This summer, take the guesswork out of planning a vegetable garden. Great new software has been developed by South Africa’s queen of home-grown vegetables, Jane Griffiths.
Launched this spring, Jane’s Delicious Garden Planner is a software program that will draw up an exact and interactive plan of your kitchen garden. You can even personalise the planting schedule by entering your postal code and the software adjusts to your area.
Jane is a great believer in planning and her book, Jane’s Delicious Garden: How to grow organic vegetables and herbs (Sunbird Publishers, 2009) is the ultimate reference guide on how to grow herbs and vegetables successfully in Johannesburg. Her own Melville garden is an earthy homegrown laboratory and all her advice has been tested out in her own garden.
The latest software program developed by Jane takes the planning of a summer vegetable garden to new heights. You can experiment with bed designs and plant placement and plan successive sowings to maximise the amount of food you can grow.
Crop rotation can be planned to prevent pests, diseases and depletion of soil nutrients and the programme is a great way to keep track of what is going on in your kitchen garden. And if you forget to look at the garden, biweekly e-mail reminders of what to plant and do in the garden will also keep you on the straight and narrow.
“My own vegetable garden is about 50m² and over the years I have grown a wide variety of vegetables, herbs and medicinal plants” says Jane. As a child she would visit her grandfather’s farm outside Kokstad, but it was during a career in the world of film and television production that her interest in home-grown food was reawakened.
“In 1994 I visited a friend in California whose garden was bursting with chillies,” she explains. “It was the first time I had seen red, yellow, purple, brown and orange chillies in such a variety of shapes, colours and sizes. At that time in South Africa all you could find were little hot red ones. Jalapenos were hardly on the culinary radar yet.”
“Although I didn’t have my own vegetable garden, I was so inspired by this rainbow vision, I bought a packet of every variety of chilli seed I could get. Back home I removed a section of lawn, dug in some compost, scattered the seeds and sat back to watch my chillies grow.
“That summer I had about 20 varieties of chillies growing in my garden and quickly earned the nickname of Chilli Queen. They grew so fast and were so prolific I felt obliged not to waste the harvest. Jane’s ‘Hot Diggedy Chilli Jelly’ soon became a firm favourite among friends.”
As the years rolled on, Jane dug up more and more lawn. Chillies were joined by herbs, lettuces, asparagus and eggplant. She experimented with medicinal plants, vertical gardening and tomatoes.
“It has not all been easy,” she confirms. However, her successes, dreams and aspirations make powerful reading for anyone interested in growing vegetables this season.
Vegetable tips
These are Jane Griffith’s basic guidelines for a successful vegetable garden this summer:
* Mix fast-growing, slow-growing, early harvest and late harvest crops together.
* Mix heavy and light feeders.
* Mix long-rooted plants with shallow-rooted plants.
* Sow sun-loving tall or leafy plants as umbrella plants to shade those needing less sun.
* Sow several varieties of each vegetable.
* Harvest whole plants as soon as they begin to crowd out others.
* Be ruthless with plants that you do not want. Pull them out when they are young.
* Sow fast-growing, shallow-rooted plants such as mustard, Asian green, radishes and buckwheat to crowd out weeds.
* When planting bought seedlings, don’t plant them all out at once. Do succession plantings to overlap harvest times.
* When leaving plants to go to seed, leave the ones on the southern side of the bed as they won’t shade the others.
* Plant as much variety as possible.
* The better your soil, the more productive your garden will be. - Saturday Star
l Sign up for a free 30-day trial of Jane’s Garden Planner at www.janesdeliciousgarden.com Contact [email protected] for more information.