GARDEN IDEAS
Double Your Crops
Double your crops by trying out these ideas and make your garden work for you, rather than the other way around!
Rotation:
When one crop comes out of the ground, quickly turn the earth and plant something else straight away. This could be late summer lettuce or over wintering varieties. Some beans can be succesfully planted in the autumn, in particular the broad bean, along with late variety cauliflowers and other brassicas. Make small cloches to protect your young plants. Cut a clear plastic bottle in half width-wise and voilà - 2 mini-cloches!
What you plant as a second crop will depend heavily on your area, climate and availability of seed. However, when this crop comes out in the spring, there will be far fewer weeds than if you had left your patch fallow all winter.
Don't do this every year as the earth will need feeding and resting, but even a small garden can be divided into rotatable patches, and if you get double your crops from one place, you won't need the extra space every year. Pile on as much green manure as you can and keep your fallow patch weed free.
Double your crops with Companions:
Plant your crops close together so those pesky weeds don't get a chance to come up. Companion planting enables you not only to save space in the garden, double your crops and control the weeds, it will also help with pest control. A line of onions next to a line of carrots for example confuses both the onion fly and the carrot fly.
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Plant your good companion plants close together but avoid putting large crops of the same species too close. Plant a tomato plant here and there round the garden, then if one plant gets a disease, it won't easily spread to the other plants. The same with cabbages. The cabbage white butterfly, enemy of all brassica growers everywhere, won't be so attracted to your garden if the cabbages aren't neatly planted in rows.
Double your crops with Raised Beds:
Not only good for controlling the weeds and saving space to double your crops, but also great for controlling aching backs! The raised bed system in principal means you don't walk on your beds, and therefore they should be organised to no wider than a couple of metres.
You need to be able to reach everywhere on the bed without stepping onto the soil at all. Once dug, fill with plants and hoe regularly. When your first crop has been harvested, fork over the soil lightly. It shouldn't need any heavy digging again for some years.
Permanent Patches:
Keep permanent patches in your garden. A small herb patch or corner in your vegetable garden will attract bees and also give you and your family lots of new tastes, natural medicines and even cosmetic preparations. Herbs will establish themselves fairly quickly and will thrive with regular picking. You honestly won’t know what to do with all those wonderful fresh herbs, that would otherwise cost you a fortune in the supermarket.
Another great permanent patch to create is asparagus. Most new gardeners are put off growing this wonderful vegetable because of all sorts of crazy reasons. I’ve even heard it said that it’s a ‘luxury’ crop – whatever that may mean!
Asparagus is extremely good for you, is ready to pick during the ‘hungry gap’ from the vegetable garden, and best of all, with very little attention, it will produce more and more every year, so will more than double your crops in the long term. Create a permanent asparagus bed and indulge in the luxury!
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Fruit bushes will crop year after year with the minimum of maintenance. Raspberry canes tend to be hardy - and who could resist a home grown raspberry or three...
This variety at Thompson & Morgan (UK) is Autumn fruiting and they also have summer fruiting and golden varieties.
Raspberry 'Autumn Bliss' (Autumn fruiting)
Excellent flavour
Perfect for growing in smaller gardens and containers
Ideal for eating fresh or freezing