Gardening Advice & Tips for Irish Gardeners

Day 5 in the Garden  – March 18th (Planning my Raised Beds) It is time to plan out my raised beds and decide where I am going to sow everything this year. I am using two raised beds, one small greenhouse and I’ve got a few pots for herbs and potato grow bags for my potatoes.

Because the greenhouse is so small and my want for tomatoes so large, I will have little room in here for anything but tomatoes. But there is a corner of the greenhouse that is a bit shaded and this would be ideal for salad crops.

In the Greenhouse I will plant

• 5 tomato plants and one shelf will be devoted to seed trays of cut and come again salads including French salad mix and Pak choi
• All these seeds have been sown now, my tomatoes are still in the kitchen out of the cold, while my ‘yet to germinate’ salads are already in the greenhouse. Today I recorded temperatures of 24 degrees in there, but at night time it has gone to 10 degrees, anything lower would be harmful to tomatoes so they will stay indoors for now

With 3 potato grow bags I should get about 15 kg of potatoes by the time I harvest them, this won’t exactly get me through a month never mind a year, but it’s nice at least to have a small harvest of spuds and my time and space is limited.

I hope to transplant my seedlings into my raised beds in the next month and I can start sowing sets and garlic cloves next week. In the raised beds I will be growing

Carrots  (Autumn King), Beetroot (Detroit Crimson), Butternut Squash (F1 Hunter), Courgette (Alexander), Chard (Bright lights), Lettuce (Gondor) Onion Sets (Sturon) and Garlic (Elephant)

Space will be tight as my beds are 1.5m x 0.9m in total. With the courgette and squash being such large plants they are likely to take up half this space once mature. Luckily the carrots, chard, onion and garlic don’t require much room to grow. In one bed I will plant:

• 5 rows of onions & 1 row of garlic & 2 courgette plants
• This will give 15cm between the rows of onions and with the sets planted 5cm apart I will have a total of 90 onions at time of harvest

In the second bed I will plant

• 4 rows of carrots, 2 rows of beetroot, 1 squash and some lettuce which I will continually plant over the summer and if there is space left over I'll try and fit in some broccoli.
• The carrots are spaced 7cm apart with rows 15cm apart, this will give a total of 51 carrots. The beets are spaced 1cm apart so I’m looking at getting 18 at harvest, which is more than I’ll ever want or need

One thing that im missing is some legumes such as beans or peas but with limited space and the small harvest that they offer I will omit them this year. Instead I hope to plant the beds up with green manure over the winter months to return some nitrogen to the soil – as the peas would normally do.

I want to grow rotation groups together, so I am keeping my onions and garlic in one half and I am growing roots (carrots & beet) in another half. This will make rotation easier for next year where I could introduce some legumes or brassicas.  Seemingly courgettes, lettuce and squash don’t have a specific rotation group so these can go anywhere so long as they are not planted in the same spot two years in a row.

With the planning out of the way, the next step is to get sowing. Next week I will sow my onion sets and garlic bulbs. By then most of my seedlings should have germinated too so they will need a good supply of light and moisture. Should be interesting....