Growing Veg year on year
steph_lewis1991
Posts: 8
Hi there,
I'm new to this site as well as growing vegetables in general. We've just bought our first house so for the first time ever, have a garden to ourselves and have started growing some brocoli and cauliflower which have just started to sprout !
I've been doing as much research as I can around growing and planting, but I have a slightly different question which to some may sound really silly. But with things like brocoli and cauliflower, once you've harvested them, will you have to take them up from the soil, and start from scratch again from the next year? Or, once you have harvested all you can in one year, do you leave the remaining plant in the soil for it to regrow the next year?
I'm guessing with things like carrots, once you pull them up thats it you will need to grow from seed again (although, when you cut the tops off can you put them back in the ground - I'm sure someone said if you keep the top with the lead green bit it will regrow again?).
Many thanks!
Steph
Posts
no brassica's are a one shot thing, most vegetables are, apart from the things like asparagus or artichokes
The growing carrots from the tops thing works as an amusement for children in a saucer of water on the kitchen windowsill - but it's not a successful way to grow carrots in the garden.
Fruit bushes of course, will continue to fruit year after year if looked after - so you might like to consider growing some fruit?
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Summer cabbages will produce small secondary heads if you leave a few leaves when you harvest the main head.
There are perennial forms of kale - daubenton and few cultivars - and I think sutherland kale will do OK as a short lived perennial too. There is also a perennial form of broccoli - 'nine star' - which is more like purple sprouting than the bigger head calabrese but reliably persistent year after year if you take every head off before it flowers. Skirret, a root vegetable that Monty planted in his garden last year, is perennial. If you grow scorzonera as a leaf crop rather than a root it will be perennial. Asparagus, of course, a very well known perennial vegetable.
There are also veg that self reproduce in one form or another to be effectively perennial; top setting onions, or 'walking onions', there are 'multiplier' leeks, Jerusalem artichokes which are so prolific you never manage to get all the tubers up so there's always more next year (if your digestive system can hack it, of course
).
Then there are all the herbs and has been mentioned, soft fruit including rhubarb, currants, raspberries and strawberries.
Have a look on heritage vegetable websites like Pennard Plants or Incrdible Vegetables - there are actually lots of perennial veg, none of which you ever see in a shop - grow your own or go without
“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”
With the exceptions listed above. Most conventional veg we grow are annual ( grow set seed and die within one growing season) or biennial, such as the root crops like carrot & parsnip etc grow a food store if left they then use that food store to produce a flower spike set seed & die. That is what the plant naturally wants to do. We come along and interrupt that cycle by harvesting that food store before the plant can die off. Although in some cases we eat the seeds eg beans etc.
Globe artichokes are perennial, good looking, easy to grow and very tasty.
there is however a way to make the annual vegetables to come up year on year, let them go to seeds and they could self sow if your soil is good enough and the slugs are under control.
Last edited: 27 March 2017 08:43:01