Part of the trick with growing things commercially is that you always need to have something to sell. So for us we expect to have a good crop of peppers and aubergines and squash over the next couple of months with about half a dozen beds of sweet potatoes coming through. However our main focus is on providing a succession of chard and spinach that will take us through to Christmas. [...]
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So here’s a selection of 5 vegetables you might have a crack at. Perpetual Spinach, radish, rocket, mixed salad and the carrots. Plants are very susceptible to daylength rather than temperature but we have about 8 weeks before they slow to a crawl. Under protected cropping they really only stop between mid december and when the light turns in mid february but still – if you’re feeling bold this selection should give you the best shot. [...] 
Things to grow at this time of year One of the advantages of having some protection – either as a polytunnel or glasshouses is that you can grab a late season crop of short growing season crops. At this time of year you can get away with quick growing crops like little gem lettuce, pak choi, radishes and spinach. You could also get good results with a cut and come again salad mix. Here are a few Spinach plants we prepared earlier. You need to be quick because we’ll soon run out of Daylight but there’s just under 60 days usable daylight left until next year. So get sowing!. The other thing you should be thinking about is propagating cuttings from plants over the winter. We’ll do a bit more on that soon. [...] One of the exhibits I really liked in the Grow Your Own section was the one for Armstrong’s seeds that showed you what you could be growing in your greenhouse throughout the year. As commercial Organic Growers under glass ourselves we’re following these ideas ourselves anyway but I thought their display captured it well. If you’re looking for ideas you could do worse than look at these snaps. [...] 
One approach is to take a leaf out of the Permaculture book and go into the 3rd dimension. Grow the plants up the garden fence or even up rolls of vertical netting – which is actually what we do here at the glasshouses. [...] 
We’ve found by experiment that a really suitable variety for us is Maskotka which is a sprawly bush variety which produces cherry tomatoes of a good flavour. Most important for us is that it’s pretty early and means that we can snatch a crop before the blight kicks in. [...] 
This month the earthbox has shot to fame. So far we’ve sold about 8 which is about what we’ve sold in the whole previous history of the company. The earthbox is a revolutionary self watering patio planter which will enable people with limited space to grow tomatoes and other salad crops on balconies, roofs or patios. [...] 
People have also often asked me what varieties do we use ourselves. For squash we’ve planted Kuri, Blue Ballet, winter butternut, sweet lightning and delicata. These last two were our best sellers last year. [...] We’ve just planted out some leeks in the glasshouse. As commercial growers we need to make sure that the spacing is right so as to deliver the optimum yield and make the plants easy to weed. We use a bamboo grid to plant them at approx 13cm centres which means we can use the 8cm small wolf tools – hoes, rakes etc to keep the plants clean. [...] As gardeners we are always trying to bend the rules a bit. One tip is to warm the soil up a bit with fleece, cloches or polytunnels. Another is to start the seedlings off in a protected environment and then planting them out later. [...] |
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