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Hi,
I'm a long time lurker, and think it might be handy if I describe our 'patch' before asking anything.
We've tried growing vegetables in our garden before. The late spring, summer and autumn were fine, but because we chose the wrong part of the garden nothing withstood the winter wet, even though the top of our four foot wide 'raised beds' were a good foot above soil level. We think the drier soil simply acted as a wick.
We're trying again and have dug up a different part of our lawn for vegetables. It isn't a huge area, yet, because we want to see how it goes, but even so we're hoping to get as much out of it as possible in our first year.
Our whole garden slopes downwards from west to east, veg rows will run north -> south ish, protected from the north by a tall deciduous hedge. It will probably get very hot in the summer, but it's in the only part of the garden that doesn't get hopelessly wet in winter. There are good, clear, land drains and soakaways but they don't cope with a very high water table and the fact that our garden is lower than everybody else's, so it's a bit of a sump. In time we hope to raise the soil level to the top of boarded edging, to make it into a 'proper' raised bed with a fully horizontal surface, but that will have to wait until there's either enough home made compost or enough cash.
Our ground is very heavy clay, we're not far from some old clay pits. We prepared the area by double digging and using lots and lots of our own, and our neighbours, well-rotted compost as well as commercial multi purpose compost and quite a lot of sharp sand. There were great clods of solid pure clay very close to the surface, which we've thrown away.
All that leads to my question, which is about companion planting and/or interplanting.
I'm not really sure which is companion planting and which is interplanting, but I'm fairly sure both are different from catch-cropping. The limit of my previous experience of companion planting was to put in french marigolds and borage to help attract insects, frighten nematodes and distract some of the slugs. I've never tried growing two lots of crops in the same ground at the same time, which I think is the principle behind intercropping.
I've gone to all the effort of getting Celeriac seeds to germinate and actually grow more than the seed leaves, but we've now realised that our patch might not be the best place for it to grow into decent sized roots - because it'll get almost direct, very hot, sun.
I've read that Celery is a good companion for beans, so I came up with a plan to plant the Celeriac beneath, and between two rows, of dwarf French Beans! The trouble is that although I know it will benefit from all the extra goodies in the bean trench, I'm not entirely convinced it won't be swamped by the bean leaves. So I wonder if it'll be a waste of effort, and we'll end up with no Celeriac and some extremely happy, overfed, slugs.
Does anybody have any experience of this sort of planting, and does it actually work?
Serious apologies for the very long post, and thanks in advance for any help.
I'm a long time lurker, and think it might be handy if I describe our 'patch' before asking anything.
We've tried growing vegetables in our garden before. The late spring, summer and autumn were fine, but because we chose the wrong part of the garden nothing withstood the winter wet, even though the top of our four foot wide 'raised beds' were a good foot above soil level. We think the drier soil simply acted as a wick.
We're trying again and have dug up a different part of our lawn for vegetables. It isn't a huge area, yet, because we want to see how it goes, but even so we're hoping to get as much out of it as possible in our first year.
Our whole garden slopes downwards from west to east, veg rows will run north -> south ish, protected from the north by a tall deciduous hedge. It will probably get very hot in the summer, but it's in the only part of the garden that doesn't get hopelessly wet in winter. There are good, clear, land drains and soakaways but they don't cope with a very high water table and the fact that our garden is lower than everybody else's, so it's a bit of a sump. In time we hope to raise the soil level to the top of boarded edging, to make it into a 'proper' raised bed with a fully horizontal surface, but that will have to wait until there's either enough home made compost or enough cash.
Our ground is very heavy clay, we're not far from some old clay pits. We prepared the area by double digging and using lots and lots of our own, and our neighbours, well-rotted compost as well as commercial multi purpose compost and quite a lot of sharp sand. There were great clods of solid pure clay very close to the surface, which we've thrown away.
All that leads to my question, which is about companion planting and/or interplanting.
I'm not really sure which is companion planting and which is interplanting, but I'm fairly sure both are different from catch-cropping. The limit of my previous experience of companion planting was to put in french marigolds and borage to help attract insects, frighten nematodes and distract some of the slugs. I've never tried growing two lots of crops in the same ground at the same time, which I think is the principle behind intercropping.
I've gone to all the effort of getting Celeriac seeds to germinate and actually grow more than the seed leaves, but we've now realised that our patch might not be the best place for it to grow into decent sized roots - because it'll get almost direct, very hot, sun.
I've read that Celery is a good companion for beans, so I came up with a plan to plant the Celeriac beneath, and between two rows, of dwarf French Beans! The trouble is that although I know it will benefit from all the extra goodies in the bean trench, I'm not entirely convinced it won't be swamped by the bean leaves. So I wonder if it'll be a waste of effort, and we'll end up with no Celeriac and some extremely happy, overfed, slugs.
Does anybody have any experience of this sort of planting, and does it actually work?
Serious apologies for the very long post, and thanks in advance for any help.
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