Last year was the first time we ever grew our own vegetables on a scale to potentially feed ourselves, and we think it was reasonably successful. More importantly, we gained a lot of experience and we’re going to hopefully make our vegetable garden even more productive this year.
This week we planned out what we’re going to grow, and everything will be grown from seed. Our seeds are predominantly from DT Brown and last year they were a huge success. Everything we sowed turned out great.
We’re going to aspire to maximise the production of vegetables from our beds while also increasing the variety of things we grow, and we’re also going to rotate things from bed to bed to prevent any potential disease.
We still have bags and bags of potatoes left, a few pumpkins and the garlic reserves are still going strong. This year, we want to repeat our garlic and potato haul, and we want to have a lot more onions that we can store too.
So with the plan firmly entered into my trusty spreadsheet, if the weather behaves, we’ll start our seeding process in March. They’ll all be in pots in our studio that stays quite warm because of the huge glass windows.
Consider collecting your own seed from the previous summer’s crops. A very rewarding activity, not to mention some significant cost savings.
A great suggestion Jasper. That is something I was considering this season. We did retain garlic cloves, beans and seed potatoes from last year’s harvest. I will be more adventurous this year and try to save and dry other seeds too. Any tips you have would be greatly welcome.
If you’re planning to save seed, keep cross pollination in mind. You might end up with whole new varieties! 😀
Good luck with your growing. If you go to realseeds.co.uk they have instructions for saving seed which are very clear and easy to use. It only works if you grow from open pollinated seed (which all theirs are) – F1 hybrids will not produce seed that comes true even if they produce viable seed at all.
[…] a printout of our 2021 vegetable planting plan in hand, and a box full of seeds from DT Brown, we spent a few hours seeding all the vegetables […]