Year-round bed - first with carrots and spinach. Later with leeks

The idea is that this bed should provide fresh greenery during the cold winter months, but it should also be able to shed some of it during the summer. Therefore, start by making 5 rows with 30 cm in between, where summer carrots were sown. The groove is watered at the bottom so that it is well moist and the soil does not risk drying out before the small carrot seeds have germinated. Then sow quite thinly (a few cm between the seeds), so you avoid too much thinning work later, and cover with approx. one cm of soil.

Between the rows of carrots, 4 rows of spinach were seen in the same way, which will be the first that you will be able to harvest from. Here you do not thin out - you just start picking the spinach leaves as "baby spinach" when they have grown big enough sometime in May. The leaves must be taken at the latest before they become so large that they shade the small carrots, which hopefully have come up in a few weeks. In late May or early June (depending on the weather) the spinach can probably no longer and will go in stock, so the plants are then removed.

Only in June is it time to plant the winter crop, namely winter leeks. If you have not pre-cultivated your leeks yourself, a tray of planting leeks will be available at both nurseries and many supermarkets from sometime in May. You just have to make sure that it is just winter leeks, as summer leeks do not tolerate winter frosts very well. The leeks are now placed in the rows where the spinach has stood. If all goes well, you will be able to start harvesting the carrots during June - but more on that by then.

Written by Peter Norris, April 9, 2018