Garden Experiments

Friday, June 27, 2008 by Jeremy Dore - Categories: gardening
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Seed companies would have you believe that all you have to do is buy the right seed, water regularly and use good soil to be guaranteed success. But real gardeners know differently: every garden is different and there are thousands of important factors that make up success. No matter how carefully you follow books and seed packet instructions, you soon realise that conditions you have and the way you garden are unique - and both have a great influence of the results you get.

Take carrots for example. I know many experienced gardeners who say that, try as they might, they can never get a good crop of carrots. Yet I have no difficulty in producing a fantastic crop year after year. On the other hand I’ve never yet managed to get garlic to grow well, despite trying a few ways. Some of this is undoubtedly due to the conditions in my garden – sandy soil is great for carrots. But there must be an element of the way I garden in there as well.  I’m increasingly of the opinion that you can only get so far with gardening books and advice – the rest must be learnt on the job in your own soil, with your own tools. That’s why this year I have taken to running a few little experiments, to ‘learn from the land’ and improve as a gardener:

• Sweetcorn: A month ago I surrounded half of my sweetcorn with an organic mulch and left the rest as normal.  Verdict: The mulched sweetcorn is taller, stronger and much better developed after just a few weeks (see the picture above)
• Early Salad Leaves: Having read about Victorian hot compost beds I took some shredded buddleia cuttings that were already forming a nice hot-compost mix, reaching 40 degrees Celsius in early April.  I half filled a large terracotta pot with this and then topped it with compost, keeping another pot filled with just compost.  Verdict:  The mix failed to raise the temperature and clearly didn’t match the nutritional value of the all-compost pots which produced much better, earlier salad
• Different Organic Composts: I tried three organic composts, comparing each for the different jobs I use it for. Verdict: ‘Fertile fibre’ was great for seeds but needed supplementing when re-potting plants.  The others (‘Earth Cycle’ and ‘Tesco Organic’) were the opposite – working well as a follow-on compost but with very mixed results for seeds.
• Aubergine (Eggplant) Positioning: I planted a spare aubergine directly in ground-level soil in my greenhouse, comparing with two identical plants on a bench in pots.  Verdict: The ones in pots are doing much better, despite the bed having more room for roots, excellent compost-rich soil and better moisture retention.  I need to experiment more to find out the reason here – is the bed-raised plant shaded too much, or influenced by other plants nearby

The essential thing in experimenting is to try to isolate one or two factors that you have a hunch may be important.  It’s a practice that is so simple to do but can really increase your depth of knowledge about your garden.  Experimenting is especially fun when there are a few too many plants and you can afford to try something without losing your main crop.  Will excess leeks grow close together in posts as an alternative to spring (salad) onions?  Can beans be trained to climb up the outside of a greenhouse to provide a bit of shade to plants in hot summers?  There’s one sure way to find out...

If you have tried your own garden experiments, why not add a comment below and tell us about it...