S4 ● E122 No-Dig Market Garden plan & seed order done for 2018

Now it's time to get the seed order in. So right now we're working on the bed plan for 2018. Veg planning is always a complicated task and we use about 400 different spreadsheets, it seems like, to do that process. I'm sitting with Matt and we're going through notes from the season and compiling strategically what we want to do this year. So we've been reflecting on the sales model, how that's changing as we move towards weaker. And we've just started here planning the beds and their rotations. Most beds getting two to three rotations throughout the season. Everything's rotated around each season. We're rotating the plan around, so the pen's a bit faded on here. You might remember me talking about the bed system, but we've labeled all the beds. This is n1 and they're blocks of 10 beds. So n1 1 to 10, and then n2, n3. So the principle of our rotation, we have east, west, south beds and two lots of north beds. These are the new beds we found used this year. But basically everything rotates numerically towards the lowest number. So what was grown in N2 essentially is being grown in N1 this next year. We don't follow strict rotation because we try and keep to families of plants. But it's, you know, it's not practical. We've worked out how many beds of what we want to sell based on the demand and what makes, you know, a good rounded share of vegetables. We don't strictly grow just high profit vegetables. We grow a mixed sort of family style. Yeah, it's orientated towards a balanced, rounded diet where you've always got cooking greens, salad greens, some interesting vegetables, some roots, etc. What are some of the main things that we've been talking about up to now? We've been working on this since yesterday. No, to look at open spaces in beds. And what are some of the key things that we've chucked out or included this time, would you say?

I think what we're trying to do is fit everything together like a nice puzzle and sort of taking into account the varieties more so than just the vegetables that we want to grow. And if you factor in the days to maturity and the time, the veg you're using at different times a year, you can get that third succession. And we actually had beds this year that had a fourth succession. It wasn't actually planned for. And so by experiencing that, it's just realizing, hey, like, we can get a lot more value out of these square feet.

Yeah, RICO changes everything. Now if we move towards, like with something we've talked about is not selling boxes anymore, but selling boxes, like a csa, but they're made of bunches like we would sell on Ricoh. And it gives us a different standard unit for measuring the output of each bed. Like everything's measured in bunches. Now, rather than sharing a mass glut in the middle of summer, which is what happened a bit this year, like we're giving away a lot of vegetables, which is common in the CSA setting, I guess.

Yeah. I mean, one thing I've learned is it's easy to just grow an abundance of vegetables, but if you want to be able to quantify your potential, which you should want to, then that's what you need to have some type of a standardization for. You know, if I put this many seeds of this veg and the bed, what can I get out of it? So by doing boxes based on Rico bunches, we can quantify each bed easily and it won't matter who it goes to. The only difference will be, you know, maybe there's a small discount to someone who prepays. But the, but as far as planning the. The amounts you can get out of the bed is going to be exactly the same. The only other variable is planning for restaurants. So we've been. Then one of the next steps I think is creating a. Like a chart that shows the. Where the peaks are of different veg to restaurants in the summertime, because we had a huge peak in July and August to restaurants. And then some of them are seasonal here and they shut down a lot of restaurants.

Seasonal here. Yeah. It's interesting because the. Matt was talking about varieties and it's, it's partly. It's combining what we want to grow with things that are rapid, obviously, because the difference in certain varieties, say for example, certain lettuces going from 28 days to double that time, makes a huge differ in our short season. Like technically, the last frost will come up to 7 June and can come again in mid September. So to get these rotations out, we really have to plan carefully the varieties we choose over just the type of vegetable and then how we want to harvest it. So there's a lot of back and forth with notes from this year. And again, everything is so variant on the weather. Like the seasons are so dramatic, I think, Matt. And the time you've been here, it's been the wettest spring on record. It's been the driest spring on record. Yeah, we've had the, you know, it's been a mix up every year. It's very unpredictable.

Yeah, yeah, you just sort of have to. I guess there's not much you can do but just try to be ready and maybe plan for the best and assume the worst or something like that.

Yeah. Matt did a lot of record keeping this year where we looked at gaps in the planting calendar that we wanted to then fill and that's the process we've started doing now.

Yeah. So at one point in the.

I.

Wanted to see, for example, if I had time to fit varieties in. So it was the beginning of July and I could see that we had rockets scheduled to go in on August 18. So I was able to say, okay, well, I've got about 45 days here. What can I put in there? So we put in some 21 day radish and so on and able to see, okay, these beans are scheduled to be in the ground until the end of September. Do they actually need to be? And if I take them out in the beginning of September, what can I put in there? By doing this, we were able to get quite a lot more veg out of the ground and it was done on the fly. So we're now doing this at the beginning of the year and I think it's going to make a huge difference.

Yeah, it's quite a lot of extra beds. We're now going to sort of tally up the amount of beds in total of each crop and check the succession of those just to see if our plan still makes sense. Because we've been moving things around. We've scrubbed a few crops, we got rid of Calabrese again, we prefer to just grow good broccoli and we're getting rid of some of cabbages. We're going to grow more sauerkraut cabbages. They've been selling really well on Rico and it's much better for us to put the extra work in and make sauerkraut than sell cabbage as a head cabbage. And obviously we're competing with large scale field growers and that's a crop that grows so well on the field scale here that it's, you know, it's not worth competing. But another complexity that we also have to work with here is the relative aspect of the beds and the sun. So, for example, we're growing runner beans this year, which I'm excited about. We've always done field beans, but putting them at the back of the bed so they're not shading out other crops is a consideration we'll have. And we're playing around with really refining how to lay it out in a way that optimizes the space over time and in relation to the orientation, etc. The next step of the plan is because early in the season, if you've been following the videos, you'll remember we started meeting with restaurants and then we started changing the bed plan. And we have so many spreadsheets just based on changes and note keeping. But now we're trying to consolidate everything. Ultimately the whole plan is to get all of the information you see on the screen. Once we've double checked it and we are happy with the varieties and seeding dates, we'll go down to the calendar level. And this is the operational procedure for running the garden. So it tells you when to take trace and seed them, how many of what variety, what to label them as. It tells you when to take them out the germination space to harden off. It tells you when to prepare beds, when to seed directly. And we'll have a harvest sheet based on this too. So the whole, you know, it's a few days full on work right now to then set up the whole season to make it more of an automated process when there's so many other things like the broilers and layers starting up in the spring.

We have this RICO thing now which. So, yeah, I mean if you're watching for the first time, basically it's like a farmer's market, only everything is pre sold through a Facebook page and it's fantastic. And what it's essentially allowed us to do is, you know, not just to extend our growing season and on both ends, but actually that we don't need to worry about the veg box dates, you know. So our veg boxes were starting in the middle of June because we needed to have enough vegetables to make what would be a box and it was ending the end of October to have enough vegetables that would make a box. So actually now what we're doing is we're able to sell vegetables well anytime we can have them and we don't necessarily need to have them in the tunnel. Now it's the beginning of November and I'm going to be bringing vegetables out of the gardens today to people. So to get a third succession and the fourth succession maybe on some of the beds we'll be potting on things like kales and pak chois and some different things like that. So that by the time they, although they would technically be going in the ground too late, they'll already be grown quite to a healthy size. When they go in.

And it helps with flea beetle and things like that, having stronger plants, particularly in the spring. But we've been talking about this a lot with like having the paper pot transplanter and how that conflicts with growing plants on because the benefit of growing plants on whilst it takes longer is that we can definitely get more successions and we can also eradicate some of the issues with flea beetle which hasn't been that bad this year, has it?

No, it wasn't so bad. They really just go after certain varieties pretty hard and they leave some things alone. Like some of our cabbages, they just, the Rubicon for example, they just, they just love it. And you know, we haven't been intending to plant, you know, so called trap crops but it's been some, it's been working out like that. Like they're leaving the Hun Sai Thai alone which last year they ravaged and they're in the bed next to it just you know, eating up the cabbages. And you know, the thing about this, this farm and every other market garden farm is everyone has their own model that works. And I think some farms, I can see that the paper pot transplanter works entirely and other farms, they don't use it at all and they're successful. And I think with the climate here and what we were just explaining with potting on that it could be a combination here. I see maybe that the paper pot transplanter could be really vital and save a lot of time for the majority of the season, but then maybe, maybe not at the end of the year.

Something we've been talking about is not building a bigger walking cooler now and just working with the space we have. We think if we harvest smartly we wouldn't actually need any infrastructure developments.

Yeah, it's really nice idea to have a cooler and it's a nice idea to harvest in advance and just so that the day you go to market or get your boxes ready, it's, it's kind of done already. You just unpack all the bunches and put them in boxes. But we don't the workflow here at the farm, we don't necessarily need to. And part of it's only the second season of the market gardens here and one of the reputations we have is the freshness of the vegetables. Like the carrot tops have only been out of the ground for a few hours when it gets to the customers and you know, and we use that as leverage, so to speak, like we're pointing that out and giving them recipes for carrot top pesto and so we want to keep that freshness. And, you know, there's lots of techniques to keep veg fresh in a chiller, but you can't necessarily tell the customer it was harvested that day. So we really like that and we have that advantage over all the other veg producers in the area.

Yeah, it cuts a lot of logistics just by the management of how we harvest, isn't it?

Yeah.

Some of that record keeping you've done throughout the season and Carla has also contributed to. How's that influencing how you relate to the gardens? And you're not even going to be here next year. But.

No, but I can't feel.

How do you think about it?

I still feel attached to the gardens because I'm really, you know, because I learned everything I know in this short time has been here. And although I'm excited to start something else, I mean, I feel like it's not, you know, in a lot of ways, I feel like my. My learning actually isn't done here, even though I've decided to leave. And so one of the things I've become more into is like looking at the difference between the numbers in the bed, sheer numbers of carrots, for example, and how many bunches you could make if they all grew properly, versus the weight you can get out of the bed, which then you're selling to restaurants by weight. Maybe they want baby carrots. So you're going to get less weight out of that bed and you're going to get a little more time by harvesting them sooner. But then, you know, so there's a lot of these variables between the numbers to make bunches to fulfill a certain number of boxes, and the math on that versus, you know, selling by the. By the kilo. And there's just an incredible amount of variables and then that each variety has its own variable. And then it fits into that puzzle of how many successions are in that bed.

You can kind of play it how you want, though, because we've been selling baby carrots. It's way more profitable to sell baby carrots to the restaurant it uses half the time. And it's more value per bed monetarily anyway. Even though it's less carrot.

Yeah. So I've been spending a lot of time on the seed. We're just geeking out on the seed websites, just getting into the. The different days to maturity. And, you know, there's a lot of really nice varieties that take longer, so we're not sacrificing those varieties, but also, I think, leaning towards the shorter stuff.

As well, yeah, it's important for our season to have shorter varieties, but there are. We certainly have certain varieties that we, you know, they're just sellers at the marketplace. Like, we grow a lot of purple spring onions and things that are just beautiful, that are more valuable to us than just sheer amount of produce. Yeah.

And the Ricoh thing actually works off a Facebook page and so it's totally visual. So a bunch of orange carrots that the other guy has or the other farm has versus a multicolored, you know, bunch of carrots. I mean, everyone's gonna choose the multicolored bunch of carrots. So we're trying to work also with varieties of colors and think more about, you know, more about pictures, which I guess is a normal thing for market gardens. But it's when you're selling boxes, actually, it isn't. So.

Okay. 2 carat, 25th of June. Okay. 2 carat, 10th of July. Okay. Did I give you just kale now?

Yeah.

So two radish first July. Okay. And two radish eighth of August. So we're basically compiling all of the bed data. We've just put together in a more visual format to check the amount of beds of each crop that we have. And it also shows visually the succession. So we can double check if this plan makes sense because it's very easy to make mistakes. Matt's been ironing out mistakes for the last couple of years that I've been making. Just little things that don't really affect it. But each year you want to keep refining and making it perfect. So we've now totalled up what we've got in total. 435 beds out of 100.

210.

210 beds. So we're basically getting two rotations out of every bed. We're happy with that because of the, you know, the short climate we're in. Many of our viewers can get three or four rotations. We can get four rotations of salad and radish. But as we say, we're trying to grow a mixed. Mixed bag, as it were. Not just high value crops. All of our crops are relatively high value. We don't grow any storage crops or lower value stuff. But there's a lot of benefit to having like a lot of our customers value the spread that we produce, don't they? Yeah, I think it's. If we just sold speciality goods, we are not in a good market for that. Because we're so rural, people wouldn't respond so well. Like, we don't have many restaurants to sell to. And. Yeah, so I think it's important for us. But what do you think, Matt? Looking at this, we've got a fairly good spread of most things. This tells us how many beds are planted in each week throughout the season of different things.

So it's pretty close to what we wanted of some of the things we wanted to grow more of.

53 beds of carrots. What do you reckon? Is that a bit too many?

I think it might be a couple in this one here, seven beds of carro carrots. In the third week of July, we can maybe cut that down and shift those beds. 23 beds of spinach, I think that might be a bit. A bit too many. But overall it looks really good.

Is that a good target?

I think. I think we need a couple of more. Maybe spread out like eight beds here. We in these weeks here, we want to maybe shift some of these, but that's not as easy as moving these numbers here.

Yeah, five beds there specifically for sauerkraut. At the end of the year, we sell a little jam jar of sauerkraut for 50 crowns unpasteurized, proper sauerkraut. And so five full beds of heavyweight cabbage will generate thousands of euros. It's not such a huge job if you're putting it in 25 liter fermentation containers and you've got some way of processing the cabbage, you know, machine based. So that's pretty nice.

One way of making a change I can see is that here in the last week of June we have eight beds of carrots. If you take that down to six, it frees up two beds to then shift these mescaline, shift two mescaline over.

Here and just even it out a.

Bit and just start.

But it's pretty nice considering, like essentially we've just been sat here talking about the notes we have and rehashing it into this plan without actually planning. So now we've taken this, we can go back to the plan and we're pretty much getting down to our seed order. So all of our seedings are spaced in a certain pattern throughout the beds. Whether we're going towards paper pot transplanters or not. The seeds per bed are the same, or near enough the same, that we're ready to make a seed order as soon as we total up the numbers.

Yeah.

Once we know exactly how many beds of each thing we want, then we're ready to multiply up the numbers by seeds in bed and we've got our seed order ready and it's good to get the Seed order in at this time before certain varieties sell out, obviously. So Matt's had to go off and pack an order. He's off delivering, but we've pretty much got the order down now. So we've just spent some time really spreading out the bed. So we have a good succession of beans or carrots or lettuce, whatever it is, throughout the season. Doing a lot of carrots next year, about 45 beds. And so we've just been going backwards and forwards in this sheet to, you know, make the most of each bed and put as many crops in as possible in our short season. And then we've had to plan the greenhouses. So the big greenhouse that has the hens right now is going to have nine beds, all 25 meters long. So it's going to be 1200 tomato plants. We're growing indeterminates again. And we're going to grow seven or eight different varieties, I think, and a mixture of rainbow cherries, so yellow and orange and purple, as well as red cherry tomatoes, and then some bigger tomatoes and some highly productive, you know, normal sort of tomatoes too, as indeterminates. And then the other tunnel is going to be, we're going to do one bed of tomatillo, actually, because that's a really nice one and I really enjoy eating them, making chutneys with them too. And then the other tunnel, the smaller original tunnel, is all going down to cucumbers of a few varieties, and we'll be making pickles with them as well as selling them fresh throughout the Rico season. So basically, we got to a point now where I make some seed orders in the United States, some in the uk, some in Sweden. We use Runebys and Olsen's here in Sweden. But the main reason we buy abroad is that we need our seed packets in English and we need to buy from companies that supply days to maturity because you can't make a realistic garden plan and cram in three rotations in a, you know, we get three and a half, four months without frost here. Time. So to really make the most of these successions, you need to know days to maturity. Now, some people will say, oh, that's crazy, buying seed from the other side of the world. But to be fair, most of these companies work in a global seed network. I mean, we use Johnny's in America and they ship seed to Olsen's over here in Sweden. So it's, you know, things are called different things in different places, but it's a big global resource nowadays. I'm all up for local seed where it's appropriate, but it's the information we need to be able to make an efficient garden plan. I've just been ordering from Kingseed. That's where I get tomatoes and leeks and onions in the uk. I use Tamar Organics in the UK and we use the organic companies here, too. But we do shop around because we're after specific varieties that meet our needs, good prices, and detailed information that allows us to make a good plan. So that's most of the garden prep done for next year, and it's a bit of a headache going through all these different spreadsheets, but we're trying to make it a simpler system this year, as well as making it more accurate, more efficient. And then I'll transfer all that information to a simple calendar and that will run the whole thing. I might put in a diary this year just so there's more information, but essentially this whole thing is run by, you know, two days work put in now and the whole market garden planning is complete. And we just need to respond to what's going on on the ground. So in this planting calendar, there will be everything you need to do when to seed, when to harden off, when to prep beds. And I might need to get it down to the level of even prepping the bed so it's not left to chance. It's scheduled into a sensible workflow. So the last bit of this is just making sure the work is scheduled for the weekdays. And then if certain days have excessive amount of seeding compared to a previous day that's open, I might just manually move things one or two days just to make sure the workload is even. But it's really lovely to, you know, to be still sunny outside and still taking things out the garden. And we've already prepped the entire season for next year and filled all the gaps and get more production out of it than after, you know, the great last couple years we've had. Here's Raggy with one of his purple cabbages. You grew this year. It's bigger than your head, dude. You can't even lift it up, can you? Matt's this off to living. Where you going today, Matt? Today going to torch Sumi and Tosh me.

And we have a restaurant order for some pak choi and tatsoi.

Lovely. Nice Asian greens coming out still. Some nice salads coming out. Beautiful here in the fish tank in the back garden, we've got a lovely king strife area come up. I wasn't expecting this to fruit at all. You can See here the mycelium spreading through the straw and going into the compost that we put down below it. Very excited for these to come up under the oak trees next year. How's the crops going in here, Mavis? Just some cello leaves and baby greens.

Well, the monostone's not fully grown but they actually. We delivered it last week, cut into loose leaves and they actually just requested it that way on the phone. So I'm cutting it off with scissors and it'll. It should regrow after the winter.

Yeah, we've got some nice growth still happening. It's slow, obviously, with the temperatures down to freezing at night times, but having these row covers allowing us to get a baby spinach crop. And we've got other Asian greens coming on under here too. So this is how the garden looks for the next six months. It'll be under snow, most of it. Last few crops going to Rico and restaurants and beautiful sunny days. We're doing planning and preparation at point. Some still tidying up the farm a bit, ready for the long winter. It looks beautiful out here right now, but it's freezing at night time. We're putting in the water lines and just packing down. Everything's a bit slow tempo. So that's it for today. Short update. Just excited to have the seed order out. Thanks so much for watching our videos. Find out more in the links below and we'll see you in the next video.