Sowing Autumn / Winter seeds

Yorky

Having harvested many of the vegetables from my raised beds, I got to thinking about sowing some Autumn/Winter seeds.

Is it alright to do this when the spring/summer harvest has recently taken place or will it exhaust the soil? And then would it be alright to sow seeds again in the spring?

Thanks in advance.

The Sweeper

Yorky, do some reading up on 'crop rotation' - a means whereby you never plant the same things or family of things in the same place two seasons in a row. For instance, beans put nitrogen into the soil as they grow. Green leafy vegetables take nitrogen out of the soil as they grow. So crop rotate - beans first, then cabbages for instance.

Your vegetable patch will always benefit from being worked through with some good compost between harvests - if you wanted to leave it fallow for longer, try planting 'green manure' - a combination of plants that you dig into the soil when they reach a couple of feet in height, and allow that to rot down.

If you don't want to leave your patches fallow for as long, work in a well-composted animal manure and some blood and bone between planting - water in well, and even mulch over it and leave it sit for a few weeks before heading into the next batch of seeds.

Try other methods - I don't know how much space you have to grow vegetables, but it doesn't all have to be full throttle all of the time. Stagger your planting - if it says "sow in Autumn" you have three months - try doing three sowings five weeks apart of the same plant for longer yields come harvest time. Search for early and late varieties of the vegetables you want. You could plant up the first 1/3 of your patch with veg, leave the second 1/3 to sit with some compost and have final 1/3 as a green manure bed that you leave longest.

Blood and bone comes in bags from the garden centre - it's a strong-smelling brown meal, that you scatter over your soil in handfuls and water in well. It's an excellent fertiliser. So is fish meal and any liquid fish product - again available from the garden centre. You might have to go to larger garden centres for bags of things like animal fertiliser pellets, like chicken manure or sheep manure. Feed your soil between plantings, keep it a happy place for worms and you'll have much success growing veg.

Do some searches on companion planting as well - various vegetables like to be grown near similar or complimentary veg, and don't like to be grown near other kinds.