Learn how to increase vegetable yield in your garden with these simple strategies to maximize garden yield and increase garden production.
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How To Increase Garden Production
Once you get your garden growing your next questions might be around what strategies can you use to increase food production in your garden. I mean. who doesn’t want more harvests or bigger garden yields in the space you have?
Maximizing Garden Yield
Learn how to increase vegetable yield in your garden by listening to the podcast episode below or scroll down to read the strategies to increase vegetable yield.
How To Increase Vegetable Yield
There are 5 strategies to increase food production in your garden. These strategies can be used by new gardeners and if you have been gardening for a while.
Don’t let their simplicity fool you into thinking they don’t work! Sometimes it’s the simplest of things that have the biggest effect in the garden!
Soil Health
This is the foundation of an organic garden. It is the fertility of the soil that will drive the yield of your garden. This means that you should do a soil test and add in soil amendments in fall or early spring.
Adding 2 inches of compost and digging it in with a garden fork will work wonders with your soil. In raised beds, spread it on top and work it in with a hand fork or trowel. Clay soils are best amended in fall and sandy soils are best amended in spring.
Well-rotted compost is the best because you can make it yourself and it adds in important microbes and fungi to the soil that helps to release more nutrients. Compost also contains humus which helps to retain moisture and soil that can hold onto moisture rather than have it wash away will hold nutrients for your garden better.
pH
Ok so if you are starting to have flashbacks to science classes know that pH shows the acidity or alkalinity of the soil on a scale of 0 to 14 or dark red to dark purple in color. Lower pH values or red, orange, and yellow colors mean an acidic soil while higher pH values or blue and purple colors mean basic or alkaline soil. Neutral pH is 7 or a light green color. Most plants grow best in a pH range of 5.5 to 7.
pH is not an indication of soil fertility but it does affect how easily nutrients can become available for your plants. Nutrients are released into the soil and are dissolved in the water available in the soil. The plant takes up the water and the nutrients as it grows. Nutrients dissolve and become more available when they are in this 5.5 to 7 pH range.
Now of course some plants will tolerate more acidic or more alkaline conditions so for example blueberries tolerate a pH of 4.5 to 5.0 and asparagus will tolerate a higher pH of 6.0 to 8.0.
The only way you will know your soil’s pH is to do a soil test. For those of you who joined the Grow Your Own Food Academy, this is a new video that is going to be uploaded in the coming weeks showing you step by step taking a soil test for pH and so make sure you check that out and the private Facebook group for updates on when new material goes live.
Companion Planting
Now we can use the pH information from our soil and the preferred ranges to group some plants together and grow them based on their soil pH or nutrients needed. For example, our friend the blueberry growing in a pH of 4.5 to 5.0, well cranberries like a soil pH of 4.0 to 5.5 so they could grow happily together in the same spot in the garden.
Attractant Crops
We can also use companion planting in terms of beneficial plantings and integrated pest management from my permaculture design course. So if you have been a listener for a while you might remember the episode with Julie from Giving Grounds Seeds where she talked about planting flowers like marigolds mixed in with your veggies. The flowers provide a way to attract pollinators and other beneficial insects like predatory insects to help manage pests in the garden. If you haven’t listened to that episode, please go check it out because it is full of gardening tips and other gems that can help you grow your garden!
Predatory insects are really important because they help manage things like aphids which can decimate your plants and bring in ants and spread diseases around your garden. Ladybirds aka ladybugs are amazing at chomping down aphids and just love some of the herbs I grow to call home so plant things like lovage, dill, bronze fennel to help attract those. The bonus of course with planting herbs is that you can use them in the kitchen but flowers like calendula or pot marigold, French marigolds (the ones that help deter pests), yarrow, poached egg plant, Nigella or love in a mist and cosmos are also beacons to these predatory bugs.
I was so freaking excited yesterday to see another praying mantis in my garden. I actually jumped on the video chat app I use to talk to my parents back in Blighty and had to show them this beautiful creature. We don’t have them in the UK and the only time I really saw a praying mantis was the Buffy the Vampire episode where Xander nearly gets eaten by his teacher …. Does anyone else remember that episode? Ok, so I’m a super nerd, that comes with the territory of being in STEM… Ok so back to the praying mantis before I embarrass myself further. Those suckers eat crickets and all sorts of bugs and for those of you tuning in here in Utah, you know that those dang crickets will be showing up soon and we have to be very good at checking the garden regularly otherwise they will eat our tomatoes, corn, greens…actually pretty much everything.
Other plants that help to bring in the good bugs are zinnias and sunflowers and providing low growing or carpeting plants like thyme or Sweet Alyssum helps to provide places to hide for many beneficial bugs.
Trap Crops
So we have covered attractants in companion planting, let’s talk about sacrificial crops or trap crops. These are plants we grow near our crops in the garden that we don’t mind being eaten by a pest. In the UK, it is common to grow nasturtiums near our brassica plants (like cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower) the nasturtiums attract the cabbage white butterfly to lay eggs and basically get eaten by the caterpillars helping to leave your cabbages, somewhat free from damage.
Many gardeners plant the trap crops around the border of the growing area and plant some within the rows of the crops too.
Nasturtiums also are a great trap crop for aphids, blackfly, whitefly, and greenfly. Chervil can help attract slugs and snails, French marigolds can help attract thrips and nematodes and radishes can help attract root fly and flea beetles. Experiment with trap cropping in your garden and see what works for you!
Beneficial Combinations
The final way we can use companion planting is to have plants growing which help each other grow. Planting carrots with onions is a common one. The scent of the onions helps to deter carrot fly, and the scent of carrots and the carrot foliage helps to confuse the onion fly.
Growing radishes around your cucumber plants help to deter cucumber beetles. Cucumbers growing among corn helps to deter raccoons because they think a snake is in there. And of course, many of you are probably familiar with the three sisters of growing corn, squash and pole beans together. The corn is a trellis for the beans. The beans lock nitrogen in the soil providing a food source for the corn and the squash. The squash shades the soil helping to retain water and reduce weeds.
Crop Rotation
Rotating your crops means planting your veggies in a different position each year. Plants belong in a family so tomatoes are part of the nightshade family as are eggplant, peppers, and tomatillos. So, you would not want to plant eggplant in the same place you were growing peppers the season before. This is because nutrient needs in a plant family are similar so your soil will run out of these essential nutrients for your plants which will cause smaller harvests.
Practicing crop rotation also helps to reduce the pests and diseases that plants are susceptible to in the soil so rotating crops can help reduce nematodes, weeds, and diseases like blight for example.
Crop rotation can also improve soil structure and fertility when you alternate and grow deep-rooted and shallow-rooted plants. So growing potatoes in the garden space then growing shallow-rooted lettuces in the space the next season is an example of this.
A traditional part of crop rotation is letting a garden bed lay fallow or not planted with vegetable crops and planting green manure instead. Mixed green manures produce a lot of growth that you can cut down and use in compost or mulch on top of the bed. Allowing the green manure to flower also provides food and habitat for those beneficial insects we talked about earlier.
Green manures are usually cut and then turned over into the soil so that they break down, releasing the nutrients they pulled up from deeper in the soil. This helps to improve your garden bed soil structure and fertility.
Grow Vertically
Growing vertically in your garden helps to increase food production because you can grow more in the space you have available. Vining crops like pumpkins and squash can take up huge amounts of the room. But by growing them up over trellis, you manage that growth up and away from the garden bed which you can now fill with other crops! Vertical growing can improve air circulation if you are in a humid area like you guys in Texas, Florida, or Alabama. Improved air circulation means that you can reduce the spread and impact of some fungal diseases.
Make use of extra space like hanging baskets to grow strawberries or those upside-down planters for cherry tomatoes, even guttering on a wall with drip irrigation and stoppers on the ends can grow lettuce quite happily and all these strategies can help to make use of additional space and grow more food.
Which of these strategies are you going to do in your garden?
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