Planting plan

I've been busy clearing the early peas and planting out autumn cabbages, red cabbage and Brussels sprouts, and sowing French beans this morning, so I thought a planting plan would be a good entry, which would enable anyone who actually reads this drivel to get a good night's sleep.

The veg plot is divided into 12x 1.6m by 10m beds.  The polytunnel is also divided up into 3x 5.5m2 beds, and then there's the soft fruit area with a couple of fledgling perennial beds, and another perennial bed for rhubarb by the potato bed, which will also have comfrey in it.  There is also a small holding bed for leeks and brassicas, which go in after other crops have been lifted.

Here's what goes where:

Beds with muck added:
Bed 1: Early potatoes, which are cleared off slowly and the space left planted with celeriac and leeks.  Next year this is runner beans.
Bed 2: Main crop potatoes, which will have broad beans sown in the autumn for overwintering.
Bed 3: Squashes, sweetcorn and courgettes, which will be cleared this autumn, limed and sown with green manure, with a block of overwintered early peas under a cloche.
Bed 4: Squashes, courgettes and cucumbers, which will be cleared, limed, and green manured over winter.  Next year this is French beans.

Beds with lime added:
Bed 5: Runner beans with red cabbage and Brussels sprouts, with a block of khol-rabi at the end.  Carrot bed next year, which means double-digging.  I can feel those blisters already...
Bed 6:  Broad beans, followed by kale and romanesco as the beans are cleared.  Onion bed next year.
Bed 7: French beans with some salad at the end, followed by savoy and winter cabbages, and broccoli.  Chooks next year.
Bed 8: Early and maincrop peas, followed with more Brussels sprouts (never too many sprouts) and autumn cabbages.  Chooks next year.

Beds with nowt added but sweat and graft:
Bed 9 (double-dug): Carrots and failed parsnips followed by autumn calabrese.  Squashes next year.
Bed 10: Onions, beetroot, salads, chard, garlic, followed by green manure.  More squashes next year.
Beds 11 and 12: Chickens.  These fat lazy birds are busy destroying the grass and manuring the beds ready for the potato crop next year.

A wee holding bed with all the brassicas and leeks waiting for room on the main plot.  Next year I'm gong to build it up a bit with new soil to keep grass from encroaching.

The polytunnel has three beds: chillies/peppers, tomatoes/aubergines, and herbs/salads/melons rotated every year.  In the winter it'll have salads and herbs, then some early potatoes, carrots, etc in the spring.

My idea is never to have bare earth anywhere.  Compost will be added before a sowing/planting, and green manures will cover anywhere that there are no crops.  Everything mulched:  I'm thinking about a clover cover crop as a living mulch, which other plants would get nitrogen from.  I'd clear small patches of clover where I'd want to plant/sow, and let it grow back when the crops are established.  Maybe.  The chickens would be put onto plots where I had just cleared crops for a few days to scratch out pests, but as the coop's so bloody heavy I might not...  Rabbits are to be kept on the grass paths in arks as edible lawnmowers!