Planning

The level of your gardening results will more or less be dependent on your level of preparation slash planning. Some people find this bit very leiðinlegt. I am not one of those people.

A friend of mine once asked me if I really had excel spreadsheets to make things easier or if I had things to do purely so I could make excel spreadsheets.

So my season 2011 spreadsheet was more or less completed this week. This is not something most people need to distress themselves over, its just my OCD nature creeping into every aspect it can. But if you are planning on growing more than a few varieties of plants it pays to make notes of what you planted, when you planted it, where you planted it etc. so that you can learn from your experience next year. Even with my excel mastery I ended up shoving some seeds and seedlings in gaps when they came about and now have no idea which type of carrot was which - and one was substantially better than the others.

The details I have decided noteworthy are;

Variety of the type
Seed brand
Date from and until the seeds can be sown
Where they can be sown (pot, bed, greenhouse)
When I actually sowed
When the plants germinated
When I planted out
General comments



As well as this paperwork of sorts, it pays to prepare the area you are going to plant. Unless you are creating a container garden and only need to fill your pots, which I have to say is infinitely easier to manage both from a soil preparation and weeding standpoint.

I am not one for digging I have to say. However the garden where I live was embedded with several years of established perennial weeds, with whom I am in continual war. Coltsfoot being the absolute git of weeds. And no matter how much I battle, it exists in my neighbour's garden so can always creep its way back.

My standard preparation has involved turning the soil after this summer's crops were cleared. I still have quite a few winter veg in the beds though, but as these are cleared I will gradually set my 2009 now well rotted compost on the beds and let the worms gradually incorporate it into the soil. I did consider sowing some green manures to cover the empty plots and protect the nutrients from escaping but as with most things here in Iceland, the seeds were incredibly pricey so I will defer that until next year.

I take some time to roughly plan what I will be planting in which bed so that I can treat the bed appropriately. Some vegetable families like very firm soil, some want immense amounts of organic matter and some don't want to be near a patch which has been composted for at least a year. For these reasons some amount of planning is necessary, not forgetting the all important crop rotation.


As soon as the soil defrosts in spring I will turn the soil a little again, weed out whatever I can get my hands on (knowing more will grow later) and add more compost to the beds in which I will be planting plants that appreciate it - this is not all vegetables so I recommend checking first. It is also in spring that I add general fertilizer, preferably organic - I am going to try and get some blood, fish and bone next year.

Its at this point I will also mix in a heavy amount of sand for my root vegetable patch. I tried to avoid doing this in 2009, after all I was gardening whilst heavily pregnant and tried to cut as much gruntwork out as possible, but the bottom line is - carrots and parsnips simply do not work in unprepared soil. They split at every point they hit a hard surface and beyond the look, it makes them hard to cook. This year I bothered and have been rewarded with rather handsome fleshy daggers.