these is very simply to think about which part of the plant you are interested in. Are you trying to eat the leaves, roots, flowers, seed pods or fruits? Pulling radish roots is clearly a much quicker yield than waiting for a runner bean to produce seed pods. The former may yield in 4-6 weeks, the latter takes 3 months. But this is not all bad news because the amount you get to eat from a single plant is also very different. One radish seed gives you one radish to eat but one runner bean can produce a kilo of pods over the summer. Time spent understanding your plants will definitely help turn frustration into success.
Happy Gardening from Alison