- What often happens is, at
the start of a growing season, people plant like crazy
because they're excited about growing their veg, and rightly so, why wouldn't you be? But what also can happen is the veggies that you so furiously planted
at the start of that season tend to pitter out before
the season is actually over, leaving a gap of time when you
could have still been growing and harvesting good, fresh, clean veg. I like to call this, the veggie gap. And because I think a
veggie gap is unfair, I'm gonna give you my
five top things you can do to grow more veg all
season right to the end. Let's get into it. (gentle music)
(birds singing) Number one is over sewing,
crowd growing, sardines, whatever you wanna call it, my vegetables don't
practice social distancing. I squish them in nice and close because they don't mind
being snuggled together and I can get more out of a smaller space. I then thin the plants out
over the growing season so I harvest baby greens,
baby carrots in this case, baby celeriac, baby
beets, baby everything. I just love babies. Now I'm not saying there's anything wrong with spacing your veggies
out as is on the packet, or as people recommend,
but lots of vegetables can be grown this way
and extend that harvest. You say well, how can I extend the harvest because you'll have the
larger maturer ones at the end but there might still be a
gap before the season's over? Well, sometimes yes, but
often because they are grown closer together, they
compete with each other and because of that competition, they grow a little slower. You might not want this for everything, but in these types of crops for example, lettuce, celeriac,
carrots, those types of veg don't hurt at all to
compete with each other. And as you're harvesting the baby greens, the baby carrots, you're then leaving room for the other ones to
finally mature and grow on and often, this does extend the harvest. In this bed here, they're
not all the same crop. I've got onions, lettuce, some dill, so a real mixture and
I know that the onions always grow slower and
then they start to speed up as the season starts to end
here in our part of the world. Growing 'em all crowded in
together is a really good example of being able to maximize
space and grow more with less over an extended period. Number two is nutrition or fertilizer and it's not what you think, I'm not gonna give you
guys the same old spiel how you've gotta give
your plants enough food or they won't sustain themselves
throughout the season. I know that's a given. I'm gonna approach this
a little bit differently and I'm gonna approach it the
exact way I always have done practically in my own garden,
which might surprise you. This is just about the
end of our cow manure. It looks like soil, doesn't it? But it's actually dried cow manure. And I love using that in the garden. It's not overly fertile,
but behind us here is the remaining pile of chicken
manure that I've got also, which is quite potent. Look how thick it is. So, a little bit of this goes
a long way in the garden. I like doing things easy and for me, it's about preparation at
the start of the season or preparation on that garden
bed before I plant something and letting it sustain itself. This whole row of healthy
looking beets and peas, just look at 'em. Look at how green and lush they are. Yes, they're all crowded
in together as well, so you'd think they'd suffer
more trying to compete with food, but it's not
all about the nutrition it can get through fertilizer. It's also about structure of the soil because often your plants
will seek more nutrition out of just the soil,
they're not even looking for that extra fertilizer or
raw hit of chicken manure, or commercial fertilizer
that you might put down or watering a soluble fertilizer. I think if your soil or medium is poor, then you're going to run into those issues of either under fertilizing
or over fertilizing. And this way takes the
guess work out of that and makes it so much more easier. These tomatoes here, look
how healthy they are. I will not be giving
them any more food ever, but I can guarantee you they will last right into our steaming hot summer before eventually the weather and the climate is just too much for them, but it won't be because
of lack of nutrients. I prepared this bed simply
with some cow manure, some mulsh, some compost, but if you're having to constantly guess, am I giving these plants enough fertilizer and then you either under
or over fertilize it because you haven't set the
bed up at the beginning, that's a sure way to shorten the season and to fall into that gap where
it's run out of production and you've still got plenty
of growing season left to go. Number three is pruning. Now tomato plants are a classic example. Most of you guys probably are aware that you can slow down the
early demise of tomatoes by pruning off any diseased
leaves and foliage. Pruning also revitalizes
plants and triggers new growth because when you prune
off foliage from a plant, it thinks it's been grazed by something or it's had a storm and
lost leaves or branches and it's natural defense
system is to regrow back, stimulate itself to repairing those broken leaves, broken branches. If you prune your plants
in the correct way and not over do it, of course, they will stimulate growth
and often that growth will come back new,
improved, bushier and better, producing more growth like
if you're just going to eat the foliage itself of
those certain plants, or perhaps even more fruit, like tomatoes so that at least you
can extend that harvest right out to the end of the season. Number four is regular harvesting, and pruning, we just talked about, can be regular harvesting and
there's a bit of a crossover there but there are some extra points that I'd like to make
that plants like peas, this is a really good
example, let me find one. Peas, broccolini, broccoli
that grows in shoots that you keep harvesting and
then it keeps generating, lettuce is another one, if you're just harvesting
the lettuce leaves. All these are good examples
of the more you harvest, the more you get. (crunching leaves) And who wouldn't want more of that? The thing is, depending
on the type of plant, if you leave the plants grow on naturally and don't harvest as they go, you'll end up shortening the life because the plant will reach maturity, it'll have all the fruit or it'll have all the foliage it needs and then it will die back
and go into the new stage. Whereas, if you keep
plucking the fruit off, like in the case of peas or lettuce, harvesting the leaves, it will
then keep regenerating those pieces back or tryna grow more fruit, tryna grow more leafy matter, so that it will prolong
the time to maturity, it won't stop it, but
it'll prolong the time or it'll slow it down and over time then, you will get more peas, as an example, or more lettuce leaves out of that plant, rather than just leaving it go. There are exceptions of course. You might be thinking of a
hearting variety of lettuce, like an iceberg lettuce where
you won't harvest the leaves as they go, and that's
fine, there are exceptions to everything, but I'm saying generally, the more that you harvest along the way, the more produce you're
gonna get out of your crops and the longer you'll
get out of that season. Number five is succession sewing. If you're not sewing in succession, you're not maximizing the crop
growth over the full season. You can see the gaps here
in the middle of this bed and that's because we
had our cabbages mature and then we've harvested them
and cut them out essentially. This one here is still
remaining in the ground, we've just cut the top off
and it's starting to re-shoot. That's something different,
but that will then, again, regrow and produce
some mini cabbage heads, but it won't produce another large one. But what I really wanna talk about is this little seedling here,
this little seedling here and there's another one over there. I'm replacing those larger
cabbages as they get harvested, I'll usually pull them out,
I might leave one or two in to grow on and get some
mini shoots out of them, but most of the time,
we'll just yank them out, utilize that mature
harvest and then replace it straight away with a seedling. There's always enough time
to get another harvest, especially if you time it right. If you've planted your cabbages early, at the start of the season,
you will still have enough time to be able to replace the
ones that you've harvested and still get another crop
before the end of that season. In our case, we start
harvesting these cabbages now through the middle of our winter and then we plant more seedlings and be able to harvest
another full mature crop at the start of summer. And yes, I'm planting them
in exactly the same bed. In some cases, in the same planting hole that I had the others one in, because I set this bed up
properly in the beginning, like I was talking about earlier, I don't even need to add
any extra fertilizer. I can just replace
crops with new seedlings and know that they will
have enough nutrients to keep them going all the way through. Of course, if you want and
you don't have enough space in existing garden beds, just make a new garden
bed, like I've done. Or you can use containers,
or anything else to extend that growing season and plant more seedlings out to cross over or succession sew in order
to extend that season right out to the maximum. But say you've stuffed up a little bit with the season and the
timings, well so what? You might get 1/2 a cabbage,
it's still worth it. You might get less tomatoes or you might get a fully grown lettuce. Well that doesn't matter, does it? You'll just harvest
them immature or small, but you're still extending
that harvest out, and that's what I'm talking about. Do you have any extra
tips on how to grow more veg in a season? If you do, whack 'em down in
the comments section below so we can all read and learn from them. Well I hope you enjoyed this video, if you did, make sure you
give it a big thumbs up and let's together, try to
close that veggie growing gap and extend that harvest right
out to the end of the season so we can all grow more and that veggie gap just gets smaller. Thanks a lot for watching,
subscribe if you haven't already, bye for now.
