Last year we grew onions and garlic in bed one, potatoes in bed two and salad leaves, beetroot, cabbages, runner beans, courgettes and purple sprouting broccoli in bed three. We also had tomatoes in pots.
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| Photo from May 2013 |
Our plans for 2014 are being guided by a certain bit of news though. We've decided to take a few months unpaid leave from our jobs and do some travelling. We'll be out of the country for all of September, October and November and we're going to spend most of our time in New Zealand, though we're also stopping in Canada, Australia and Thailand. As you can imagine we're rather excited about this and I'm sure you'll hear more about it all as time goes on.
This has made us think more carefully about what we're planting. Not being here during the autumn is a little limiting, but means we can focus on those crops that will keep us going all summer.
Bed One was an easy decision. We really enjoyed having a fresh spuds in the garden all summer, and it saved us quite a bit on buying little polythene bags of baby potatoes from the supermarket. We'd mostly finished our potato crop by September and so we'll just plant a couple less plants this year, focusing on early varieties.
We've gone for Pink Fir Apple and Pentland Javelin which we had great success with last year, and have added Red Duke of York as a variety we've not tried before. These all came from the garden centre where they have a range of loose potatoes on a "fill a bag" basis. We found last year that this worked really well for us as one bag is plenty for our space and we could fill it with a mixture of varieties. Joe set these out to chit at the weekend.
Bed Two is going to be given over to fresh salad leaves this year. We can plant these as we go along and again should keep us going for all those summer months before our trip. We'll let you know what we plant when we make such decisions.
We then had a bit of a debate about Bed Three. We had wondered about leaving it fallow, then considered planting a green manure, before stumbling on the answer; peas! We're going to fill the bed with peas and broad beans which hopefully we'll enjoy for several months (read: be fed up of by the time we leave), and should hopefully do the soil some good too.
We've chosen "Hurst Green Shaft" pea variety and "Red Epicure" bean variety this year. Yes - a red broad bean, we were intrigued and decided that this definitely needed investigation (particularly with a description such as "'beany' flavour" - who could resist).
And thats it. We're keeping it simple and hopefully this should leave us with some time to get on with the rest of the garden as well.