Limited Living

[polaris2582]

This year has been a particularly wet one for us so far, no tots by the sea and hurricane conditions blowing in has turned our ground to marsh. Last year I spent a long time watching how our garden grew and taking note of everything. Our greenhouse definitely needs sterilisation and reflooring after housing the rabbits for the winter but on to that later.

I have set myself the challenge of buying no meat or veg this year, with the rabbits not breeding yet, only escaping! We have what looks like a lean summer coming if we're not careful! I plan to make the most possible use out of our available ground as I can and have started planning carefully.

I have one 6x8 green house, cement floored with two story shelving on South East side. Outside I have three raised beds, one 4x8 and two 6x8, 8 inches deep. I also have five fish boxes and a flower border I plan to take advantage of.

One question I have is, if I build a new raised bed now, fill it with seaweed, rabbit and hen bedding/poo... When would it be ready to plant (anything!) on??

I have a bed at the moment which is 40% old soil, 10% rotting veg scraps, and 50% used rabbit and hen bedding! I was planning on putting potatoes on it this year, and squash on the new bed in a couple of months (soon as possible really).

I also have a majority of small tubs I plan to put into use.

I will be starting a thread to document the whole endeavour but for now I'm looking for the experts in planning! I grew some amount of veg last year (tomatoes, leeks, salads, potatoes (ruined), beets (slugs), rhubarb (weak/caterpillars), courgettes (brilliant!), peas (brilliant), radishes (BRILLIANT).

What veg do you double plant during the season? Are there any you have good luck getting two lots out of one patch of ground?

I quite like the idea of runner beans with lettuce below etc....

[diggernotdreamer]

I would say use your tubs to grow salad crops, carrots and radish. Make your new bed with all the stuff you have got and then plant it up with no dig potatoes, put in a couple of wigwams over the top and you can then put runner bean transplants on one and french bean or pea transplants on the other, this will give you three good crops out of the same bed, when space was at a premium, it was a method I employed. I don't know if you grow a lot of transplants, but you can get away with planting through lots of mulchy and partly rotted materials that way. A very good crop is Tuscan black kale, you can have it cropping at virtually any time of the year and when young the leaves can be used as salad, the larger leaves then used in stir fries and eventually when it starts to flower you have some very tasty shoots to harvest so is well worth the space and starts producing in a very short time. Hispi cabbage is very good, maturing quickly and producing very nice heads. Not everyone realised that when you cut a cabbage, that is not the end, by cutting a cross into the top of the stalk, it will quickly start to sprout and produce four little cabbage heads which you can harvest and quite often it will keep on going for a very long time before running out of puff.

[polaris2582]

I would say use your tubs to grow salad crops, carrots and radish. Make your new bed with all the stuff you have got and then plant it up with no dig potatoes, put in a couple of wigwams over the top and you can then put runner bean transplants on one and french bean or pea transplants on the other, this will give you three good crops out of the same bed, when space was at a premium, it was a method I employed. I don't know if you grow a lot of transplants, but you can get away with planting through lots of mulchy and partly rotted materials that way. A very good crop is Tuscan black kale, you can have it cropping at virtually any time of the year and when young the leaves can be used as salad, the larger leaves then used in stir fries and eventually when it starts to flower you have some very tasty shoots to harvest so is well worth the space and starts producing in a very short time. Hispi cabbage is very good, maturing quickly and producing very nice heads. Not everyone realised that when you cut a cabbage, that is not the end, by cutting a cross into the top of the stalk, it will quickly start to sprout and produce four little cabbage heads which you can harvest and quite often it will keep on going for a very long time before running out of puff.

Very very good advice!! This is exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for, I have some wigwams packed away from last years pea endeavours and I'm topping off the beds tomorrow.

Would tatties be ok in such a raw/non-decomposed bed? I'm just worried about them burning or other... I've never used a bed that wasn't at least three years seasoned before. I'm more used to having to add to beds rather than dilute... :) we prefer small waxy potatoes, would this make a difference?

Sorry, I'm a complete veg variety novice, but extremely eager to learn! I'm perusing seed websites with all the sense of a lost goose at the moment... "Oh, that looks tasty.... Oh that looks tasty too!"

[diggernotdreamer]

April 1st (1).JPG (144 KiB) Viewed 3075 times

First picture I had rolled landscape fabric along this area and partially killed off the grass, then from about February to April, I had been piling the chicken bedding along the length of the new bed (shavings and droppings) I think I got the seed potatoes around the middle of April and just roughly dug holes and popped the tubers in, covered with damp newspaper and a covering of whatever I have around, usually spoiled hay and grassmowings and then as the tubers come through, earthing up with more mowings. Had a brilliant crop of spuds, all my sarpo experiements, Blue Danube, Sarpo Mira and Axona, Maya Gold and a few other odd tubers I had leftover from planting elsewhere. No problems at all. The bottom picture is the same bed planted up with my new garlic I bought fresh last year. You wouldn't be able to sow seeds in here because of the decomposition going on that could inhibit germination, but transplants do fine for me, been gardening in this wibbly wobbly fashion for a long time now. Some of my leftover spuds were Anya which are lovely and waxy, they grew very well. If you grow earlies and your beans etc are still producing, you can always tickle some spuds out and leave the rest to grow away