Tardissing the Space Part 2 – Working with Space Time

I like celery. I like cooking with it and using it for scooping up dips and for lunchbox crudites. The classic diced celery, carrots and onions (mirepoix) is one of those recipe essentials. But there’s a limit to how much celery I want in the garden – three or four plants is just about it.

And celery is slow. Most vegetable seedlings are much slower than you think they are but celery is particularly slow. This baby is at the stage when it needs to be planted out, but look at the label. The seed was sown back at the end of May. It is already three months old. The seed would have taken three weeks or so to germinate, so it would have been the last week of June before it was up and early July before it was beyond the two leaf stage. At that stage I would have chosen the strongest five or six seedlings to plant into three inch (7.5cm) pots, and potted the remainder up in batches of five or six in recycled paper coffee cups for the footpath giveaway box.

By early August, the seedlings would have outgrown the small pots, and I would have again chosen only the strongest couple to pot on into these six inch (12 cm) pots, in a nice rich potting mix of compost, worm castings and cracker dust (and the others would have gone out on the footpath). It’s early September, and I have a spot just vacated by a harvested cabbage. I’ll topdress with half a bucket of compost, and plant this celery into it. It will take off now, with warmer weather, rich soil, and a well established, undisturbed root system. I’ll be harvesting outside stalks within a couple of weeks, and will be able to keep harvesting for a few months. More than half its life though will have been spent on the potting bench.

This is my main trick for doubling my annual garden space. I have 30 square metres of raised vegie garden beds. It’s not enough! I could make good use of double that without needing to level up in soil building and harvest distribution, but it’s all the space I can really spare for annuals on this little 500m² suburban block.

But by halving the amount of time a plant spends in the garden, I effectively double the garden space. Not everything is quite so generous. Big starchy seeds like peas and squash germinate quickly and outgrow a pot in a matter of a few weeks. But many vegetables will happily spend the first half of their life in a pot, getting to 15 cm or more before they will really appreciate being planted out. They can be kept much more closely packed in space in the nursery using a fraction of the space they will need as mature plants.

They also do much better pest-and-disease-wise, and face less competition for their specific nutrient requirements, by being planted out individually away from others of their own kind. I can choose just the number I need for potting up and planting out and avoid wasting garden space on things that will just end up as gluts. I can place each plant individually to give it the right amount of space, the right neighbours, the right aspect. I can keep the garden very full, all the time, with things that are all bearing or within a few weeks of it. It’s almost like a whole second garden, in miniature, waiting on the potting bench for its turn at occupying the space.