COLUMNIST: NEIL M WHITE
Neil M White lives in Perthshire with his wife and three children. He has worked in horticulture as a landscape gardener and in a tree nursery.
Passionate about growing fruit and veg, Neil's latest book on gardening ‘The Self Provisioner’, was published in April 2020.
The nights are fair drawing in aren’t they? And it’s getting harder and harder to do anything meaningful in the veg garden. Your winter crops are ticking over nicely and the usual end of season tidying is all done, leaves cleared up and lawn mower oiled and sitting waiting for next year. So what is a gardener to do? Plan for next year of course. Grab yourself a cuppa, a pen and paper and make a plan of what to grow come the spring.
Winter is a great time to reflect on the veg growing year: what went well, what didn’t? Which varieties of potatoes did the best? Will you try kale again but this time keep the pigeons off the young plants?
It’s also a good time to flick through the seed catalogues and choose seeds and plants for next year. I’m a big fan of keeping veg growing as simple as possible. Self provisioning is about taking as much nutrition as you can from whatever garden space you have so I focus on easy, reliable crops that my family loves to eat.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t experiment though. You might just discover the perfect variety of courgette that adores your garden’s climate. I like to do a rough sketch of my plot and plan out where everything is going. That way I can compare this against what I grew last year and avoid any mistakes as well as practise crop rotation.
Rotating your crops is important for a few reasons. Firstly, you prevent diseases like clubroot building up in the soil. Repeatedly growing the same crops in the same spot also depletes the soil of nutrients over time. Thirdly, some vegetables like a rich soil, others prefer lower nutrients. But how can you achieve this through mere crop rotation?
The simplest way is through the ‘3 bed’ rotation system which means working across three beds (or a multiple e.g. 6 or 9). In the first bed you grow roots such as carrots, beetroot or potatoes; in the second you grow fruit crops such as squash, beans or peas and in the third you grow you grow brassicas - think cabbage, kale and broccoli. Then next year you rotate everything across by one - so last year’s bed 1 now has the brassicas, bed 2 has the roots and bed 3 has the fruit crops.
This serves a few purposes:
It’s really easy to remember so plan to give it a go next year! Draft out a plan, practice crop rotation and go for gold for your soil, your veg and your sense of satisfaction when you are harvesting fresh crops next season.
You can follow more of what Neil gets up to on his Twitter and Instagram pages.