Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
The ruthless grower
It's difficult to think about winter when it's so balmy in the tunnel. After all, how
can frosts be on the horizon when the cucumbers are growing so fast that you
need to train them three times a week? But if you're serious about getting the
most out of your polytunnel, there's more to it than full beds under a sunny sky.
If you want your walk-in larder to have food in it over the winter and into the
hungry gap, you need to be working towards this by the second half of the
summer.
Should you fail to do this, one day in October it will finally be time to take all the
summer growth out, and your tunnel will suddenly look very empty indeed. The
garden centres will be no help at all, unless you fancy some winter pansies, as
they sold the last of their vegetable seedlings months ago. This is why, almost as
soon as you've finished planting your spring sowings, you should start filling the
staging with seedlings again. If you get it right, the staging will be just as full in
September as it was in April.
Sadly, your winter harvests come at a price. Space must be made for them in late
summer, and this means taking out some plants that are probably doing per-
fectly well. While this is a sacrifice, you can minimise it by carefully planning
your tunnel's whole year in advance, rather than staggering from one season to
the next, wishing you had a little more space. The following are a few tricks that
might help.
Using modules
Most winter plants are suitable for module sowing, and can be potted up once or
twice if their space is not ready in time.
Clearing away ground-level growth
Tomatoes, cucumbers and similarly tall plants can create serious shading at soil
level, but they don't have to. Cutting away all leaves to a height of 30cm around
the middle of August won't seriously affect their energy levels, but it can make a
big difference to small plants struggling to get started beneath them.
Growing summer plants in pots
Consider putting some summer plants, such as peppers, in large pots instead of
directly into the soil bed so that they can be moved as the situation demands.
Undersowing
Some small-seeded plants, such as lettuces and carrots, spend some time resting
after germination, and if light levels are poor they can stay like this for several
weeks. You can take advantage of this by sowing their seeds under the canopy of
an existing plant, resulting in tiny seedlings in standby mode. Once the growth
shading them is cut away they're ready to go, but this works only if they survive
