I’m feeling quite proud of myself this week because I’ve managed to really make the most of my veg patch. I’ve been intercropping. Or something like that. I don’t really know what the right terminology is, but I have magically squeezed an extra 70 plants into the veg patch without needing to make more space.
I chose to do this with some lovely salad leaves that I wanted to grow. My aim is to pick them regularly to keep the plants quite small (famous last words) so I’ve planted them in between rows of other plants. To give some examples – I planted the leaf beet bulls blood between a row of chard and a row of spring onions. I planted wild rocket between parsnips and leeks (I’m hoping that the leeks and parsnips will cast a bit of shade over the rocket and stop it from bolting). I planted mizuna between sweetcorn plants (again, hoping for shade to stop it from bolting) and frills mustard between celeriac rows.
I already had a bed of salad leaves, but mainly lettuces, so this was a really good way of adding to the plot and using every little space I could. I think you could easily add extras like baby corn, spring onions, beetroot and leeks in this fashion as well, basically anything that doesn’t take up much space.