Sizing a Vegetable Patch

There have been some problems this year with the vegetable patches, with the deer eating the strawberries (I know, not strictly vegetables) in one of them, and the drought, rabbits and moles doing their best to kill off everything else.

Nonetheless, we are very happy with what has grown so far, particularly the spicy leaf, rocket and peas.  So, especially in light of the problems with food safety in Germany at the moment, we are planning a new, larger mole- and rabbit- and deer-proof vegetable patch.

Our ethos for the vegetable patch is that we don't use any chemicals for killing weeds or insects, the only fertiliser is our own nettle tea, and we recuperate from the roofs all of the water that is needed.

Plan for parterre vegetable patch

The overall design is based on the idea of a parterre garden, with its centrepiece a pond of about 30,000 litres which will provide us water near to the vegetables and will allow us to get through another drought like this year's.  

We will then put 5 beds around the pond, each about 10m x 15m.  Having 5 beds will enable us to rotate the crops each year and, if we choose, leave one bed fallow each year to give it time to recover naturally.  This will give us a large growing area, but it means that we can grow less intensively and try out different vegetables that we couldn't if we were restricted for space.

Our next task, other than preparing the vegetable patch, is to work out what and how much we plant in each section.

As we build the new vegetable patch we will provide updates on how it is going, and we will definitely give some details on the yield that we obtain next year.