» The Consequences of Failing to Plan

You’ve heard the saying:

‘Fail to plan, plan to fail’.

Our recent excursion into growing our own vegetables is a good illustration of how this can work in practice. We haven’t failed, but we could have had more success than we’ve achieved so far.

It would be unfair to say we didn’t make any plans at all, but we weren’t really very systematic, nor did we base our plans on sound research. We’d grown some vegetables before in England, so we knew the basics: prepare your ground, sow your seeds or source your small plants, lay out your patch, feed, water, weed etc. And we knew what we wanted to grow, so set about acquiring seeds and plants to fulfill our desires.

But we didn’t pay that much attention to things like soil quality, growing seasons in a different country, compatibility of plants growing next to each other, growing habits of plants or weather conditions. We definitely went into this like amateurs!

Here are some of the things we did and what they taught us:

We were told we could choose anywhere on the plot for our vegetables, but didn’t consider the effects of sunlight and shade before settling on a plot. So we have an area that gets little natural shade and we’ve had to rig up some netting that goes a little way to cutting the glare of the sun. Our plants are getting strong sunlight for around 12 hours per day, which is too much for some of them. We’re feeling the effects in the need to water deeply and feed regularly, as the water quickly dilutes the nutrients in the feed. The netting also has to be adjusted as plants like sweetcorn grow higher, and we have to struggle under it to water, feed and weed, making us wander around the plot almost bent double.

We also didn’t consider the quality of the soil when we came to choose our plants. We’re working on a plot with quite heavy, clayey soil, which is sticky when wet, and cracks quickly as it dries out. Not the preferred environment of crops like carrots, but we still planted several rows. A recent inspection suggested that, although we have good top growth on the carrots, we’re likely to get small, stunted vegetables that won’t be worth peeling. Fortunately most of the things we’ve planted fruit above ground, but we’re hoping our red onions don’t suffer a similar fate to the carrots. Walking in this soil when it’s even slightly moist is a good way of picking up a few pounds of ballast on each foot. Good for strengthening the leg muscles if nothing else!

Despite our planning failures this carrot really tried to deliver for us!

But then those carrots shouldn’t have been in there anyway. After raising them from seed, and cheerfully planting them out, I got to wondering how long it would be until we were enjoying tasty carrots straight from the plot. So I decided to search the web for some guidance, only to find that carrots don’t like really hot weather, so in our climate should only be planted in spring or autumn. Another reason why we’re not expecting a bumper crop. And I can add several other items to the list of plants that don’t like the heat. In fact, we’ve planted more things that don’t like the heat than things that do! With some of these there’s a chance that they will develop fruit in the autumn, as the temperatures start to fall. So for now we’re just watering and hoping.

More than once we were advised to look at what local people were growing and copy them, to make sure that we had the right crops growing at the right time. That’s sound advice, which we followed to an extent. But the locals know when to get their crops in the ground, and when you find you’re months behind them you’re already on the back foot. Plus some of the plants look similar to each other, or, conversely, are difficult to recognize. Without going and interrogating the elderly men and women in their gardens – which is difficult when you have a language difference – we were stuck. A feeble excuse maybe, but the challenge of trying to communicate with that group of people least likely to have much command of English were compared against that of having a go and seeing what would happen. And the latter won.

When they’re in small pots, you can’t get an idea of how big things are going to grow. We were planting some things, like eggplant, zucchini and cucumber for the first time, and didn’t know about their growing habits either. Consequently we planted our zucchini too close together. As they developed we decided to stake them and let them grow upwards as there was more space for them this way. This worked fine until one plant broke off completely at the stem as we tried to harvest a couple of fairly large specimens.

When we placed our plants within the plot we did this with a hazy idea of what to put where. We didn’t consider space needs or accessibility. Nor did we think about plant heights and how these might help provide shade for other plants. So we have a fairly random layout where we could have had more order. Some plants are getting pushed aside as others take up more room than we expected. Taller plants aren’t offering any shade to others. Weeding is interesting: dancing around like a ballerina trying to avoid stepping on something. Eyes in the back of my head would be useful; eyes in my butt would be even more so!

We’ve got a nice row of sweetcorn, some of which is getting pretty high. Just the other day I read an article that said sweetcorn is wind pollinated and so it shouldn’t be planted in a single row. Whoops! All I can say is that the wind has often come from the direction that would blow along the row – that’s when it doesn’t just swirl around from all directions – so maybe we’ll be alright.

One food we were keen to grow was peas. We asked for seed at the local garden supplies centre, and were told the seed was not αρακάς (the word on packs of frozen peas), but μπριζέλι. According to our dictionary both words are Greek translations of ‘pea’, and we’d written both down on our list just in case, so we thought nothing of it. They looked like normal pea seeds, and they sprouted like normal pea seeds – growing so quickly we could almost see them. But these aren’t like any peas we’ve seen before. The pods don’t fatten out in the way we’re used to, nor do they go a noticeable green. But if they’re picked when they are still firm and a very pale green they taste like the peas we’re used to. So we’ve lost quite a few as we didn’t know what was happening and let the pods get brown and dry.

Succession planting – to give a longer harvesting season – is desirable to make sure we don’t have more vegetables than we can cope with at a time. But it’s proving difficult. It’s too hot to get any new plants started, and we began our gardening activities too late to follow the usual practice of sowing small numbers of plants at regular intervals. So we have cucumbers, zucchini and French beans – lots of them all at once – but only the odd tomato and pepper. Plan A was giving the surplus away, which our friends appreciate. Plan B is to learn how to preserve them so we can benefit from our own efforts later in the year.

As you can see we haven’t failed completely. In fact we can sometimes boast that there are more home-grown ingredients in our meals than shop-bought. But there are things we could have done differently that would have helped. Lessons that we’ve learned for the future and that we’ll use when we get onto our own plot. In fact we’re already doing this: noticing the soil condition, where the natural shade is, where there will be good drainage etc.

And we’re collecting lots of guidance from the web about growing in a hot climate. Plus as our language skills and confidence grow it will become easier to ask the locals and benefit from their replies.