21 Questions on My 6-Bed Self-Sufficiency Experimental Garden

I am here in my six bed garden, and this is a micro self-sufficiency garden. It's a series that I'm running here on the channel to see how much food can you grow in this space. At the moment, the average is 15 portions or servings of veggies per square meter. But you guys have been asking me questions. So, Will has very kindly prepared a load of questions that I'm gonna pull out and kind of quick fire, and hopefully it's an opportunity to add a little bit more detail about some of the practicalities and some of the thoughts or ideas behind this space. So, in no particular order, and using the chapters down below to navigate yourself, all that's gonna fall off, that'll be fine. We're just gonna go for it. Why did I cut the tops off the canes? Could they just be pushed in further or the crossbar raised? I think it's probably talking about the peas. It's because I was just tidying it up. If I couldn't push it in further, which is usually my default, it's probably because there's a massive rock. It's quite a rocky place here. Then the name of this farm is Forza Gravel, which is like place of the gravel. So, there's a lot of rocks in the ground. So, the reason why was I put it in as deep as I could go, and then I just tidied it because it was uneven. And I wanted to make sure that it was somewhat okay. All right, sorted. Thank you. Next one. The garden is perfectly set up for crop rotation. Why not use it? That is a fantastic question. It is. It is perfectly set up. And in a sense, it is kind of forming a bit of a grouping or a family-based planting. So, I've got the salad bed, I've got the root bed, the legume bed, the cucurbit beds. But what I can do next year is just swap things around. So, instead of thinking I have to do a set rotation, because as this is like the first year of this kind of scale, I'm testing. I might actually realize that I only need half a salad bed next year. And I'd much rather have the flexibility of being able to swap and change and prioritize more crops over others, if that's what I need, versus the rigidity of a crop rotation that forces me to work within constraints. And sometimes it's useful having certain constraints, but when they're too kind of immovable, I actually think it makes your garden less productive. So, that is exactly why, but I can at least move things about very easily each year, because this is predominantly annuals, apart from the one perennial raised bed. Will you net your vegetables? Brassicas and carrots, for example. That's a really good question. So, I am not, I am not a netter. The reason why is because it is faffy. Now, I know that I do have brassicas here, but I just have to remain vigilant. I need to remain vigilant to make sure that they don't get eaten by the cabbage white butterfly caterpillars. The butterflies aren't the problem, the caterpillars are the problem. So, because it's such a small space, it's actually very easy for me, every day, every other day, just to go around and have a look at the different leaves. The carrots I'm growing resist to fly. So, that is a variety that is more resistant to carrot root fly. And so, also, for this kind of efficiency, the crop choice is helping me with creating a more resilient garden. Where are you buying the bargain seeds? Well, I do actually recommend the bargain seeds that I have been buying in person, and I don't think I can, I don't want a defamation case or whatever against me for quoting the brand. But if you are looking, if you are looking for high quality, great value seeds, then I highly recommend Premier Seeds Direct. That is where I would go, and that's probably what I'm gonna do pretty much all of this garden next year with. If there are weeds in your grass, can you still use the cuttings as mulch? Yes, you can. The thing that I just say when it comes to using grass cuttings is if you're using a lawn and you might have some dandelions growing or thistles, as long as nothing is flowering or nothing has gone to seed, then there isn't really much seed pressure there in the first place. So, keeping on top of your lawn and cutting it, you'll notice the grass doesn't go to seed, so you're gonna have far fewer weed issues. In fact, I would argue that you're more likely to get weeds flying in from the long grass around your garden than actually putting your grass clippings down from your nice lawn that isn't flowering. Oh, I'm spilling. What would you plant if your six beds were six 40-centimeter pots? That is a great challenge. So, 40-centimeter pots, a fair amount of size. I would very much simplify it to think about, with that kind of scale, I would go more towards the focus of flavor. So, looking at maybe a couple of those pots could just be dedicated to herbs. Think like cut-and-come-again herbs like coriander, parsley, dill, those kind of things. If it's, you might be on a balcony or have a sunny patio, the other one could have some basil, and maybe you want a bit of hard herbs. You could have one that is just mint because you can grow a huge amount of mint in a pot, and that is great for herbal teas. I would also recommend going vertical. So, because a 40-centimeter pot is quite large, you can actually stick some bits of bamboo in and grow loads of peas or grow loads of beans. So, that is what I would prioritize first and foremost. It's also quite fun because you can make like a little cloche to go over these pots so you can start things off earlier in the season as well. Will the salad seeds need thinning when they start growing? No, because I am, with like sowing the lettuce and rocket and everything, when I sow it quite closely together, I don't mind that it grows closely together. It's a very intensive way of growing, but they will just kind of force themselves apart. And I kind of thin them by harvesting the semi-mature plants. I might accidentally pull out a lettuce, and it's like, oh, well, it's just a harvest. I can eat it. So, just by harvesting it normally, because there are so many more plants, I'm actually forced to harvest more because I've got more food. So, actually building in that idea of like intensive sowing forces me to have more food as a result. It's a similar thing with carrots in a way. You can sow them really quite intensively. And then when they start to show their tops, you can go and pick every couple. You've got a great carrot harvest. You've got the carrot tops, the pesto, and then you can let the remaining ones grow on to full maturity. Do you cover the size of the beds and the spaces between them? So, the size of the beds are pretty much three by one meters, I think. Wait, Hamlet, yes. It is 18 square meters of growing space. 18 divided by three by one meter. I think so. It's something like that. It will be on the screen. I'm pretty sure it's 18 square meters. So, it'll be three by one because I decided to make it a little narrower. So, yeah, usually I do beds that are three by 1.2, but I just thought it'd be clean to have the square meterage. As you can see, I haven't prepped for these questions, but they're great questions. In between, I've got approximately 60 centimeters or so, maybe like two foot of space for the pathway just to make sure that there's a bit of space to allow the plants to kind of spill over and I'm not kind of crammed around and harvesting my lettuce and knocking over the courgette plant with my backside. What meals do you prepare to avoid wasting homegrown produce? I actually think this starts at a different point. To avoid wasting homegrown produce, grow the things that you enjoy and are easy to cook. So, at the moment, on many days, I'll eat half a kilo of courgettes. I'll just put a load of spices, chuck them in the air fryer, have them as a side, and it works so effectively. With cucumbers, I make a delicious cucumber salad. So, waste is a human construct. There is no such thing as waste in nature. So, anything I can't quite manage is either going into the compost bin to enter the fertility system or it's going to go into someone else's pockets for them to enjoy as well. How do you keep track of everything you have planted? Because it's small, I can just use my eyes. I can just, oh yeah, oh look, the lettuce is starting to go over. Maybe I need to sow something else. I think also, though, that comes with experience. If I was you and if I was starting off and you've got something like six raised beds, just draw out six rectangles and you can just make a note of what you've planted in each thing. That would be the easiest way to kind of keep a track of everything you've planted. What I do do is I also keep a track of everything I've harvested. So, I have a Google Sheets spreadsheet and it's every single crop and then harvest one, two, three, four, five, and then I put in exactly in grams how much I've harvested. So, it might even be like parsley, 17 grams, for example, but every harvest counts. That's really important. What overwintering vegetables can I plant after summer? This is a tough one because the vast majority of your overwintering vegetables are actually started around late spring, particularly if you're thinking about things like swede or Brussels sprouts or these kind of things. What I would recommend is firstly, looking at all your winter radish. So, your daikon radish, your Spanish black ground winter radish. You can, though, still do kale. It's okay to do kale. They might just be a little bit smaller, but you'll have those harvests and you'll have those harvests next season. You could, right now, if you're feeling bold, you could try some purple sprouting broccoli, but the biggest mistake that people make is that it gets to summer, late summer in particular, gaps start appearing and then they start thinking, what should I plant for winter? Well, unfortunately, we've missed most of the opportunities for sowing, but I actually, particularly next year, will sow a lot more things for winter, things like parsnips, et cetera, because it is kind of quite good to spread the harvest over the season. Instead of having all the guts in autumn and then the beds being empty, in fact, I can have harvest in the ground that I can come to whenever I need it over the winter months, because it's kind of like sitting out here like its own little green grocer. One thing I would recommend though, is if you have got some space and you wanna fill it, garlic is a great one, because you can harvest your garlic kind of end of June, and then you can put in, there's still plenty of time to put in succession, so another big batch of food. So you might just wanna pack your garden or a few of your beds with garlic this winter. There's also some other things like overwintering onions as well. You could also do broad beans, but in this climate with me, sometimes they'll either survive or they won't. And so it's just a risk to take. Why is the garden so rocky? Is that to show that manicured compost beds are not essential? How dare you? How dare you have the audacity to call this a rocky garden? Do you even know what a rocky garden is? It's rocky because of, I'll put in the timestamp of the previous question that I answered, which is because it is a very rocky place. This is topsoil from this place. I have removed the biggest, but there's nothing wrong with like a few stones. It actually helps with the aeration. It helps with actually allowing water to go in. So I don't mind a bit of that. It's just the really big ones. If I'm planting out something and I hit a big stone, I'll just pull it out and lob it into the bushes. Do you ever mulch around seedlings with fresh grass clippings? Excuse me. Yes. Yeah. In fact, the cucumbers were done using that method and it was well worth doing because I got a great harvest of cucumbers. So nothing wrong with using fresh grass clippings. Just don't do it thicker than like six to seven centimeters or like three inches. And don't let the grass clippings touch the base of the plants, touch the stem, just leave like an inch or two to three centimeter gap because it can just cause some issues. So allow the stems to breathe, but give a nice thick mulch of fresh green grass clippings. It's absolutely a wonderful mulch. This is the tiny little one. What about eating the courgette flowers? Sure. You can definitely eat the courgette flowers. You could stuff them. It's a great thing to do with the male flowers because they don't turn into the female. But this garden is about producing food, bulk food. I couldn't feed myself on a diet of flowers. No matter how fun that would be, how pretty my life would be, I don't think flower power is hue power. So I let my flowers use to either pollinate the female flowers to then have the courgettes and the bees. And then by the end they kind of have gone over. So they can go on the compost. But again, it's tiny. Oh, I like this. Could arches over the central path support climbing beans, peas or squash and save bed space? Could cover crops fill the bare patches between planting? Yes. Hey, are they allowed two questions? I guess so. I'll go backwards. Cover crops, yes. There are a couple of spare patches, bare patches. The only reason why is because it has been so dry that the direct sowings have failed. That's the only reason why. So I kind of think if I was direct sowing some cover crops, they probably would have failed as well. So there aren't intentionally meant to be bare patches, but it might be something that I do later in the season, particularly maybe the salads bed over winter. Now the arches over the central supports, definitely. I think that'll be something really fun to do in this garden. I've done it in a previous garden of a runner bean support structure, which worked really well. Maybe growing some like pumpkins vertically or something like that. But yeah, of course you can do that space saving and it also makes it look really interesting as a garden. So I like that because this is gonna carry on next season and I'll do a full review at the end of next season just to see how well this has done as an experiment. Because I think that there's like a size with like the self-sufficiency garden that that had everything it needed. So it worked quite well together. Whereas this started later on in the season, it's only six beds in our compost bin and there are some more restraints here. So it's just kind of getting through the season ready for next one, which will be very interesting. Can you tell us roughly where the garden is located? Is located in Wales. We are near the coast and we're about a mile away from the coast. And in terms of the land here, this garden is about, I don't know, six, seven meters below the self-sufficiency garden. So this is actually a little bit of a frost pocket. So it'll be interesting to see how this fares later this season. Can vegetables that have bolted still be eaten? Should they be used differently? It depends on the vegetable. If lettuce is bolted, it turns like really bitter. It's like eating dandelions. So that within reason, but some other things that bolt, like you might be able to see the radish flowers in the frame. That's radish that's bolted. You can eat the flowers, you can eat the seed pods. So they actually give you an additional crop. It's the same thing with kale. When kale bolts spring next year, it gives you all the flower heads to eat. So some things you can have, some things you can't. They just might turn like really woody, like carrots. But then carrot flowers are one of the best flowers for attracting beneficial insects. So everything has its place. Are you gonna grow potatoes? I know a few of you have asked this question and yes, I will next year. I can already tell you what I'm gonna grow. I'm gonna grow charlottes because they are so productive here. They just seem to be so productive as like a salad crop potato. So I'm gonna do that. I'm not gonna do a main crop, but I am gonna do charlotte potatoes next year. I might even do a whole bed of them. We'll see what happens. It was just too late in the season when I started this project to think about putting in potatoes and guarantee a pretty good yield, unless I wanted to grow a blight resistant variety. Could you make a best variety list for herbs? Yes, I can. It'll be in the video description. Oh, that's quite fun, isn't it? That's quite satisfying. Do rabbits leave the beds alone? No, we have had a little bit of rabbit problem. We've had to replace a couple of brassicas. We had a rat problem right at the start, which I've solved. It was eating all the kale. What weird rats. But I know it was, cause I saw it with my very own eyes. And I know the difference between a rat and a rabbit. Thank you very much. I did grow up in the countryside, but yes, there have been a couple of problems, but at the moment everything is producing lots and it's all very exciting. So if you have any questions about this project, let them know, because I'll continue to do these sporadic Q and A's to see what I did there.