Vegetables and Herbs

Growing vegetables is a deeply satisfying aspect of gardening. It is a valuable way of using your garden: you know exactly where your food's been, and you have a good idea of what it's made of; and, of course, your food comes fresh.

Which vegetables?

Plan what you're going to grow, and how you're going to go about it.

When deciding what to grow, begin modestly. Choose types and varieties that aren't going to cause problems. You may not have a large plot, so aim to keep your first vegetable bed fully employed --plan a succession of good companions. Choose those that are well suited to your soil and climatic conditions.

Even with a small patch, you need to attend to the soil, sow seeds, and maybe hoe, before planting; and you need to tend your plants while they are growing. Avoid two extremes: (a) having everything ripen at once, which leads to a short-term glut but nothing thereafter; and (b) having only one crop ripen at a time, which leads to no choice of what to eat.

Remember that running a vegetable patch properly takes experience. Don't be ambitious until you're sure you have the requisite skills.

Rotation

Crop rotation applies above all to intensively managed vegetable plots, where the risks of disease and pat build-up are high and potentially devastating. Planting the same crop in the same place, two or more years running, invites colonization by pests and diseases that "go to ground" in the off-season, ready to attack in force the moment the crop reappears. Some pests attack whole families of plants.

The clubroot fungus, for example, affects all the brassicas—edibles of the Crucifer family—which is why brassicas are treated as one in a classic rotation system.

Rotation also enables high nitrogen fertilizer to be applied first to and used first by crops with high nitrogen demand and tolerance; later, as nitrogen and other minerals are successively depleted, one can plant crops with progressively smaller needs and tolerances. This principle is not as important to organic gardeners as it is non-organic gardeners.

Although it is not "natural", rotation mimics nature in that it ensures a balanced mix of plants. Each crop makes the habitat less suitable for itself (by sequestering nutrients, altering soil structure, and attracting enemies) while at the same time tipping the balance in favour of another crop (which appreciates the new soil structure and isn't susceptible to the first crop's enemies). Crop rotation prevents any one crop becoming dominant.

Rotation systems

Different authorities recommend different systems. Do not let this confuse you. The basics are easy.

It's good to base your system on the three main enemies of staple crops: clubroot (brassicas); eel worm (potatoes); and white rot (onions). Plant all brassicas in a single plot one year, potatoes in another, and onions in another. Next year plant the brassicas in the previous onion plot, potatoes in the previous brassica plot, and onions in the previous potato plot.

If you have a large cultivated area, rotate other crops similarly. If you don't have a large area, combine the three main crops with others.
The three-group system does not include legumes and members of the carrot family, so such plants must be worked in. This leads to more complex rotation schemes. The most detailed ones take account of nutritional minutiae and companionability. Some rotation systems look very daunting indeed.

It's up to you whether you choose to adopt a ready-made ultra-sophisticated system or simply stick with the three year brassica–potato–onion basic pattern, inserting your own selection of other crops among them. As long as you avoid replanting any particular crop in the same place for at least three years, your rotation system most likely will work, and you can improve it with experience.

Resistance

You can fight pests by choosing varieties that are naturally pest- and disease-resistant.

Plant breeders constantly work to improve resistance, and their successes are worth seeking out. Conversely, some very old varieties, which may have fallen out of favour because of lack of eye-appeal, short shelf-life, or other commercial disadvantage, have good resistance. Using organic methods in itself reduces the stresses that lead to disease; in addition, the disease resistance of almost any plant can be improved by the use of seaweed-based foliar sprays.

Perennial vegetables

Rotation gives no place to perennials. The disease-prevention principle of rotation positively forbids having the same crop in the same place two years running, and with good reason. Being particularly vulnerable to pests, many perennials have evolved their own defences. Rhubarb leaves, for example, are lethal.

One way to minimize the risks for species less well-equipped than rhubarb is to surround them with a variety of other species—which is the way most of then would grow in the wild. It's best to do this is in the garden at large, rather than in an isolated vegetable patch.

Globe artichokes are generally supposed to require deep, rich soil, where they will thrive. But because they native to the sand shores of North Africa, it follows that they can be grown on light soil, provided seaweed is incorporated and sprayed. They look wonderful in an ornamental bed, like gigantic thistle! (which they are). But remember: if the flowers aren't cut for eating before they open, the plants tend to weaken.

Jerusalem artichokes are related to sunflowers. Like sunflowers, they grow almost anywhere. Like sunflowers, they grow very tall, so make a useful wind break.

Left in the ground, the tubers throw up new stems year after year. Even when carefully dug, some tubers escape notice, so don't plant Jerusalem artichokes anywhere you'd rather not see them again.

Asparagus is not only perennial. It has to be in place for three or four years before it produces a crop. It prefers well drained soil, although it's not essential to make a traditional "mound" in order to succeed. The main problem with a standard asparagus bed is keeping it weed free, since perennial weeds are almost impossible to remove from the spidery asparagus roots.

If you're prepared to accept the tender, delicious asparagus sprouts as a bonus rather than a crop, however, some crowns can go at the back of a permanent bed, mingled with ground cover to keep perennial weeds from invading.

You can crop off some sprouts for food when in season, leaving later ones to grow into an ornamental foil for other, even later, plants in front.

Integrating asparagus into the garden at large helps to protect it from asparagus beetles.

Rhubarb is an obvious candidate for any integrated garden. It's an almost indestructible perennial, with pink stems that can be eaten as fruit long before any real fruit is available. Rhubarb takes care of itself. And, even if you hate it, it's worth growing for the sake of its naturally insecticidal leaves.

Other herbaceous perennial edibles include bunching and tree onions, seakale, Good King Henry, and strawberries—of which the wild species provides good ground cover and gourmet fruit.

Cut and come again

Most salads and leaf vegetables are harvested all at once, so you must carry out successive sowings to get a continuous supply. Others, such as kale and leaf beet, are gathered leaf by leaf, and the plant makes good the loss. Even cabbages cut off at the stalk will yield again.

There are also salad varieties with the same qualities, giving a long harvest without the need to resow; such varieties include loosehead lettuces, sorrel, radicchio, endives, rocket, land cress, and most of the oriental salads such as mizuna and hoki choy.

There are likewise salad mixtures that are sown thickly and harvested en masse with scissors when they are a few inches high, then left to regrow.

Crops for storage

There is the satisfying winter store of home-grown roots, tubers, rhizomes, and bulbs. This is an area in which you can excel.

When raising your winter supplies, aim for vegetables with good keeping qualities and versatility in the kitchen. It doesn't matter if all your winter-store onions are ready at once—in fact, when you come to harvest them, it's helpful if they are.

Select your varieties with care, harvest them according to the best advice for each variety, and store in the correct conditions.

Indoor storage conditions are easier to stipulate than to create. Use your first winter to test a variety of situations, with a batch of each crop in each place. Check them regularly so you can pinpoint the best place for each crop. Good storage is priceless; if you find the ideal store, don't change a thing!

It isn't necessary to have a suitable building for storage. The reason the roots we eat are full of food is to enable the plant to survive over winter. If your root vegetables are hardy, they could theoretically keep in good condition in the ground. If you don't disturb them, however, they'll be preparing for growing next year; if you do disturb them, it's possible that damage will facilitate rot.

Perfect storage therefore entails putting your undamaged but disengaged crop into conditions you'd expect to find under the ground—in ideal weathercool but frost-free darkness, moist but not wet. This is the basis of the clamp: first dig out the crop; then re-bury it in a sandy mound insulated with straw—this to keep frost at bay.

Crops to freeze

Remember that a full freezer uses no more energy (possibly even less) than a half-empty one, and a large freezer doesn't use twice as much energy as one half the size. If you use a freezer, keep it as full as you can.

Growing for the freezer brings another dimension to your vegetable strategy. Instead of having to make intricate successive sowings. you can make good use of a glut of the of crops that normally have a very short season.

There are vegetables that lend themselves to freezing. Beans and peas freeze especially well, as do asparagus, maize, and Brussels sprouts. Herbs, crumbled after being quick-frozen, can fill up corners.

Other preservation methods

As well as energy-consuming freezing, the time-honoured natural methods suet as sun-drying, pickling, salting, and sugaring still work, although excess salt and sugar are not now considered to belong in a healthy diet. It's worth growing some crops especially for drying, and for making preserves, to provide food year-round.

What sort of bed?

Traditional gardening entailed much digging and back-breaking labour, year after year. Such effort is seldom necessary in household gardens—earthworms do the work.

You need to decide whether you want raised beds or magic mounds, perennial plots or rotated ones, a formal vegetable plot or a mingle of vegetables and ornamentals, a separate area for ornamentals, and so on.

Even if you choose to have frilly lettuces as ornamental edging and asparagus fern setting off roses, you may wish to establish sonic kind of vegetable plot. There are many different cultivation systems to choose from. The choice depends on you. your soil, your climate, and what you want to grow.

Which direction?

When establishing a permanent bed. think first about the relationship between compass points and sunlight angle. Whether you run your beds in the conventional north-south direction or align them west-cast depends on several considerations.

If you plant rows of different sized crops in the same bed, it is sensible to run the bed west-east, so that the taller plants can be at the back where they won't shade smaller ones, but can give shelter from a polar breeze.

If the bed is to contain crops of a similar height, and more particularly if it's to be a convex raised bed, then it's better to run it north-south; this gives each plant a good share of sunlight. The farther away from the equator you are. the more important the effects of alignment become.

Raised beds

Raised beds offer improved drainage; deep topsoil with no compaction; fast spring warm-up; and the ability to sustain closely planted crops (which also gives better moisture retention). All this adds up to high productivity per unit area of ground.

Adding compost to your vegetable bed, year after year, naturally raises it as time goes by. But if your garden is prone to waterlogging, it makes sense to build a raised bed right at the start. A wall can be made to any height, depending on your needs, and from a variety of materials. Wood tends to rot in time, although old railroad ties can last for many years.

A quick. functional wall can be made with planks pinned vertically into place, or corrugated plastic sheets driven well in. However, such walls tend to be flimsy, and unattractive.

Brick or stone walls are harder to build. but can be both attractive and practical. Seams and gaps can be planted with trailing herbs. If the bed is to retain moisture. Impermeable, it is best to construct brick or stone walls.

A raised bed is also easier to tend at ground level, and it's less likely to be infiltrated by surrounding grasses and other wild plants. In cases where the soil presents real difficulties but where rainfall is adequate, a raised bed suitably enriched with compost provides an instant vegetable patch.

Constructing a raised bed can be done in one operation, or over several years, according to your needs and resources. When shifting topsoil from some other part of your garden (making a wildflower meadow, for example, or digging a pond), the topsoil could be mixed with compost to start a raised vegetable bed at the same time.

Another way to approach the project is to regard it as a long-term plan, putting walls around the bed when it has risen naturally after regular addition of compost. A magic mound can also be turned into a raised bed in time.

Construction

The bed should be narrow enough for you to reach the middle easily without walking on it (i.e. not more than about 4 ft, or 1.2 m, across). The height and length will depend on individual requirements, available space, and the nature of the wall materials.

A highway may have to support a considerable weight on one side only, and this must he taken into consideration, plus the fact that you might sit or lean on it while tending your patch. If you're using railway sleepers, their size will dictate the height and length of the bed.

Raised beds don't always have to he contained. When excess moisture is a problem, it is often preferable to have a free-formed convex bed; this presents a larger surface area for planting and for evaporation. Flat­ topped contained beds arc best for retaining moisture, however, because their surface area is smaller and their sides are sealed.

The walkways between raised beds can be finned with temporary paving materials. or made into permanent paths.

Flat or deep beds

Where soil is dry and light, raised beds often need much compost and/or imported topsoil.

Although a raised bed can retain moisture well if the crop is tightly packed to cover all the soil, a level bed is also appropriate on well-drained ground. If the ground is too well-drained for your requirements, a level bed can be improved by converting it into a kind of sunken raised bed, or deep bed.

Instead of building a deep bed above ground, the objective is to excavate a 4 ft (1. 2m) ­wide strip; you may also line the walls with impervious material before filling in with enriched soil. On deep sandy soils, it may be necessary to line the whole excavation with plastic sheet, like a pond, and to create a subsoil-topsoil system within this enclosure.

Hay-bale beds can be any size you like. Moisten thoroughly and then keep moist. Initial plantings are made into pockets of mild soil in the top layer. A s tune goes by, the high-N,fertilizer acts on the hay to replenish nutrients removed from the soil layer by plants

Hay bales

A hay bale can become a ready-made raised bed of developing compost. A layer of hay bales, watered with HLA (diluted urine) and/or smothered with fresh manure, then topped off with a 6 in. (15 cm) crust of finished compost, becomes a mini-plot for a succession of crops. Once it's been built, the hay bale needs to he kept moist for up to a month—until the composting process gets under way.

Then you can plant seedlings or seeds or sown into pockets or shallow drills. The best species to choose for the first year are green, leafy, nitrogen-greedy varieties.

This system is not for the dry garden, as it needs copious watering. In a wet and relatively difficult situation, however, the hay bale could provide an instant vegetable plot. It's especially valuable on wet clay soil. As the bale shrinks, worms incorporate some of it into the clay. Repeatedly placing hay bales in the same place eventually creates a deep raised bed of soft, rich humus, even on cold, wet clay.

The warmth generated by composting also helps to encourage growth, rather like (but more mildly than) the traditional hotbed.

The hay can be old and mouldy or fresh and green. Old and mouldy has the advantage of being cheap or even free (hut heavy to handle); fresh and green contains more nutrients but costs more to buy. If you have a wildflower meadow, you need look no farther for your hay—the only problem will be getting it baled tightly enough. You can use straw instead, but it will need more nitrogen in the form of manure or urine to activate it.

Wild edibles

All edible plants evolved from something that once grew wild. Wild plants are still a valuable food resource. (See Food From The Wild for information of wild edible plants.)

No-bed

Although having a special bed for vegetables is an efficient horticultural strategy—because it allows you to concentrate your resources—you don't have to make a vegetable bed in your garden if you don't want to.

Many vegetables can be grown almost as well among flowers, and some positively thrive when used as ornamental plants. Some vegetables, such as runner beans and tomatoes, were grown first as ornamentals and only later as food.

There are good ecological reasons for adopting an integrated approach.

First, it overcomes the problems caused by monoculture. Wherever a single crop is concentrated in one place, it becomes both a target and a paradise for pests and therefore invites a plague. Mingling vegetables with other plants and flowers reduces this risk.

Second, because integration is the basis of companion planting, it can bring some of the same benefits. Most vegetables, for instance, are gathered either before they flower or before their flowers open. The services of hover flies and other flower-attracted insects which feed on aphids are therefore sacrificed.

Mixing vegetables with flowers gives them the protection of these symbionts. In some cases, the surrounding plants can act as decoys, preventing pests from targeting your edibles. There are also the pest-repellent talents of some non­edibles.

Mixing edibles with ornamentals as an informal method of companion planting is attractive, practically and aesthetically.

Starting from seed

When raising seeds, there are several strategies to choose from. The choice depends on the type of vegetable you're growing, the time of year, and the state of your soil.

For an early start, you can raise many seeds in pots or trays indoors or in a warn greenhouse. Later, when the soil is warn, it's possible to sow the seeds of fast-growing or biennial crops directly into the ground. In between, there's the cold frame for starting seeds that will be transplanted into their final bed later, or the cloche for protecting in-situ sowings until the weather is warm enough for them to be exposed (see the Propagation section).

Stratification

In higher latitudes, there is a winter season between the forming of seed and the coming of spring. It's important that seeds don't sprout before the winter, when tender plants will be killed.

One way that plants insure themselves against this is to use frost as a trigger for germination: they won't germinate until after they have been subjected to low temperatures, so if you grow these plants you must allow for this either by sowing seeds in early winter and leaving them to be frosted naturally or by refrigerating them for several weeks.

Other plants have different requirements, and some seeds have sophisticated chemical devices to ensure germination at the right time. This makes them dependent on a brief exposure to light, arrival of water after a period of extreme drought, and so forth.

Some seeds—especially those contained within berries—may stand a better chance of germinating after they have passed through a bird's gut.

Pots and trays

When raising seeds, you can make all kinds of containers from household rubbish.

• Use plastic pots instead of conventional plant pots. Drainage holes should he cut or pierced around the sides at the base rather than underneath (a hole in a flat-bottomed pot won't drain freely if the pot is placed on a flat surface).
• Use old lavatory-paper tubes to make long, bottomless pots.
• Make pots any size you want from cardboard or a double sheet of newspaper. Uncoated cardboard or newspaper pots break down completely when planted out with their contents.
• If you have some plastic trays of the type used by supermarkets for prepacking fruit and vegetables, pierce drainage bores and using them as seed trays.
• Use clear plastic bags by turning them inside out and using them as mini-greenhouses for single pots or trays. Open the bags when the seeds sprout.

Growing medium

Seeds have their own food store and don't need rich soil to germinate.

Peat-based composts became popular because they're low in nutrients but high on texture, and generally "clean" of disease and viable seeds. Other sustainable alternatives are now becoming available; use them in preference to peat. These include mediums based on various by-products, such as coconut fibre, also called coir, and shredded hark.

You can make your own seed compost from well-rotted leafmould, or by mixing coir with sand, arid adding loam, perlite, leafinould, and/or well matured garden compost. When the seeds have germinated, nourishment can either be tailored to their individual needs or supplied with a balanced feed such as a seaweed-derived product.

Seedlings

Once germinated, seedlings need light and air. They can be grown until they're big enough to handle and/or thin out, when they can either be repotted or thinned out.

One of the greatest hazards to young seedlings is damping-off, a form of fungal stem rot which causes them to fall over sideways. The best defence is to keep everything clean; bring the seedlings on as fast as possible by keeping them warm. If the seedlings are covered with plastic bags or glass, take the covers off for a few hours during the day (if it's warm enough) to ensure good air circulation.

Worm compost is a powerful anti-damping-off agent. Soil that has passed through a worm's gut gives both protection and stimulation to seedlings. If worm compost is blended into the growing medium, it reduces the risk of damping off as well as providing other benefits.

At the right time and stage of growth, plant pot-grown seedlings in the vegetable plot, either by tapping them out of their plastic pot or by sinking the whole of a biodegradable pot into the soil.

Hardening off

If seedlings have been grown in a sheltered environment, such as in a greenhouse or cloche, or on a windowsill, they need time to become acclimatized to the outside world before being planted out.

Begin by allowing them out during the day in a sheltered position (or in situ with cloche opened); then increase the exposure—both degree and period—until they can cope.