Greedy Gluts: Just Too Much Stuff! – Part 1
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!