Want to grow your own vegetables, but you’re never home? If you’re one of the persons who can only visit their garden once a week or less, go for a self-managing vegetable patch! With the following planting techniques, you’ll have a perennial vegetable patch… sometimes called the lazy veggie garden! Why? With a thoughtful selection of perennials, and a few insights brought on by permaculture, you’ll avoid nearly all the tiring, repetitive chores.
It’s possible. Have a garden, but at times it’s weeks on end before you can visit it? Select species that don’t need your help to grow well all year long!
Perennial vegetables and also resistant and easy-to-grow varieties will help you set up a vegetable patch that needs neither care nor maintenance.
Potatoes. Simply grow these under a bushel of straw: all you have to do is lift the straw to harvest a few potatoes from underneath!
In many of today’s vegetable patches, these are often absent. This is all the more surprising that they don’t require any attention at all apart from the planting!
What if you even forget to sow your vegetables sometimes? No problem with the following selection: they’ll do this work on their own!
Since you don’t want to waste time weeding, do the next best thing with a few of them: eat them!
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Weeds that are full of benefits
Every gardener dreams of simply walking through maintenance-free garden to harvest veggies without bending down.
All there is to do is to select climbing varieties:
All the crops below are named in this article as plants that carry on without you. Use the table to pick the ones that match how often you can actually turn up.
| Vegetable | Group | Why it looks after itself | What the gardener still does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Artichoke ‘Petit violet’ | Perennial | Needs no follow-up care once it is in the ground | Plant once, then pick the small flavourful heads |
| Daubenton cabbage | Perennial cabbage | Very resilient and productive even with no watering | Simply cut leaves as required |
| Herbs | Perennial aromatics | Thrive in the poorest soils and want little water | Harvest for the kitchen |
| Winter leek ‘Bleu de Solaize’ | Hardy variety | Resists diseases very well | Lift over the cold season |
| Potatoes under straw | Tuber, no digging | Grown under a bushel of straw, no soil work needed | Lift the straw and take a few tubers |
| Onion and shallot | Bulbs | Very easy to grow and need no water at all | Pull the bulbs when ready |
| Jerusalem artichoke | Heirloom tuber | Needs no attention beyond the planting itself | Confine it to one side of the garden, it is invasive |
| Chard | Self-sowing biennial | Comes back on its own even with no care at all | Harvest in year one or let it seed in year two |
| Escarole ‘Cornet d’Anjou’ | Self-sowing heirloom | Highly resistant and copes well with mild frost | Harvest in mid-autumn |
| Cherry tomato | Self-sowing annual | Fallen fruit sprouts by itself the following year | Let a few fruits drop and wait for early spring seedlings |
| Pole beans and snow peas | Climbing varieties | Crop is held at hand height on tall supports | Pick standing up, no bending down |
Combine a few from each group and the patch keeps producing between your visits.
Watering and weeding are the two most critical chores in the garden, but they sure do need a lot of time! The wily, lazy gardener will do anything to reduce or even eliminate these tasks.
Even if most of the plants you’ve selected don’t need much water to begin with, there’s yet another trick to reduce the need to water even more: mulch. It has scores of advantages:
Ready to have a maintenance-free vegetable patch, but you still want to grow a few veggies that need watering several times a week? Here are a few tips:
Only sow spring and winter lettuce
. If you plant lettuce in summer, you’ll have to water constantly to keep them from going to seed.All right! All set to succeed in the vegetable patch… without doing anything!
Pauline Sutter
To learn more, read:
The same principles scale down to a handful of pots — growing vegetables on a balcony asks for no more.
