UK: What to grow now on your vegetable patch
“At this time of year, organic matter is falling from trees and dead plants on to the ground. Gather it up and apply all this new fertility to the surface (of the vegetable patch). Never dig it in because leaving it on top encourages worms and other soil life to come up and find it and take it down.
Daily Echo Reporter
10 December 2022
Excerpt:
Christmas may be nearing, but don’t think you can sit tight just because the nights have drawn in – there’s plenty you could be doing on the allotment or vegetable patch now to give yourself a head start for next year.
Gardening expert, author and YouTuber Charles Dowding (charlesdowding.co.uk), whose new book No Dig (DK, £30) was recently published, urges people to use the winter to give soil a boost and make plots ready for planting.
He offers the following tips:
Lose the weeds
“Get the weeds to zero. If you have a mass of weeds on your allotment which are going to be too much effort to hand-weed, lay cardboard on top, with a little bit of compost on top of that, which should get you weed-free very quickly.”
The cardboard will soon get wet, so it will start to degrade very quickly, and you’ll have to keep on top of pernicious perennial weeds like couch grass and ground elder.
“You’ll have annual meadow grass, bittercress and groundsel but keep weeding and clear the debris to the compost heap.”
