Lesson 2 - Planning your vegetable growing
To plan your growing do some research around the types of vegetables that will best suit your site and your circumstances. Most annual vegetables have defined lifecycle, from the seed germination through to harvest, referred to as the ‘days to maturity’. Different vegetables have different temperature and light requirements – so are best suited to a particular season – knowing this helps to plan when and where you will plant. In temperate areas this is warm season vs. cool season, however in warmer and tropical locations there is much more flexibility in terms of growing times. Generally winter season vegetables will be sown and then grow over winter and spring to harvest; while summer vegetables are sown or planted in spring and then harvested over summer and autumn. Most regions have advice or guides for vegetable growing for each month of the year indicating the best times for sowing or planting. For many herbs and perennial plants, planting them in a dedicated space or container in the garden is preferred. It ensures that they are not disturbed by the planting and harvesting of adjoining annual plants and provides for easier management and harvest.
While many gardeners prefer to sow seed directly when growing vegetables, there is also no harm in purchasing seedlings. They may be a little slower to establish compared to sowing seed directly, but they can be easier to handle and manage, especially if you are starting out and are unfamiliar with seed sowing. It’s also possible to grow your own seedlings yourself indoors, such as a windowsill before planting outdoors.
Many of the easiest to grow vegetables are also those that have relatively short lifecycles, meaning they can be sown and then harvested just a few weeks or a month later, examples include lettuce, radish, spinach and kale. Others will take many months of growing to harvest, such as beetroot, cabbage, and many of the family Solanaceae – tomato, eggplant, capsicum, etc. If space allows, consider successive sowings or plantings of the same crop in your garden. This staggers the harvest, avoiding a glut of produce at the one time, and can provide an almost continuous harvest. Vegetables such as lettuce, spinach, radish, carrots, peas, beans and spring onions in particular lend themselves to this approach. For some crops it can be useful to grow them when pest and disease loads will be low. Many of the brassicas – cabbage, broccoli, kale, etc. – can be grown at almost any time of the year. But when they are grown over winter-spring in cooler climates they are not subject to the same pest problems that they have over summer, especially the damaging Cabbage White Butterfly (Pieris rapae).
Diggers tip
Do some research. There are many, many cultivars of different vegetable species, there are perhaps 10,000 named cultivars of tomatoes for example. Some cultivars will be suited to different times of the year, some are resistant to particular pests and diseases and others vary in terms of their days to maturity. Talk to friends and colleagues to see what they have grown and had good experiences with.