Monday 15 February 2010
I get a little annoyed watching Gardeners World. It’s a little like the BBC breakfast news, which I had to stop watching in the end due to my shouting upsetting our house mates. Gardeners World isn’t quite as bad, but they lost their way somewhere (I think it was after Precy Thrower retired). They seem to spend too much time trying to convince you how quick and easy gardening is and miss-out some of the really important lessons – like planning. We spent most of the winter planning; drawing out beds, pouring through seed catalogues, researching the best varieties and planning the optimum schedule for our little vegetable garden. And I have to say – I think I had almost as much fun doing that as I’m going to have when our friends come over for the harvest.
Our vegetable garden plan is based on intercropping and catch cropping principles. That is to say, growing quick crops in temporary spaces between slow growing veg (radishes between sprouts for example) and replacing spring harvested veg with summer / winter veg as soon as possible.
You’ll notice there’s a heavy focus on summer veg on this plan, with little left on the patch for winter. Our housemates Sarah and Al are moving back to Australia in June and Alicia wants to buy her own place. Although I’m sure it wasn’t anything to do with my morning rants against the TV, this does leaves us wondering whether we’ll reap even the summer harvest – we’re certainly not looking further than the end of the year.
The best laid plans of mice and men…
2 comments:
I love making plans, it's so exciting.
I think most of my plans these days go on in my head except for a few quick sketches to rotate the vegetables but then we have lived here nearly 30 years so changes are not usualy too major these days.
However I have stopped watching gardeners world since the change over from Monty Don I find more interesting things on other garden blogs.
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