We get through a cabbage every fortnight, so we need 25 cabbages and a handful of reds for special dishes and pickled cabbage. We will start now, in the first week of September with Durham Eary, though an earlier sowing would have been better. I should get about 12 good plants in a bed, possibly 15, but that is a fifth of the garden, and I need at least a few more plants.
Scattered around the garden in large pots I will have another dozen. a plant in a 40 cm pot will do well of fed and protected from frost. (Pots are colder than beds). Then, if March we will sow Greyhound, sneaked at the back of the flower bed. Then in pots, sown in April we will sow All Year Round and plant them out wherever they will fit, guerilla gardening in my own garden!
Onions and carrots
In September we will plant out Japanese onion sets, filling one bed. We should get about 80 plants in the bed, in rows, interspersed with rows of carrots, sown in April. The Japanese onions will be pulled in late May and they will be replaced with rows of salads and beets between the rows of growing carrots. Fiddly? Yes, but I don't have much else to do!
The maincrop onions will be sown in large containers. I'm not quite sure yet where or how, but my plan is to fill rubble bags with compost. They look ugly, so I am making rustic looking surrounding hurdels for them, so it will all look pretty for the neighbours. Each rubble bag will grow a plethora of crops, easily 25 onions. We won't have enough for complete self sufficiency in onions, but it's well on the way.
Another of the beds will be half filled with leeks, the good old fashioned Mussleburgh.
Salad leaves of all kinds are sown most of the time from spring onwards, but wherever I can make them fit. The point being that in nature there are no gaps. You rarely get a plant , then a space and another plant. Nature grows like a massive splodge, and so long as you have the nutrients, water and the sunlight you can grow more than you think.
Undersowing, growing crops between others, is a great way of maximising what you have.
Turnips, beets and Sweed are interesting to grow. Sweed, like all brassicas, need rich soil and space to attain any size, so we will grow about a dozen plants in a small bed.
A tremendous investment of space! The sweed will be started in the greenhouse in April and planted out towards the middle or end of May. I am trying the variety Gowrie this year because it is productive but at the same time resistant to clubroot and powdery mildew.
Plants are spaced at 30 cm intervals.
Turnips and beetroot are to be sown ad lib, wherever there is room, don't forget to thin them to at least 10 cm, otherwise you will get small roots. I tried growing them in a growbag, it was a disaster, you get lots of little roots, and all we had was enough to make a single pot of beetroot chutney.
Interestingly, you get the same weight of root per row if you grow 50 plants or 15, its just that a lot of small roots weigh the same as fewer large roots.
Tomatoes! Arrgh, tomatoes. You see I only have a small greenhouse, and this year I filled it with tomatoes and peppers. It was the worst summer for tomatoes ever, so next year I plan to put the greenhouse to better use. So tomatoes will be outdoor types. The tomatoes are going to be outside.
In pots we will be growing Crimson Crush F1, blight resistant variety, and from hanging baskets everywhere, lots of Tumbling Toms, in the sunshine, and if they do OK then its going to be down to good luck - praying for a decent summer.