Gardening

Andrew Steens

When size matters

As I write this it is raining, yet again. Rainy winter days are a pain in the proverbial, but they are good for planning for the coming seasons. A well-planned vegetable garden can provide enough to make a family selfsufficient in veggies for most of the year, so important in these high-cost times.

It is relatively simple to work out the quantities you will need for each crop. For example, if your family eat about four beetroot a month, then planting half a dozen each month should meet the demand and account for some losses. Many other crops such as carrots, cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, leeks and lettuce also produce one harvest per plant.

Crops such as spinach, silverbeet, some lettuces and celery are sometimes called ‘cut and come again’, as they can have a few leaves harvested each week until the plants go to seed. Half a dozen plants are usually enough for each of these crops, but make sure you replant regularly to replace the older ones.

Most gardens will only need half a dozen or so of each of tomatoes, capsicums and eggplant, with probably only two cucumbers and two courgettes. Even though they are fairly long lived, be ready to replant these during the season, as they can come to a grinding halt quite quickly with various diseases, or adverse weather.

In small gardens, it’s best to concentrate on crops that produce a high yield per square metre – carrots or yams rather than kumara, for example. Kumara produce many tubers per plant, but on average, for a family that eats a couple of kumara each week, you will need to use about two square metres of garden per person. Larger gardens can go for broke, with whole beds devoted to space-devouring crops like melons and pumpkins. Three of these plants can easily take up an area of six square metres or more, and only produce 10 or so melons or pumpkins. One way to save valuable bed space is to plant these away from the veggie garden, along a fence line or under trees.

Potatoes typically produce about 2.5kg per square metre, though good growing conditions might double this production and poor conditions might halve it. Using tyre stacks or planter bags, a good gardener can produce up to four times this amount from the same area, assuming three crops a year are grown.

To completely supply all your vegetable needs, plus some excess to ensure there is enough to take account of crop failures and to bottle, freeze or preserve for the off seasons, about 10 square metres per person is needed for annual crops, plus an extra bed for perennial crops such as rhubarb and asparagus. Therefore, to feed a family of four, about 40 to 50 square metres of garden beds will be needed. As a rough rule of thumb, every 10 square metres of garden will need about one hour a week to keep it well tended and harvested.

If you can’t commit that amount of time, then scale your garden back accordingly. Even a few square metres, replanted each season with new crops, will provide a nice top up of fresh, healthy veggies to the weekly groceries.