Getting a quick crop

The vegetable garden gets going quickly thanks to plug plants.

When I moved in to my new house, one of the things I was very keen to do was to get the vegetable garden up and running as quickly as possible. I stumbled across Quickcrop’s website, and ordered one of their 84-cell plant plug trays. This is very fun to put together as you can choose exactly what vegetables you want by dragging them into the tray designer on the website:

When the plants arrived, they were neatly labelled, in good condition, and protected from the knocks and bumps of a journey with plenty of straw:

I’ve been planting them around the garden, including in my lovely herb garden table. Here they were on their first day in the soil:

Here they are three weeks ago:

And here they are now:

I’ve been getting great harvests for lunch, breakfast and supper for two people every day from the mizuna and the rocket. Here’s my scrambled eggs and mizuna breakfast from earlier this week:

As you can see, the rocket has bolted, which in my opinion is never a bad thing as the edible flowers are so, so pretty:

Once the rocket has gone over, the red cabbage next to it will need the space anyway, so the plants will come up, receive a once-over from the hens, and then finally make their way up to my compost heap. I ordered purple-sprouting broccoli, red cabbage, rainbow chard, italian kale, russian kale, mustard salad leaves, mizuna, rocket, pan choi, basil, coriander, sugar snap peas. The only plant I’ve been disappointed with is the sugar snap peas, which are weedy and dry, but I suspect that this is my very poor chalky soil that’s at fault.

Thanks to Quickcrop for getting me set up in my garden: I normally find it easier to grow my vegetables from seed, but as I couldn’t very well do that surrounded by packing cases, this is a godsend.