Country Enterprise - Growing vegetables for health and profit in allotment or kitchen garden.

Country Enterprise - grow vegetables for taste and wellbeing</H1> <P><B><A HREF=veg1.htm TARGET=mainframe STYLE="text-decoration: none">Growing vegetables</A></B></P> <P><A HREF=veg2.htm>...Timing your veg</A></P> <P><A HREF=veg3.htm>...In heavy Soil</A></P> <P><A HREF=veg4.htm>...In light Soil</A></P> <P><A HREF=veg5.htm>...With Organic Manure</A></P> <P><A HREF=veg6.htm>...Seaweed</A></P> <P><A HREF=veg7.htm>...Cultivating</A></P> <P><A HREF=veg8.htm>...Ditches</A></P> <P><A HREF=veg9.htm>...Irrigation</A></P> <P><A HREF=veg10.htm>...Your enemies & friends</A></P> <P><A HREF=veg11.htm>...After germination</A></P> <P><A HREF=veg12.htm>...Overworking</A></P> <P><A HREF=veg13.htm>...Presenting the product</A></P> <P><A HREF=veg14.htm>...Specialist veg</A></P> <P><A HREF=veg15.htm>...Sprouts to Endive</A></P> <P><A HREF=veg16.htm>...Eggplant to Salsify</A></P> <P><A HREF=veg17.htm>...Sea Kale etc</A></P> <P><A HREF=title.htm >Chapter headings</A></P> <P> A vast number of people grow vegetables. </P><P> In country areas it has always been the rule rather than the exception and with the increase in enthusiasm for self-sufficiency in recent years, many more urban areas have followed suit. It is much cheaper to grow your own vegetables and they always taste far better than those bought in the shop. </P><P> The trouble starts when your production outstrips demand. Even with a freezer there are times when you have to dispose of surplus crops. When the surplus has not been planned it is usually a case of passing out bunches of beans to friends and neighbours. Not many shops are interested in a spasmodic supply and the bulk does not justify the kind of packaging necessary to send the vegetables to market. </P><P> If you are green-fingered and have put some planning into your enterprise then it can be profitable. You have to decide at the start how you intend to make your enterprise work. You can either decide to produce a wide range of vegetables — as you would normally to feed your family, only on a larger scale. Or you can decide to produce large quantities of a few specific crops. </P><P> If you feel your market is among people living locally who will come to you to buy their weekly vegetables, you should practise the former. If you do not wish or feel it is impracticable in your area to carry out a farm gate enterprise, choose the latter course. Clearly the amount you can produce is limited by the amount of land you have available and by the type of land. </P> <P> Early land, that is land in the south that naturally warms up early, can give you the advantage of reaching early maturity dates. </P><P>A crop that is ready even two weeks before the majority reaps a good bonus. The lettuce is always a clear indicator of that. If you have lettuce ready for sale early and the weather is warm you can never keep up with demand. The price is good and with tremendous enthusiasm you raise more seed, encourage your seedlings. Then everybody else has their own little lettuce glut and you are faced with bolting lettuces and a price that has dropped to rock bottom. When the end of the season approaches, lettuce is again in high demand. </P><P> It can often pay great dividends to wait a whole year before going into a vegetable enterprise. That way you can actually monitor the buying behaviour in your area and decide what to plant and which peaks to aim for. Either that or accept that there will be times when you cannot sell all you produce and vice versa. With bulk crops you must decide either to aim for the highest possible yield when the market is possibly at its lowest in cash terms or sacrifice quantity to try for an early market. </P><P> There was a delightful example of enterprise a few years ago in Thanet, Kent. It is a great potato-growing area and vast acreages are planted. One farmer was unable to harvest a few acres of late potatoes as Winter set in early. He did not do the usual and plough them in. Instead, in the very early spring, he found that most of the potatoes were in excellent condition. So he harvested the lot, sorted them and sold them as the earliest new potatoes. It was a tale that has kept the farming community entertained for months — every year it is retold in the autumn and the spring. We have never tried it ourselves but like everyone else who hears it we say that we will one year. </P><P> The initial requirement for producing vegetables is to have somewhere to grow them. Unless you are 'going hydroponic', that is aiming to grow plants in a solution of nutrients in water, you will need some land. </P><P> When you walk on your land and dig around in it you can classify it. If the land is heavy, slow draining and impossible sible to dig in wet weather, you have to accept that your plants have a comparatively short growing season. You have to delay planting until Spring has warmed and dried the land. However, in high summer you do have an advantage in that your land holds the available water and is not so susceptible to drying out. If you can dig in large quantities of organic manure, some ash, sand, and carbonate of lime (except on alkaline soil), you will obtain heavy crops. Given this assistance, vegetables thrive on this soil. Choose suitable varieties for the heavy soil — for example, round-rooted carrots grow beautifully where long-rooted ones do not. </P><P>Chalk soils are produced where limestone is found below the top-soil. Often the top-soil layer is quite thin and the soil has a greyish look. Although very sticky in the rain, this soil dries quickly and you can work on it earlier than on heavy soil. Its advantage is that it very rarely requires liming where other soils do. Its disadvantage is that the soil can dry out very quickly and plants that suffer in drought never fully recover. It is often worth mulching on clay soils to retain moisture. Applying large quantities of organic manure increases yields. If you grow broccoli and cabbages through the winter on this soil, they will need a dressing of a nitrogenous fertiliser or they will look miserable. </P> <P> You should be happy if you have a well balanced mixture of clay and sand in your soil. </P><P>Your soil is no doubt dark and friable, you can work happily on it for most of the year except directly after rain and your vegetable enterprise should flourish. Bearing in mind, of course, that all your neighbours have the same excellent soil, you will probably have to grow for a market some distance away and be involved in the packaging that involves.</P><P> With light, sandy soil you are able to plant very early in the spring. Every drop of water and fertiliser you add, however, is draining away at speed. It is therefore wise to delay the application of organic manure until after the main winter rains and also to apply any chemical fertilisers little and often. Even with generous mulching, you will probably need to irrigate in the summer. You can grow long, tapering carrots and parsnips and early cloche crops. Runner beans are happier in heavier soils so grow French beans instead. </P><P>Farming vegetables in light soil seems more elegant than in heavy: the root vegetables are elegantly tapered and even the beans are French! And the soil does not walk around with you as our Kentish clay does. At the end of a wet day we walk around laden down with mud collars around our Wellingtons. Our latest attempts to make our progress lighter has been to rub our boots with goose grease but unfortunately, this just makes the dogs wind in and out of legs trying to lick it off. The next attempt will have to be with something they do not like — perhaps diesel oil?</P> <P> If you are fortunate enough to have access to great quantities of that precious commodity, manure, a great many of your problems are solved on any soil. </P><P>If you have well rotted manure and straw mixed with animal droppings, ideally with a liberal mixture of poultry droppings for nitrogen, you can obtain heavy crops with little else added. Dried blood and bonemeal are also organic manures but are used in small quantities. Sewage sludge, although it sounds evil, is usually quite pleasant to handle. It is not available everywhere but where it is, it is often free or very inexpensive. </P><P>There is a problem, however, as was proved on a local village cricket pitch. Lovingly maintained and fertilised, the green grass is the pride of the cricket club. One year it grew an excellent crop of tomatoes! Well, that is an exaggeration because the plants were not allowed to reach fruiting size. The sad truth is that treatment at the sewage plant does not destroy tomato seeds and under suitable conditions very hardy tomato plants will appear. </P><P>We had a similar experience some years ago when our septic tank, hidden down at the end of a field, overflowed. A couple of months later the area of spillage was knee-deep in fruiting tomatoes. We leave you to guess whether we ate them or not! </P><P>Deep litter poultry manure must be well rotted before use as it contains wood shavings. This usually pollutes the atmosphere so is not worth doing unless you have an area well away from neighbours and your own house. </P><P>If you are intending to rely on garden compost to supply valuable organic material, become a waste miser and put absolutely everything you can on to it. Even a small amount of animal droppings, say from a pet rabbit, adds life to the compost heap. Certainly add household peelings and waste. Good leafmould takes a year to become suitable for application. The leaves should be layered with soil. There are often local speciality manures such as spent hops in brewing areas and wool shoddy near wool factories. The traditional methods of application of these substances are always the most efficient. </P><P> If you live near the sea, seaweed is really fantastic. </P><P>You have to stack it for a month or so for most of the salt to be washed out. In fact, if it is gathered in a dry summer, you will have to water it. It really does produce heavy crops. If you feel tempted to bring some back from a holiday by the sea, it may be worth remembering that to be really effective you have to apply 12lb (6kg) per square yard (metre). Even if your car will carry a hundredweight of it, you can only fertilise ten square yards, and of course you may well find your family refuses to appreciate the odour of decaying seaweed at close quarters. </P><P>Preparations from a seaweed base for foliar application are available from garden centres. We often concoct our own liquid mixtures using well rotted manure and these are particularly effective if there is a dry spell and the plants are not able to draw all the required benefit from the soil. These liquid feeds are not a substitute for well-dug-in manure, just a helpful supplement. If you apply a general fertiliser to growing crops but do not dig it in, just sprinkle it on the ground — the rain will gradually water it in and it will reach all the roots instead of bypassing them. </P><P> You have now decided where and what to grow and the sort of manure you are going to use. </P><P>If you are cultivating a new area, you may well have to remove grass. Before you dig it in or remove it and stack it somewhere to rot, it is worth considering whether you can sell it for turf. The best turf comes from new leys neatly cropped by sheep; your turf may be like this or it may be a portion of garden you are digging up with equally suitable lawn grass. In any case have a good look at it. There is nothing more heartening in a new venture than to get an instant cash return. </P><P>Whenever you are cultivating, remove and burn perennial weeds. Each weed you remove will save you dozens next year. Never be tempted to put such horrors on the compost heap or they will merrily return along with the manure. In fact, many permanent weeds grow from chopped up bits of themselves so you could greatly increase your problem if you hope to simply dig them in. Aim to have the area dug and manured by Christmas; you can then celebrate with an easy mind while frost and rain complete your work. </P><P>When you can get on to your land again depends on your soil type. Heavy soils mean late access; light soils mean you can get going early. In any case, you should now find that the top few inches of soil break down to a fine crumbly tilth when raked. You may find that the soil beneath is compacted. One cause of bad drainage is continually rotivating at a set depth: this causes the soil beneath to become compacted and water finds it difficult to drain away. If this is your problem, you will have to dig right down and loosen the bottom layer. This is remarkably heavy work and certainly worth avoiding by varying the heights at which you rotivate. </P><P> If you have ditches near the area you are cultivating, keep them really clear. </P><P>A well-cared-for ditch is a great help in draining land and one that is often overlooked on small land enterprises. By digging down an extra foot, ditches that have long ceased to be effective can be returned to active life. Watch an effective ditch at work when the weather is wet and imagine what all the water it is carrying away would do to the land it is draining. Without ditches it is more difficult to drain land. To drain a large area you may need to use land drains leading to a constructed soakaway. Envisaging all this digging may persuade you to practise small-scale ditch digging. This is really an application of polder farming. Dig ditches, with the lie of the land vertically down your plot, dig a ditch at the bottom leading to a collecting area such as a small pond. </P><P>On clay soils you can construct a pond in a time-honoured way by using the natural clay as an impervious layer. If you live on different soil or do not have such faith in nature, you must resort to polythene liners. Of course, if you live on very light soil then you can run the whole system in reverse. Put the pond at the highest point and lead the ditches running away; if the soil is extremely light it is worth lining the ditches with polythene. These methods of carrying water to and from sources have been practised all over the world for centuries. </P><P>It is amusing that now we have developed cheap plastic sheeting to make the whole process more foolproof, we seem to use the method less. This is, of course, partially due to a mechanised approach to vegetable production. When the enterprise is looked at from a smaller point of view, machine and daily labour requirements can take on a different position and it is often logical if you are producing on your own to use the winter months to construct waterways and drains so that the summer workload can be lessened. </P><P> When it comes to Summer and you are actually applying water to the vegetables, the essential point to remember is that when you water, do it enthusiastically.</P><P> Lightly watered plants scorch in the sun, rain-watered plants do not, so that when water has to be applied artificially it must be in rain quantities, not in watering- cans. Water storage tanks are often necessary. In old garden systems they were often incorporated as part of a basic design. </P><P>We have a greenhouse containing an enormous grapevine. It has its own tank that fills from the gutters and apparently from underwater drains. It has never gone dry and so there is always water on hand. Even a rain butt under a gutter collects a vast amount of rain in a downpour. </P><P>Water storage puts two extra responsibilities on you. The first is to make sure that the water is completely safe from a child's point of view. Even if you do not have children, other people do and little children can trot remarkable distances when unguarded. A water tank is a potential killer and must be fenced in or covered. </P><P>Your water storage can also be an ideal place for mosquitoes to breed and flourish. A drop of oil on the water surface cures that and in the summer it is well worth keeping an eye out for them. It is apparently only the females that bite but it is impossible for anyone but another mosquito to tell the difference, so do not bother with the niceties and kill the lot. </P><P> One creature that anyone cultivating does not want to destroy is the earthworm. </P><P>If you have applied generous quantities of manure, you will certainly increase this useful creature's numbers. The earthworm obligingly cultivates deep down into your soil by his continual ingesting and passing out of the soil. </P><P>'Baddies' in the vegetables such as slugs can be disposed of using proprietary killers or more profitably by letting egg-laying ducks do the work for you. The duck eats the slug (she loves the succulent beasts) and will give you eggs in return. Chickens love slugs too, but they will also eat your vegetables. Just a sprinkling of ducks keeps the ecological system working to your advantage. Instead of all that digging in the winter, you could let a few free-range pigs do a lot of the work for you. You can also use goats to eat their way deep into scrub and brambles. This all depends on whether you want to integrate different areas of production or not. </P><P>Planning a kind of animal-assisted ideal life is very useful to fill in wet days when you cannot get on to the land. Of course, once you have committed yourself to the livestock you must be out irrespective of the weather. That is always a point worth remembering. </P><P> When you look at the price of a packet of seeds you can instantly see the potential profit. </P><P>A few pence produces pounds of crop. That is assuming that you are able to help the seeds along and also that the seeds are worth planting in the first place. There are always great differences in the price of seed on offer. The only real advice to follow is to choose seeds from a reputable company, buy them where you are sure they have been kept correctly and choose a suitable variety for your conditions. Last year we did not buy courgette seeds until the season was quite advanced. There were very few packets left in the shops and it was clearly too late to buy by mail order. We bought a brand that we had never heard of, the packets looked a little crumpled but the dates were still correct. The seedlings made a disappointingly sparse appearance and the plants had nothing like the vigour we had hoped for. Next year we shall order early; there is nothing more disappointing than labouring away at something that will never come up to standard. </P><P>If you are planning to plant a wide variety of standard crops, try to buy the seed by weight. There is not much point in going out and paying for dozens of pretty little packets when you are growing commercially. Seeds are usually tiny things (unless they are banana seeds), but they need warmth anyway. Do not be tempted into sowing too thickly: it makes thinning unnecessarily time-consuming and is wasteful. There are all sorts of tips on how to plant small seeds. You can mix them with sand and sprinkle the lot along a row, you can sprout the seeds in wallpaper paste and put that into an icing bag and dribble it along the row. If you have a steady hand, you can simply deal with them by hand. </P><P> When producing crops for sale you must find the balance between over-effort and under-effort. </P><P>To produce single specimen parsnips is an enviable achievement unless you intend to make money selling them. Rather produce a larger quantity of good parsnips and leave out the 'stars'. All growing is like that if done to be commercial. Your product has to be excellent to sell but not so excellent that it becomes uneconomical to produce it. That is why it is worth getting a head start by having the ground well manured and buying good seeds. When the growing and harvesting season is under way you will need all the time available to keep up with gathering and packing without having to encourage under- nourished plants or pamper 'prima donnas'. </P><P>Weeding becomes a pressing occupation during the growing season. After all the ideal growth area that you have prepared for your vegetables is also a paradise for weeds. Using weedkillers can today cut down a vast amount of labour. However, weedkillers are of necessity very powerful toxic substances. We use as few of these substances as we can, partly because we do not like putting chemicals near the food we intend to sell or eat and partly because we do not like having dangerous substances around. Anything of this nature should be kept in a locked cupboard. </P><P> We grow a lot of our crops in blocks rather than in traditional rows. </P><P>This increases ground cover and if you keep the weeds at bay in the early stages the plants soon become big enough to make their own way. Planting closer together than usual also helps this method. It means that things like beetroot and lettuces tend to be harvested while they are smaller than most for sale. This achieves two objects: first, it decreases the amount of possible damage from slugs and other things that eat into your growing plants and secondly, it provides a more attractive crop. A bunch of beetroot, the globes some 1.5 to 2 inches across, tied with raffia around the stalks with the deep green leaves still attached, is a beautiful sight. Buyers at the farm gate and local shops will often be tempted by this natural presentation to buy. Once the beetroot grow to a standard three or more inches in diameter, your product is just the same as that available everywhere. You have lost the advantage that smaller scale production can have. </P><P> If you aim to encourage the public to buy directly from you, plan the vegetable area with visual effect in mind. Marrows are quite spectacular in growth. Plant them in a compost heap and the trailing variety will soon cover the area with umbrella leaves and bright yellow flowers. The flowers themselves can be harvested and stuffed and deep-fried. Perhaps your customers are not aware of this — a small recipe sheet often inspires specialist buying. There are some examples of ones that we have successfully used in the <I>RECIPES</I> SECTION. Leave some of the yellow flowers to grow into marrows and you have had two incomes from one crop. Selling on a farm gate scale means that you can also bundle together succulent little carrots taken as thinnings from a main carrot crop. These little carrots do not look beautiful for long as they wilt in a dry atmosphere but if they are sold quickly and cooked gently, they are the most delicious carrots of all. </P><P>Everyone, public and shopkeeper alike, will be encouraged to buy if you can chat about the special delights of your products. Become an enthusiastic vegetable-eater and the feeling will soon come across to other people. When you see what a small portion of housekeeping fresh vegetables have become, it proves that there is scope for an enthusiast. Some health shops will sell fresh vegetables — they must usually be organically grown. </P><P>Many young housewives have been brought up almost entirely on a diet of frozen vegetables. The same customers are often the ones with a keen interest in cooking so if you can put a tempting array of vegetables in front of them, you will have willing buyers. A trip to the continent always shows what many of us are missing: there every little corner grocery seems to offer a tempting variety of fresh vegetables. You can even carry the presentation theme as far as preparing strings of onions for sale. It is quite simple, you simply tie the dried onion stalks to a piece of string and form a chain. While we would not think of suggesting that the vegetable growers of Britain take to their bikes as the French used to do to sell us their onions, it is certainly a product with tremendous visual and culinary appeal. </P><P> There are a few seedsmen who now specialise in selling exotic varieties of vegetable seeds. </P><P> In a suburban area, the market for exotic vegetables like yellow tomatoes and red beans can often be tapped through a high-class greengrocer's or health shop. There are often even outlets in supermarkets in towns. The essentials for exotic vegetables are professional packaging and standard production. It is much more complicated to produce a succession of exotic vegetables through the season than to grow the traditional crops. However, if that kind of challenge appeals to you, it is certainly most worthwhile and often a lot of fun. </P><P> Children, and adults who have never come across tiny cherry tomatoes, are hooked for life. How about growing spaghetti plants? Even a few regular customers, becoming converted to the fascination of eating hitherto unseen varieties, leads to continuing sales. Even vegetables that were once popular, such as sea-kale, are unknown by many today. Often all a vegetable like this needs to increase its local popularity is a recipe leaflet. If you consider how we all happily consume avocado pears, kiwi fruits and other exotic fruits it is clear how powerful effective marketing is. </P><P> Some less usual vegetables to consider are Jerusalem artichokes. Grow the smooth-skinned variety; their long stalks make excellent game cover. Globe artichokes are delicious but never as prolific here as on the Continent. Asparagus peas are tiny tender little things and very popular in a speciality market. Try unusual coloured beans and even home-grown haricot beans. Haricot beans do not provide a heavy crop but they are finer in flavour than the mass-produced ones. If you follow a really good, complicated recipe for baking them, guess what? They taste just like canned ones! Not nearly as many red beetroot are sold fresh as cooked but there are a lot of good recipes for borsch about and if you introduce them to your customers, you can sell the fresh roots. </P><P> To sell Brussels sprouts pull up the whole plant. Hung upside down in a shed, the sprouts stay fresh for a few weeks. This often encourages people to try fresh as opposed to frozen ones. </P><P> Red cabbage is delicious cooked or uncooked; it sells well in areas with a continental population. </P><P> Cardoons are appreciated on the continent but you will have to do some customer-education here with a recipe leaflet. They look rather like globe artichokes but it is not the spiky globes that you are after. Tie black polythene around the plant in mid-September to blanch the stems: this is the part you cook, using the same recipes you would use for celery. </P><P> Celeriac is now sold in many supermarkets. It is a celery-flavoured root and really at its best fresh. </P><P> Chicory is interesting to grow; you produce a root from seed, then you dig it up and force it in pots in the dark and up come those shiny nobs of chicory (some varieties produce a pink chicon). </P><P> Corn Salad looks like forget-me-nots. You can eat it in the winter when other salad stuff is in short supply and it makes an excellent salad mixed with thinly sliced red cabbage and a few nuts. </P><P> Courgettes are not really very special unless you grow yellow ones. If you live near an area with a continental population, grow a few big dandelions and blanch them; these are delicious in salads and much appreciated by healthy eaters because of their beneficial effect on the liver. </P><P> Endive is another salad vegetable not appreciated so much here as it is on the continent. It has a bitter flavour and we only like it when it is mixed with lettuce. </P><P> Egg-plants (aubergines) grow remarkably well if they are well manured. We have tried egg-plants under glass and out in the garden and found that they preferred a sheltered spot in the garden where they grew enthusiastically. They look very decorative and like being used as patio plants in pots as long as the bottom half of the pot is filled with rotted manure. </P><P> Fennel is another decorative vegetable to grow and its aniseed flavour is very refreshing. Garlic grows well in good soil but not to the enormous size of Italian bulbs unless you use a giant variety. Usually we grow ours from healthy garlic cloves bought wholesale. There is a variety of giant bulb on sale from one of the specialist seedsmen and we are going to try it this year — apparently it has a mild flavour. If you edge your vegetable area with nasturtium, you can pick the seed heads and pickle them like capers. </P><P> Shallots are worth growing because they are often not available from ordinary greengrocers and are necessary in many recipes. Peppers grow well, especially under polythene tunnels. If you pick some of them while they are still small, it gives the keen cook a chance to preserve them in oil and vinegar. </P><P> Salad potatoes have a waxy flesh and make the most delicious potato salad; they also sell for a lot more money than ordinary potatoes. Growing several varieties of radish offers your purchaser a wider variety; French Breakfast are our favourite ones. Winter radishes are cooked in the same way as turnips. </P><P> The farmer's name for kale is fodder but for humans it provides greenery at a time of year when hardly anything else is available. </P><P> Salsify and scorzoneras are similar in appearance, both being long tapering roots with a green growth on top. The main difference between them is that salsify is a brown-skinned root and scorzoneras have a black skin. They have different flavours but are cooked in the same way. You can eat the leaves chopped in a salad; the roots should be cooked in acidulated water and are delicious in cream sauces or deep-fried. They grow rather like carrots and as they are hardy, you can leave them in the ground until you wish to lift them. </P><P> Sea-kale, like asparagus, requires a permanent bed; as with chicory, you grow the root in the ground, lift it and then force succulent young shoots to grow. You can eat the unforced green leaves, using them as you would spinach; the blanched stems should be boiled in acidulated water and served with butter or a sauce. </P><P> All the different types of spinach are worth growing; you can have some of at least one variety available all year and good-looking fresh spinach sells well. </P><P> Pumpkins are great fun to grow and very decorative — they always look like great big plastic monsters lurking in the vegetables and there seems to be a returning enthusiasm for using them at Halloween. This year we saw a lot imported from Spain and they were astonishingly expensive, compared to the price fetched by a similar vegetable, the marrow. </P><P> There are other exotic squashes and continentals and Americans certainly use them far more than we do. All the odd-shaped tomatoes are worth growing for a specialist market, in particular the really giant ones: they were fetching twice the price of their humbler cousins this summer. </P><P> Well, that is a list of the more unusual vegetables. No doubt we have left many out. Add to them all the standard vegetables, like carrots and onions, and it goes to show what an enormous choice we could have available in Britain. </P><P> Remember, any kind of root vegetable has a very limited life if you wash it to improve its appearance. Interestingly enough if you wash it you are theoretically carrying on a different business from simply growing and selling produce and could require a change of use planning permission. Farm gate sales of home-grown vegetables and fruit often leads on to other things and many smallholders happily sell oranges and plastic-wrapped cucumbers that clearly were never grown on site. In an area where planning officials are plentiful this can lead to conflict.</P>