Eco Friendly House And Garden

Welcome back, and I hope you are ready for more top tips for your eco friendly vegetable garden!

Moving on from just growing too many in the first place, these next 2 tips cover storage issues and gardening overload!

2)  Where can we put them all?
What could be more disappointing to the end of your growing season than to have runner beans (or whatever you grew too much of) going rotten in the fridge. 

Home grown crops – especially when grown organically – do not have the same shelf life as those brought from super stores.  They are not designed to stay fresh for a week or so for retail purposes, and if picked or dug out of the ground will only last a few days.

Yes, there are many veg that can be stored for months if you do it right, like potatoes and onions for example, but generally everything else needs to be eaten or preserved as soon as possible really – or given away to who ever will take them!

So, you need to learn which crops can be stored for a long time, those which can be frozen, veg that need processing in some way before storing, and which ones only have a short shelf life.  Then plan how many of each you can grow.

Many beans and peas can be blanched before freezing so as to increase the number of nutrients remaining in them, and others need a certain amount of other actions before they are ready for freezing or turning into preserves or chutneys, etc. 

You also need to make sure that you only freeze them in portion size amounts, otherwise when you want to eat them you have to take the whole lot out and smash off the amount you need to cook!

And do you have enough freezer space in the first place?  Most avid vegetable growers need another freezer to store all their summer veg to last them through to the winter!

Planning ahead is the key here – and if in doubt ask someone who is already growing their own crops what they do with all their veg!

3) What a waste of your land:
If you are turning over great swathes of your garden to vegetables because ‘that’s how many seeds there were in the packet’ then you are taking the fun out of your garden.

Imagine the kids playing ball and they keep tripping over plants and cane poles.  You want a few minutes to yourself on the patio but all you can see are plastic bottles and rows and rows of pots and mud!

You won’t get a moments peace either, as you will have so many crops to keep an eye on that you will constantly be out there checking on everything.  When you look out of your windows making your morning coffee – you’ll see something wrong with the plants, or something has fallen over or whatever.

You could end up out there on your afternoon off from work, tending to a huge number of plants that you might not even end up eating (see points 1 and 2).

The Answer?
Growing your own veg should be fun, and if you grow too much of one thing, then you lose that fun. 

Eating artichoke every so often is a nice treat, but when you always have another 2 in the fridge, it loses it’s speciality.  It’s not even fun to eat it anymore.

Also, if you know that you always have more of something growing outside, you may actually care less about each individual vegetable you have indoors.  For example, will you care if one parsnip goes rotten waiting to be eaten in the fridge if you have another 2 meters of them left outside to dig up?  No, you won’t. 

Too much of something actually tends to encourage waste as if you have so much – why does one matter?

This certainly wouldn’t be true if you had brought the parsnips. Every penny counts these days and you can see it when you have brought something yourself out of your wages.  But vegetables you have grown don’t seem to be worth anything, you don’t see the money and energy they have cost.

Your back yard vegetables aren’t free, so don’t treat them as such.  Value them as your time – and your time is worth more than money.

Bad vegetable planning results in more food that you will want to eat!

I’ve seen it over and over again when people start growing their own food – they grow too much.  There is a fear that there may not be enough of something – so over-planting is widespread.  Please don’t make that mistake yourself.

Even on my tiny allotment, I wanted to sow in rows like all the other people were doing, and this resulted in far too many radishes to harvest!  What a waste of the earth resources!  I was using up all it’s vitamins and other nutrients in my soil to grow a crop I just couldn’t face even eating! 

There was also the continuous begging of other people on nearby allotments for me to take some of their courgettes/seedlings/rhubarb/cuttings or runner-beans!  They just had too many too!

I totally agree that it is great of others to share their bumper crops rather than let them go to waste – but why spend your time, effort and resources growing food you have to give away?

Wouldn’t it be better to control your growing and have a better variety than before?

Surely it is better to run out of courgettes but have had some squash and pumpkins too!
Wouldn’t you rather tend smaller areas of crops than have row after row to weed and harvest?

There are many reasons why it is better to start small and learn from last year than to plunge straight in – and here are a few of them:

1) I can’t eat another courgette!
Most important to someone new to growing vegetables is that they need to find it fun.  They need to enjoy preparing, tending and then eating their crops.  And that can’t happen if you take on too much.

There is no need to grow loads and loads of the same things because it’s easy to grow, like potatoes, or because you got loads of seeds or seedlings.  Crops need energy and water to grow successfully – the earth in your vegetable plot on raised beds isn’t self regenerating – it gets used by everything you grow on it – so grow with care.

Also, if you find yourself harvesting a bumper crop of courgettes, it will be fun at first and you will try new dishes with them and tell your friends how yummy they are – then it will become apparent that you have been eating courgettes for dinner nearly every day for the past 2 weeks – yet there are still more in the fridge and even more ripening in your garden.

Soon, you will actually try to avoid eating courgettes at all because you are sick of the site of them and will no doubt end up throwing a few away as you picked them before you needed them and they have ‘gone off’.

Then you will run out of people to give your spare one’s too.  You will have asked the neighbors and friends at work or down the local club, and they will love it at first but then you might get embarrassed to turn up with a carrier bag of yet more courgettes to be palmed off to whoever will take them, or you might just get fed up with trying to find homes for them….

Basically, if you grow too much of something – it’s not fun anymore!

So, join me in a few days for Part 2 of this article for some more reasons to start small – if that wasn’t reason enough!