One of the key parts in the foundation of how we produce our food is the vegetable sowing plan I developed over 13 years ago. In the intervening years there have been a few minor tweaks, but over the same time there have been some major changes in the way we eat, one of those being to move towards a vegetarian diet. This was not taken into account in the original plan. Also we have experimented and learned more about what things work, and what don’t and what new crops we like, and what we don’t.
After all the time and changes I decided it was time for a full review, so that our prime document was updated to take into account these significant changes, kept up with the times and continued to be useful to us. The process which I followed was -
- Annual vegetables/varieties we no longer ate – things like wong bok, mizuna, and button squash, and the summer dome variety of broccoli which is a hybrid.
- Perennial vegetables – which shouldn’t have been in a vegetable sowing plan designed for annuals in the first place, eg asparagus or Jerusalem artichokes,
- Others – plants which I had originally designed to be part of the rotation but worked out fairly early on that all they really did was take up space which could be more usefully filled by annual vegetables eg marigolds and nasturtiums (Yes I know nasturtiums are edible as well as a companion plant, but I am not a fan of the flavour!)
4. The varieties we grow of each veg have an impact on the flavour, texture and growing characteristics (eg early, main crop or late season etc.). Stupid as it sounds, after years of growing long green and crystal apple cucumbers, I found that we actually prefer Lebanese cucumbers. Also while we started out growing a number of lettuce varieties (including iceberg for some stupid reason!) we have settled on two leaf (as opposed to heading) lettuce varieties. These varieties (Green Mignonette and oakleaf) lend themselves to being used as a cut-and-come-again crop, which extends the harvest and gives us a small amount of lettuce every day rather than a whole stack in one lump which we would then have to preserve somehow. We also tried two very early tomatoes (stupice and kotlas) for a few years but found they didn’t work very well here so we went back to using a main crop (grosse lisse). We have, however, added a determinate tomato (mayan indian), the advantage of which is they do tend to ripen as a whole and so provide a harvest of tomatoes we use for preserving.
5. Change Amounts – During the years we have found that we like some crops more than I thought we would. Silver beet is a good example of this, we started out growing a bit here and there but now we use it quite a bit and have changed the plan to sow enough for two plants every two weeks.
6. Adjust dates – This is mainly for our broccoli crop. When we first started out with the plan 12 years ago, I was able to grow broccoli all year round, but the increasing heat of the western Sydney summer has meant that, even with the crop covers in place, this is no longer possible. So I have had to adjust the dates so that we are only growing broccoli to mature outside the hottest part of summer. This a continuing story and will probably require further tweaking in the future.
With all of the work now done I can press the new veggie sowing plan into service. You can download a copy of it here.
