kitchen garden design ideas

- in this video i'm gonnashow you 10 different ways to make your vegetablegarden more productive next year and beyond. (calm acoustic guitar music) now if you want to grow more food and save money at the same time, then you're watching the right video. and if you look down belowin the video description, i've actually created time stamps

for the 10 ways that you can make your vegetable garden more productive. so it's a bit easierfor you to move around. and maybe at the end of the video, you might want to reviewa couple of the methods. so just before we get into this video, i'd like to thank today's sponsor, which is first tunnels. now they provide a wholerange of polytunnel sizes

as well as mini polytunnelsand fruit cages. so if this interests you, and you're looking to extend your season, then go and check out their website to see what they can offer you. so the first way to make a more productive vegetable garden next year is by actually building soil over winter. now you may be able to see

over there to my right,which should be your left, we've got some raised beds here. and what we're doing here is we've placed a layer ofwell-watered cow manure, which is about four inches thick, so that equates about 10 centimetres. and the idea is that over winter we're going to let the earthworms and whatever microbeswhich are still alive

to work at breaking down and decomposing the well-rotted cow manure. now this is reallyimportant because cow manure is a fantastic source of nitrogen, and if you're especiallygoing to be growing a leafy green in that bed next year, then it's really important toput that source of nitrogen, because leafy greens thriveoff a good source of nitrogen. now i did make a video showingthe whole tutorial of this,

so you might want to check it out. it isn't as well-produced, but i also have a videoshowing the results of the healthy soil afterwards. secondly is to crack down on slugs and other pests for that matter. now the thing about slugs, especially if they hit you hard, they actually eat a lot of your crop,

so you're losing productivity. but luckily there are a couple of ways that you can crack down on slugs so you can reduce their collateral damage. now the first thing thatyou need to be doing is going around to your garden and remove any pots or any bits of wood that are literally layingdown on the ground, because these make perfecthabitats for slugs.

and what you wanna do is to make it as de-slug friendly as possible, where they don't have little crevices and gaps to hide behind, and more in the spring andsummer what you need to do is if you have any patchesof long grass, to cut this, just to reduce theamount of hiding places. and secondly is to havea slug hunting party. so kind of early-ish summer

you need to invite someof your friends over, bring head torches and some buckets, and literally you'llbe able in the evening to go out and pick bucket-loads of slugs, and this is going to have a huge effect. now a really powerful way of creating a more productive vegetable garden is by creating and drawing up a simple succession planting plan.

now what i love about succession planting is it really does utilise,maximise the space that you have in your vegetable garden. so especially for small spaces, like we're fortunateenough to have the land to have a big vegetable garden, but if you just have a backyard, then focus on creating asuccession planting plan, because it's all too easy,

especially for beginnervegetable gardeners, to sow all your lettuceand radish seeds in one go. but by spacing it outevery week or two weeks, you're then going tohave a continuous harvest which is going to last you morethrough the growing season, rather than having everything at one go and then chances are youwill waste some food. so just create a plan where you think, "okay i'm going to beharvesting carrots, say,

"in july, so after that "i might want to plantsome lettuces and radishes "to make use of that space." now this is another tip about space, but this is utilising the vertical space that you have around your garden. now behind you, we don'treally have anything there, but you can see overhere we've got a trellis. and what we're doing is we're gradually

adding and incorporating trellises around the perimeter ofour vegetable garden. and one thing that i thinkis underestimated quite a lot is actually the power ofperennial fruits and vegetables. so what we're doing is almostcreating a wall or a barrier around our garden, which is both creating a microclimate within it,which is keeping the heat, but also gives us another element where we can grow and produce more food,

such as blackberries and silvanberries and pears and plums, and things like that. now if you haven't yet,you might want to consider getting some sort of undercover growing, because undercover growingis a worthy investment. we have a solar tunnelhere and we're gonna be adding a mini greenhouse very soon, but the thing aboutextending your growing season is that you can startearlier on in the year,

and you can finish later. growing undercover makes it possible, especially in the uk, to grow winter salads. and it's great having afresh supply of winter salads during the cold, dark days. and it gives you vitaminslike vitamin c and d, which are harder to get in the winter compared to summer and spring.

so if you wanna see an exampleof what's been doing well, i recommend you check outpatrick dolan's channel over at oneyardrevolution. as well as succession planting, you have interplanting. and i love interplantingbecause it created a totally different aspectand element to growing food. now we did it earlier this year where we grew radishes inthe same bed as potatoes,

with the idea of utilising the ways of fast growing vegetables compared to slower growing vegetables. so what we did with the radishes, we planted those at the sametime as the seed potatoes, but the radishes had matured just as the leaves of the potatoes were covering the raised bed. so here, instead ofhaving two different areas

where you're growingradishes in one raised bed, and growing potatoesin another raised bed, we're actually growing the two together. so that's freeing up vitalspace to grow other things, and as a result, you're making and another common method for this is a growing method where you literally are growing sweet corn, and then you can plant at the bottom

a squash, or some peas, and the peas can grow upand around the sweet corn, and the squash can be at the bottom, or you can even grow lettuces. but again, you're justlooking at how you can make the most of the space you have by adding two differentor three different crops in one area, rather thanhaving them in different areas. something similar to interplanting

is square foot gardening, and this is almost pushed the boundaries and the rules of traditionalvegetable gardening, where you have general spacings, but in square foot gardening you can throw thosespacings out the window, and you grow a lot more concentrated, and it's a very intenseway of growing vegetables. and it does take a little bit more effort

to sort it all out, but you will get a lot more harvest. so there is a book that i've read and i recommend you read, which is the square foot gardening, and it's really really interesting. so if you wanna look at that, and i'll be doing somevideos, hopefully next year about that as well, so makesure you're subscribed.

when i say this method, you might think, "why didn't i think of that?" but the thing is, if you grow more of what grows well in your area compared to what maybedoesn't quite grow so well and you get so-so results, by growing more of what grows well and you kind of succession plant it out, then in that sense you'll actually create

higher productivity. now things that grow wellwith us are swiss chard, beetroot, a lot of cabbages, and also peas. now if you do have a lotmore of a certain vegetable, such as, say, swiss chard or beetroot, then the thing is you might want to look at how you can preserve it. so we've been looking at lactofermentation

and how we can fermentand store and preserve our vegetables. so by growing more of whatgrows well in your area, the idea is you'll have a bigger yield. so you may not have such a diversity of what you're growing, but the thing is you're gonna have more, and especially if your solepurpose of growing food is to save money,

then you might want togreatly consider this. use free fertilisers. fertilisers are very very very important, but not ones that you buy from shops. all you need to do is make the most of your natural surroundings, or even grow your ownfertiliser, such as comfrey. now i did a video about thegrowing power of comfrey for permaculture vegetable gardens,

which you can take a look at, and i do actually recommendyou take a look at. because i teach you how to make a comfrey and nettle compost tea, which you can use on your garden to provide very very useful nutrients. but also you can use comfrey, add it to place on your compost, and apply a sprinkle ofcompost around your plants

just to replenish thesoil with some nutrients, especially during theearly stages of growing. but also even just use it as a mulch, especially when tomatoesare beginning to ripen. you can add these nutrientsand use the comfrey as mulch. so use free fertilisers. you can use manure, comfrey, leaves use these as leaf mulch, grass clippings, theseare kind of mulches now,

but you can use that to both build soil and retain moisture andother things like that. and finally, moving on with the mulch idea is how to reduce and crack down on weeds. now we've already talkedabout cracking down on slugs, and you can crack down onother pests such as mice by growing peas in rain gutters, but by cracking down on weeds, now weeds are something,

especially organic vegetablegardeners all have to face, and it's all part ofthe truthful experience of growing your own food. but when weeds get the upper hand, then it can be quite demoralising. so by using and applyingthick layers of mulch, and i'm a great advocate of using mulch, then by using mulch and using the layers around your vegetables,

then this is going to stop and hinder the growth of weeds. and you might need todo a couple of layers, or a couple of spreadings,every growing season, but this is just gonna helpreduce the need to weed. and if you do see any weeds where it might not be possible to mulch, then you need to strike them early before they get out of hand.

and at the end of the day, if you think about it, weeds not only take nutrientsaway from your soil, but what they also do is take away valuable growing space. so thank you very muchfor watching this video, and i hope this hasgiven you some more ideas on how you can create a moreproductive vegetable garden. now if you have any questions

about any of the methods that i outlined, then don't hesitate to ask me down below in the comments section, or you can contact medirectly on snapchat, and there'll be a link available for that. now i do invite you to share this video with your friends who also grow food, just so they can maybeget some new ideas as well so they can create a moreproductive vegetable garden.

so i hope you enjoyed it. don't forget to rate whether you did like ordidn't like this video, and i'll see you again very soon. goodbye.

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