We now have 12 raised beds in our kitchen garden, giving us a total cultivated area of about 110 sqm . The big project last year was to get our polytunnel up and running. This we achieved and it has proved very useful for raising seedlings for the beds and for providing us with an almost inexhaustible supply of aubergines, tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes, melons, and basil. It covers 70 sqm (approx 800 sq ft) and is our little piece of the Mediterranean here in the cooler and wetter part of the British Isles that is County Leitrim.
We have had a good year with large amounts of produce to choose from - a bit too much if you want to know the truth. The early potatoes, varieties Charlotte and Pentland Javelin did well although they were somewhat later than usual this year. The leeks are doing very well and should keep us supplied through the late autumn and winter. Leeks are not a vegetable grown or indeed eaten that much in Ireland which is a great shame given how much they appreciate moist rich soil and cooler conditions. This spring we covered most of the raised beds with a thick layer of farmyard manure and it has worked wonders. We use a combination of approaches, employing the researches of 3 famous vegetable gardeners in particular:
John Jeavons has been leading a team of researchers in Northern California for more than 35 years now and in his book How to Grow More Vegetables ( http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/book/9781580087964/How-to-Grow-More-Vegetables), he explains how to create the raised beds that lead to very high yields and he does this completely organically.
Charles Dowding has been growing vegetables and in particular, salad leaves, in Somerset and France for more than 25 years. His Organic Gardening: The Natural No-Dig Way explains how to achieve great results without even digging! ( http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/book/9781903998915/Organic-Gardening ).
Joy Larkcom is the widely acknowledged Queen of English Vegetable Gardening and is responsible for the introduction of many of the Italian and Oriental vegetables that are commonly available today. For the minutest details on each vegetable and indeed on all aspects of vegetable gardening, she has no equal. A lovely lady who I once had the pleasure of meeting whilst working in Raymond Blanc's Kitchen Garden at his Oxfordshire restaurant, Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons - a short break from the world of finance. Her book, Grow Your Own Vegetables, contains all you will neeed to know on the subject ( http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/book/9780711219632/Grow-Your-Own-Vegetables ). She has published many other, more specialist books, on the subject but they are too many to list here.
We use the three books above to manange our own kitchen garden. Whilst John Jeavons advocates digging the beds every year, Charles Dowding takes the opposite view of never digging at all. I agree with Joy Larkcom that if you happen to find yourself gardening on a heavy clay soil or indeed any clay soil, it is most definitely of benefit to double-dig the bed at least once. I double-dug all our beds last year and have no intention of doing it again! I will fork them over at least once a year instead.
The benefits of raised bed gardening soon become apparent. Some people have been known to dismiss them as not necessary. They're not absolutely necessary if you happen to live in one of the drier parts of the British Isles but the difference in yield is worth the extra effort as plants benefit enormously from the deeper and uncompacted soil. The Greeks and Chinese noticed millennia ago that plants grew much better in loose soil. In actual fact, potatoes have long been grown in Ireland in raised beds (called ridges here).
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| Spring in the Kitchen Garden |
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