Planting plan 2012
Posted: Thursday 25 August, 2011
Even though this season's not yet over, I've started drafting our planting plan for the vegetable garden for 2012, based on what we've learned this year.
We won't be growing onions. We'll do garlic and shallots, but onions take up so much room for a crop that we could buy, organic, for a few pounds. Next year, we'll do more peas and carrots. We'll also drop sweetcorn from the outdoor beds; we'll have a better chance of a good crop in the polytunnel.
We'll also be growing fewer varieties of spuds and fewer earlies. One, we won't have so much room (we're using an unplanted area of the fruit garden this year) and two, we just grew too many. International Kidney (the Jersey Royal potato) disappointed; Anya was lovely as was Vivaldi and King Edward. Red Duke of York took a bit of a hammering and hasn't yielded well. We planted three main crop - Desiree, Druid and Rooster - so we'll see how they do. Rooster's grown everywhere round here, under contract.
As we're clearing areas, we're top dressing with manure, partly to enrich the soil and partly to stop it blowing away. On windy days, it's like the Sahara. We were going to plant green manures but we've got so much "real" manure, it seems daft not to use it. And that's one of the reasons for doing next year's planting plan - I don't want to manure the area where the root crops - carrots, parsnips and beetroot - are going. Makes my head hurt though, all this thinking :-0
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