SIX TIPS FOR STARTING A MARKET GARDEN
If you’re starting out on your market garden journey, then be prepared for quite the ride! Growing food on a commercial level is extremely fulfilling, especially when your customers start offering rave reviews and repeat custom. Over this first year I’ve learned A LOT (and I’ve been gardening for twenty years already) so I wanted to share these six tips to make this rollercoaster journey a bit easier for you.
TIP 1 - BUY EXTRA SEEDS
One thing I realised pretty early on, but after I’d already ordered, was that you need way more seed than you think. For example, I bought 300 sunflowers. That seems a lot, right? But when you break it down into costs and sales, it barely scratches the surface. If I sell stems at £1 each, then all those sunflowers actually only make me £300 - and that’s if EVERY. SINGLE. ONE germinates and grows (which I assure you, won’t happen).
Likewise, I sell bunches of beets for £3 or 2 for £5. Even at the higher end of approx five beets for £3, that’s 60p a beet. That means a packet of beets with 500 seeds has a final sale value of £300. You can see that to make a commercial enterprise of your garden, you need a lot more seeds than you think!
Producing enough crops takes more seed than you might think
So, my advice, buy way more than you think. Also take the time to consider how much you want to make from your market garden business before working backwards to understand how much of each crop you need to sow, germinate and sell.
TIP 2 - PESTS DO REAL DAMAGE
This is going to be old news, but pests cause a huge amount of damage. We all know how slugs and snails can decimate your crops. But this year a flea beetle plague landed on my radishes and turned the leaves into confetti. A few days after I transplanted hundreds of seedlings, the fledglings from the rookery descended and scratched almost every single one out. My ranunculus were about to flower when the muntjack deer had a snack and just when I thought my kale were safe, a cloud of butterflies came down and laid their eggs. The list goes on.
When you’re reading through gardening books and watching market garden videos, many of them show beautiful manicured vegetable beds stretching into the distance. But please do not be fooled - you NEED netting and agricultural fleece, stakes, slug protectors and more.
In general, market garden customers accept a few holes here and there, but they’ll draw the line at split maggoty carrots and more air in their kale than leaf. I strongly advise you consider all the usual pests and take action against them; you’ll still have pests but at least you can limit exposure from the known enemies.
Kale before the caterpillars arrived
TIP 3 - GROWING SPACE FOR SEEDLINGS
I began the year growing thousands of seedlings in my spare room with little windowsill space and only a couple of growlights. It was a disaster. You really need to consider where you’ll grow on your plants.
As gardeners, we know our seasons are far from perfect. This year, it was hot in the days but we still had frosts well past our usual last frost date. It meant that I couldn’t leave any seedlings outside overnight until well into May. Without a greenhouse or polytunnel, I ran out of space very quickly and many of my plants became stunted in their modules.
For this reason I highly advise you invest in a coldframe, greenhouse or ploytunnel. You cans till seed start early and grow on some seedlings indoors, but when you begin to run out of space, you’ll have somewhere to move those larger plants onto.
TIP 4 - DON’T PRESSURE YOURSELF
It can be really hard not to pile on the pressure and expect too much of yourself. For my first year of market farming, I set aside ten vegetable crops I wanted to try and ten flower crops. I sowed and germinated most of these, but with a virgin site, pests I didn’t know existed and all manner of other complications, it was unsurprising that things failed. And fail, they will. So when things go wrong, try not to become too anxious.
The dream of a market garden is real, but if you do it all in the first year, you’ll burn out. And then, having completed the dream, what’s left? Try to take a step back, do a few things well and gradually grow your experience.
TIP 5 - PERSEVERE
In the same vein of above, it’s important that alongside not pressuring yourself, you still persevere when things go wrong. I had to sow various crops multiple times. Seeds didn’t germinate. Seeds got eaten by mice. Seedlings wilted or rotted. Plants got scratched out or eaten. I left my radishes in the ground too long as I had nowhere to sell them, so I ended up with huge, thick, inedible roots. But the most important point here is to keep trying over and over until you finally get it right.
It took me multiple attempts to get my first decent lettuce harvest
TIP 6 - HAVE A TEST YEAR
My best tip of all; if feasible in any way, have a test year. This may mean that you begin your market garden whilst still working, either full time or part time, and looking after your plants and growing when you have time off. Or, if you’re like me, you’re able to save up enough cash to take a year out and start your business without the stress of having to achieve any form of immediate profit.
The reason a test year is so important is that regardless of your expertise, you’re unlikely to have overall success immediately. I have been growing vegetables and plants for years, but on a brand new site there are many questions. What is the best growing aspect? What’s the annual rainfall? How do the seasons normally work out? Which pests and what wildlife are local?
I would have never considered 100 rooks would descend and take out all my plants. Now I know, I can think up ways of protection. Had I been relying on these crops to make me an instant profit, life would have been a thousand times more stressful. So, if possible, start growing and setting up your business long before you need to actually start making a living from it.
So there are my six tips for starting a market garden. What are you struggling with? What are you most looking forward to? Let me know below!