Dig It Up, Plant Again

Last week I mentioned about double cropping beds. 

Here is a good example of that:

This bed has produced around 35 kohlrabi so far but as I harvested the last one last week it was time to get it producing again. 

I pulled up  the plastic, scattered some blood, fish and bone powder, a bit more compost and raked it over. 

Then I got my Earthway seeder out and drilled five rows of carrots (two times on each row to make it nice and thick) over the 30 inch bed. That's another 50ft of carrots to harvest in a few months time. 

Hopefully the plastic will have killed off lots of the weed seed that was near the surface and because I haven't turned the soil it should have brought any more to the surface. There will be weed pressure but it should be minimal now and by the time the crop grows it, planted close together like this it should form a canopy to keep other weeds suppressed. 

I should say that I also heavily watered this bed before I planted the carrots as it had been weeks without rain and the surface was very dry.

Growing Twice As Much From The Same Area

I love getting as much out of my garden as I possibly can and although it is fairly large as vegetable gardens go I still try to increase my production. 

This year many of my beds are already on their second crop, by double cropping like this I can probably get around 50 crops out of the 32 beds in my main garden, some crops on the other hand need to be in a for a long time and I have some I'm growing out for seed and that takes much longer.

Yesterday was a great example of this, I'd finished harvesting my first bed of kohlrabi and straight away I amended the soil and sowed five rows of carrots in it's place. 

Here's a video of me talking about how I'm trying to get more from some of my beds by double or even triple cropping them in a season.

Normal yearly crop rotation rules have to go out of the window when you do this though. 

Do you get more than one crop from your veg beds?

What fast growing crop do you love?