Growing your own vegetable garden is an incredibly rewarding activity. Not only can you enjoy your vegetables at their freshest, you also get to watch them grow from start to finish! It can be a lot of fun trying new varieties out, even while maintaining your old favourites. Kids especially love to grow unique varieties like red carrots, or striped tomatoes. Involve the whole family in the fun and compare which varieties grow best, or produce the most!
For myself, the best part of growing my own vegetables is being able to harvest all summer long. Though this sounds fairly simple, it takes a little planning to ensure you have a continuous harvest. Though not a new technique, ‘Succession Planting’, (which is the process of planting small sections of vegetables at alternating times to provide a constant supply of fresh vegetables), is quickly becoming popular. Rather than having a whole row of carrots ready to harvest at once, it gives you small batches every week, leading to more fresh veggies and less waste!
The easiest way to start succession planting is to divide your garden into sections and plant (or seed) your varieties every week to ten days. A great way to do this is to purchase pre-finished packs at a garden centre. These packs are available throughout the summer and can be harvested in as little as 3-4 weeks. This means you can add them to your garden every few weeks to increase your harvest. Succession planting is also very easy to do in containers: visually divide your container into sections and alternate your plantings in each section.
One of the best candidates for succession planting is lettuce. There are so many different varieties of lettuce that you can create both a great mix and a steady supply. Some of my favourite lettuce varieties are Buttercrunch, Romaine, and Leaf Lettuce. These varieties give great flavour and produce well all season long. Lettuce enjoys a fertile soil and fertilizing with 8-20-20 or bone/blood meal gives it a great boost. In order to maintain a steady supply through the summer it is important to harvest lettuce properly. Pick lettuce as soon as it is big enough to use: on loose-headed varieties, the outer leaves can be picked and the inner leaves allowed to keep growing, loose leaf varieties will grow back after cutting. A good storage tip is to put a slightly wet paper towel into a sealed plastic bag with lettuce, to keep it from turning brown.
In our climate one of the biggest challenges we face is a short growing season, but we can easily offset this with a frost blanket. Using a frost blanket can extend the growing season for your veggies giving them more time to produce and ripen. You can start your vegetables off earlier as your frost blanket will protect the tender young shoots from drops in overnight temperatures, and mature plants will be given more time to grow, often as late as October 1st!
It is never too late to start a vegetable garden; come out to the garden centre to pick up some prefinished packs or seeds and have a home grown fresh salad in just a few weeks!
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