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Clever gardening

When you’re gardening in a small space, you need to be clever to make the most of what you’ve got. Or at least a little thoughtful. Wasting space at any time seems rather silly and isn’t necessary at all. You just need a little planning.

One of the topics we are covering at the Urban Veg Growing worksop tonight is successional planting. There are some crops which are over by mid-summer, and some which don’t really take off until a little later. And this means that you can get two crops out of one bed in the same season.

These lettuces are growing happily in the raised bed where, once the weather has improved a little, the pumpkins and squashes will be throwing out their enormous leaves. As squash cannot stomach frosts, they don’t go out until the start of June, which leaves weeks of early-season growing. And so I’ve sown cos lettuces, lines of mustard and rocket, broad beans and peas in their bed in the meantime. No space is wasted.

I do the same with my new potatoes and tomatoes. By the time the golden tubers are ready to come up, the tomatoes are desperate to go in, and so save for half an hour of adding more compost and some comfrey leaves, the bed isn’t empty from March until late September when I sow a green manure in readiness for next year.

Keen to get organised? Here are some early season or fast-growing crops which will give you space for tender veg later:

Salad crops
Broad beans
Overwintered chard and kale
New potatoes
Peas
Radishes

And here are some crops which prefer to be planted out later, leaving a bed empty for a couple of months in the growing season:

Pumpkins, squashes and courgettes
Tomatoes
Climbing beans
Sweetcorn

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