Planning to Win – The Garden Planning Blueprint

This post originally featured in my column in Scotland Grows magazine, a free bi-monthly gardening publication. Check it out here.

The nights are fair drawing in aren’t they? And it’s getting harder and harder to do anything meaningful in the veg garden. Your winter crops are ticking over nicely and the usual end of season tidying is all done, leaves cleared up and lawn mower oiled and sitting waiting for next year. So what is a gardener to do? Plan for next year of course. So grab yourself a cuppie, a pen and paper and make a plan of what to grow come the spring. 

Plan to Win – The Gardener’s Secret Weapon

Winter is a great time to reflect on the veg growing year: what went well, what didn’t? Which varieties of potatoes did the best? Will you try kale but this time keep the pigeons (kids?) off the young plants?

It’s also a good time to flick through the seed catalogues and choose seeds and plants for next year. I’m a big fan of keeping veg growing as simple as possible. Self provisioning is about taking as much nutrition as you can from whatever garden space you have. And so I focus on easy, reliable crops that my family love to eat. 

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t experiment though. You might just discover the perfect variety of courgette that adores your garden’s climate. I like to do a rough sketch of my plot and plan out where everything is going. That way I can compare this against what I grew last year and avoid any mistakes as well as practice crop rotation. Which brings me on to… 

C’mon Baby, Do the Crop Rotation

Rotating your crops is important for a few reasons. Firstly you prevent diseases like clubroot building up in the soil. Also repeatedly growing the same crops in the same spot depletes the soil of nutrients over time. Thirdly, some vegetables like rich soil, others prefer lower nutrients. But how can you achieve this through mere crop rotation?

The simplest way to achieve this is through the ‘3 bed’ rotation system. Working across three beds (or a multiple e.g. 6 or 9), in the first bed you grow roots such as carrots, beetroot or potatoes, In the second you grow fruit crops such as squash, beans, peas. In the third you grow you grow brassicas – think cabbage, kale and broccoli. Then next year you rotate everything across by one – so last year’s bed 1 now has the brassicas, bed 2 has the roots and bed 3 has the fruit crops. 

This has a few purposes:

• You keep your brassicas moving, preventing clubroot building up.
• They also like nutrient depleted soil so having them follow squash and then roots means the soil will be quite low in nutrients.
• You can target your manure on one bed – the ‘fruits and legumes’ which like fertile soils
• It’s really easy to remember!

Give it a go – make a plan, practice crop rotation and do the best for your soil and your veg. 

Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail

It only takes a few minutes to make a plan for the year ahead. A bit of browsing, sketching and BAM! – you’ve planned the garden of your dreams. So give it a go and have fun.

Neil

P.S. If you enjoyed reading this, I wrote a book called ‘The Self Provisioner’ which you can buy on Amazon and loads of other places. Get it here.