The Veg Bed 2012

As this warm weather seems to have brought all my veg plants in pots on in a ridiculously fast way, I thought I'd better get my plans for the veg bed down in print before too much has happened. Over the last few weeks I've put the new raised bed around my veg bed, to stop the grass path at the back and sides creeping over it, and I've planted up some broad bean plants that I had sown in paper pots about a month ago. I've also sown a row of peas, a couple of rows of snap peas, a couple of rows of carrots, a couple of rows of spring onions, and a few mangetout. The peas have started showing already with the soil warming up so much.

Anyway, here's the pic of the raised bed as it is now, with the smaller veg bed under the fence behind it -

After learning from a few disasters from last year's veg growing, like that I tried to stuff way too much in and blocked the light off for a lot of the smaller plants, I've arranged the bed so the shortest to tallest matches the sunlight, and shadow, and I've spaced things a lot better this year too. I hope. This is the plan -

For the small veg bed under the fence I've added all the climbing plants that will get reasonably tall (the mangetout gets to 7', the french beans I've never had them taller than 5' before I've had to pinch the tops to stop them going any higher because of the canes they were on, so I'll see how tall they get this year. The fence has also got pea and bean netting stretched across it this year. Last year I tried to control the 7' mangetout plants by stringing twine across the fence posts as the plants grew up. It wasn't ideal, and it wasn't taught enough to hold the plants reasonable flat against the fence. We'll see how the netting works this year.

Redskin Peppers



Tumbling Tom Tomatoes



I've got a few Redskin pepper plants and some Tumbling Tom tomato plants on the go too (most of these seeds are the ones I picked up in the Wyevale 50p seed sell off last year). The tomatoes will go into hanging baskets on the fence, like last year. That worked well. Although I do need to get a couple of larger than 10" baskets, which were too small really. The pepper plants I might keep on the kitchen windowsill. I did that the first year I grew them and I had a reasonable crop of pretty small, but very tasty peppers. Last year I tried growing them on the patio in pots and they did nothing. I think it was too cold for them. And by the time peppers formed on them something was burrowing into them, so I didn't get any of them. We'll see how the weather looks in the summer as to where they end up.

The giant glazed pot that I got from Homebase (along with my strawberry planter) in the damaged pot sale, I think I'm going to put a courgette plant into it. Courgettes get too big for the veg bed. And they are fairly ornamental (before the powdery milldew gets to them at the end of the season), so I'll put it on the patio.

Think that's all the veg I've got on the go. And the plans for all of it. Here's to a long, hot summer. (We are in drought here, no hosepipe ban yet though. Not that it matters to me, I water all my stuff by hand anyway. What a slave to grow your own I am.)