Vegmonkey and the Mrs.

Being a primary school teacher means i get more extended holidays than most people. This enables me to spend lots of time out in the garden during the main planting time of Easter, but also to get on top of things during the Winter season. The last day or so has been spent looking at the successes, failures and ‘missing parts!’ of last year’s veg planting plan and doing lots of scribbling and crossing out to improve it.

The main changes are:

1. The plot will be a lot fuller (i forgot to plant many ‘leaves’ this year and hardly any winter veg that grew.)

2. There will be no flowers growing in the beds (they will have their own pots…somewhere as they seemed to take over, particularly the sunflowers, as the beneficial insects are only good if there is space to grow!)

3. Potatoes will be added into the rotation (i’ve decided that First Earlies can go in before the leeks need the space.)

4. The colours have been changed to make the plan easier to read.

I have included the ‘winter veg planner’ below. Click it or print to make it easier to read. This is the best quality i could get it before it became too large for the page! Things like tomatoes, sweetcorn, lettuces etc and herbs will all be grown in pots, hanging baskets or in the beds where there is space (!?). I will add a section for these later next week. I know a few people have been following some parts of the plan. I hope that things have worked, and would love to hear about any successes, failures, questions or recommendations!

I know the plan may look a bit ‘much’ but i know that this way, we are more likely, via the 4 year rotation, to have less diseases in each veg family, to know exactly what and where we can grow and to grow plants in an order so that the previous years plants prepare the soil for the next years!

 Happy planning!

I sort of decided too late that veg for Christmas dinner would be a good idea, so we only had a few ickle baby carrots as shown below. Still, quite rewarding considering it is almost January. 12 degrees where we are today, who’d a’ thought it (almost warm enough to start planting)! We also ate carrots that had been blanched then frozen from September, and parsnips and leeks that had been harvested and stored in sand for the last couple of months.

This was our first Christmas in the new house, and also our first married Christmas, so it was extra special. We had both sets of parents visiting for Christmas day, and a lot of Christmas food. Needless to say we have rather a lot still left over…looks like turkey for dinner ’til 2009!

It’s also 8 months since we started doing what we are doing! The garden is alive and well, a few things anyway. I’ve left the rest of the carrots that were planted for Christmas lunch in the soil, with a cover over so that come Feb we will hopefully have some lovely big carrots…i hope…it’s worth an experiment anyhow, never overwintered then before!

Finally, the garden had a new present of it’s own today, 2 brand new 6V batteries in the cat scarer….it’s now ‘purring’ perfectly.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all who visit us here.

Vegmonkey and the Mrs.