Sally shares some of her expert knowledge her latest 'The New Good Life' episode. Covering the three main elements - planning, plotting and planting as well as advice for beginners, companion planting and layouts. Just click play below!
Transcript
I'm Sally Coulthard I'm an author and small holder and spent two decades building the good life with my family and animals in the Yorkshire Countryside.
Gardeners often say that March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb but living in North Yorkshire I found that true of the entire spring season it starts off wet and bitterly cold but by the end of the season we can be bathed in warm sunshine. This unpredictability can be tricky so I spend a good chunk of spring planning, especially what I'm going to plant in the veg garden.
Each year is different thinking and drawing out my ideas something I wanted to share with you today now the first thing you've got to think about when you're planning your veg garden is what you'd actually like to grow, it's really helpful to think about three things when you're choosing your vegetables.
The first is what do you actually like to eat, I grow all the things that my family and I enjoy for dinner so we have things like aubergines, tomatoes, lettuces things that we're going to eat on a daily basis.
The second category I think about is what's actually really expensive in supermarkets or green grocers at the moment. So I tend to grow kinds of unusual varieties or herbs and vegetables that are quite tricky to get, so I tend not to grow brassicas very much I don't tend to grow many potatoes because they tend to be pretty good value anyway.
Then the third thing you've got to think about is is actually how much can you eat and how much can you store there's a temptation when you're first vegetable gardening to just grow as much as you possibly can and then come late summer you'll have a massive glut of vegetables that you actually can't do anything with. So the really good idea is to think about how am I going to eat this and if I can't eat it how am I going to store it, I mean there are lots of ways you can store things you can pickle them you can dry them you can freeze them but just bear that in mind.
If you're knew to vegetable gardening it can be a bit worrying about what to choose to grow but actually be reassured most things just want to grow and you can't really go wrong however there are a few plants that when I started vegetable gardening I started with and they were really really easy so the first thing is lettuce you just sew it outside and it should grow like stink and you'll be eating fresh salads all summer long.
Another good vegetable, peas they are dead easy to look after and really hardy especially in this part of the world where it can be quite cold even in spring. Rainbow Chard is another one and that will just keep coming and coming and coming and you'll have gorgeous leafy greens right through until October, and then finally two absolute stalwarts of the garden and that's beetroot and carrot and they are absolutely delicious and you'll still be pulling those up in Autumn.
So now you've decided what you're going to grow the next stage of planning a Garden is to grab a pencil and a measuring tape and let's start plotting I found it really useful over the years when I've been planning my veg Garden to create a good Scale map so I can think about what goes where but also if I'm adding extra structures to the Garden like raised beds or greenhouses or fruit cages, I can work out if they're actually going to fit in the space.
The first thing I've done is I've been outside and I've just created a really rough sketch of the outside space doesn't have to be perfect it was really quick but the key thing was to get some good measurements because that's what I'm going to use to create a scale drawing, once I've come back in I've got some good measurements which I'll use my surveyor tape for you can use an ordinary tape measure and start plotting out.
I don't have a massive sheet of paper here so I've just stuck A4 sheets together and I find that's absolutely fine and actually it has a added bonus if I can fold it away at the end of the day and not worried about it. When you're drawing your plan I found the absolute easiest scale to work with is 1 to 100, now scale rulers I think can look sometimes a bit intimidating and if you're not brilliant at maths like me one of the easiest scales that you can choose to work with is 1 to 100, and what that means practically is that 1cm on your plan is 1m in real life and that's a doddle that means if you're drawing a raised bed that's 2m x 2m on your plan it'll be 2cm x 2cm.
I do a complete plan of the garden, I've included lots of different features that are in the garden things like the hedges, the fences, the gates and then I've plotted the things that are really important in my veg Garden for me which are the things like the raised beds where the position of the garden greenhouse is, the flower beds, the fruit cages, it just really helps me work out where I've got space.
When I've got that all nicely plotted out you can then start thinking about adding layers to it and this is great because these can change your on year and so I use tracing paper I lay over my design and I start to think about what plants are going to grow where now, I've already got some sweet peas planned for the edge of the herb garden but I think I'm going to try, I've got some space here to incorporate a climbing rose so I shall make that note on my plan there we go climbing rose, and I'll train that to grow up through the Hedge as well which will look really beautiful and then if you want to go one stage further or ever add new structural elements to your Garden, this is a really fun bit I started to create little Scale Models.
So here's a weeny greenhouse and the idea of this is it's not just a nice way to pass a few hours on a wet Sunday afternoon, here's my fruit cages but actually when you're adding new structural elements to the Garden you need to actually be able to navigate your way around them, they've got to be practical, they've got to be scaled to the size of your garden, you don't want something too big too small.
Now gardeners often talk about right plant, right place, but what does that even mean. I think what it means is thinking about the practicalities of where certain plants Thrive best in the garden and how you can get the most out of where you place your vegetables in a plot. For me one of the biggest deals is practicality and how close the things that I need from the garden are going to be to the door so I tend to plant the vegetables that I eat the most often closest to the door that's things like herbs, lettuces, spring onions, things that I'm going to be using in my cooking every day.
The second thing you need to think about is orientation and what that really means is just where the sun shines plants like this which is an artichoke need bags of sunshine and so I like to place plants like these full sun and that means facing south. In fact most vegetables really like quite a lot of sunshine, so when you're planning out your vegetable garden you just need to think about where the shade is and where the sunshine is.
There's a third aspect to your vegetable garden called companion planting and essentially what that means is which plants get along together and which even can help each other a great example of this is leeks, now any member of the allium family are brilliant at deterring a certain pest called carrot fly, and so I'll plant my carrot seedlings next to the alliums but you could also plant them next to onions, spring onions, any basically any member of the allium family.
Another really nice form of companion planting is planting flowers that attract beneficial pollinators so here I've planted sweet peas, and these will hopefully grow up this Arch that I've put here and will attract bees, butterflies, and other beneficial pollinators that are going to pollinate my fruit and vegetable and make sure that we have a fantastic Harvest.
I absolutely love living in the countryside, but one of the only downsides is that it's a real battle sometimes when you're growing soft fruit to keep them away from the birds and so a few years ago we decided to put up three fruit cages and try and grow different varieties of soft fruit in them.
In the first one we're trying Autumn fruiting raspberries now we've not had much luck with raspberries actually over the years so fingers crossed this is a new variety that we're trying and hopefully we'll have something by the end of the summer. In here we have blackcurrants which are absolutely brilliant and one of the easiest soft fruits to grow and they just keep coming and coming and they're brilliant in desserts and we use them all the time. Ee also have rhubarb in here it doesn't need to be in a fruit cage but actually it's great because it's a bit of a spreader and there's a bit of space there.
Not everything you grow in a veg Garden will be a success and that is absolutely fine and absolutely normal we've tried year upon year to grow blueberries it should be fine in this climate but they just won't take and this year in the back fruit cage there we're actually trying a new type of cultivated blackberry and a choke Berry which I've never eaten before and so that's going to be a real adventure and that's sitting alongside a pink Gooseberry which is absolutely perfect and keeps on coming year after year.
Now I've been growing vegetables for about 20 years now and I really think that raised beds are the absolutely best way to do it not only are they really neat and ordered which makes your life easier when you're gardening, but they're also brilliant at a height that stops your back from hurting and also it seems to really deter pests like rabbits from eating all your delicious vegetables.
This is a really sunny quarter of the garden and so I'm planting everything this year that absolutely loves the sunshine, so from everything from French beans to broad beans, I've got my potatoes in here this is going to be petit pois and then at the back lettuce. And then behind me I'm just trying new ways of growing things up plant supports so this year I'm going to try climbing courgettes and different types of squashes, so hopefully by about June/July this should absolutely be bursting with life.
I really rely on plant supports when I'm growing in my vegetable garden everything from climbing French beans to peas even to broad beans needs some kind of support but also it gives a bit of protection from things like chickens or other animals that are trying to eat my vegetables.
I love thinking of different ways of bending the twigs and creating lovely lines in the garden this is going to support the peas but it doesn't mean I haven't added a few decorative flourishes