My top 5 tag team crops to maximise garden space and give you more food

My early potatoes - which I planted in August - have been growing beautifully throughout spring, and now they are well and truly ready for harvesting just in time for Christmas. However once these beauties are pulled I will be left with an empty garden, which is something I don't like to have, as soil is at its healthiest when it is covered with life. Luckily the potatoes will leave the ground loose and friable, which is an absolute blessing for the beans I will plant straight after the spuds are harvested.

Tag teaming crops like this is a great way to utilise every bit of available garden space and ensure maximum food from one area. But sometimes it can become confusing, especially as we try to work around our existing garden plans. We need to ensure we get our timings right, and in summer we need to keep appropriate spaces free for the crops we have planned for winter. We also need to be mindful that we don't deplete the soil in our beds of too many nutrients as we plant these follow on crops so we need to consider what each crop gives - and takes - from the soil and plant the next crop accordingly.

To help with this I thought I would share my top 5 favourite crops to tag team at this time of the year. Hopefully you will be inspired to try these combos, and you might even discover a few combos of your own.

Combo # 1 - New potatoes followed on by green beans (and then followed on by silverbeet)

Green beans are a fast-growing warm season crop that only need a few months to come to fruition, so planting them into the ground straight after your new potatoes are harvested in late December means you will be eating your late sowing of green beans by March. Considering the potatoes have broken up the soil up, and the green beans will do a great job of fixing nitrogen into the ground, choosing a nitrogen loving leafy winter crop like spinach or silver beet to follow on after the beans is a great way to get a third crop out of this one garden area, knowing you aren't depleting the soil of nutrients as you do so.

Combo # 2 - Garlic followed on by cauliflower

Although garlic and brassicas are both heavy feeders - meaning you might need to add more compost to the soil before your brassicas go in - the garlic acts as a cleansing crop, clearing away and repelling pests from the soil before the brassicas go in. If you want to give the brassicas an extra bit of protection, you can even leave the odd garlic bulb in the ground, or divide one up and replant it along the edges. The timing of these two crops works out well; garlic is usually pulled on the longest day of the year (around the end end of December), and if you can manage to keep the white butterflies off your summer planted brassicas and give them plenty of water, your cauliflowers will be ready for eating in early winter.

Combo # 3 - Lettuces followed on by beetroot

Lettuces like to grow fast in rich, well composted soil (see this past blog post), and once your spring lettuces have done their dash in this ground and are harvested, beetroot - which need good heat for germination – can be sown straight into the ground where they were, or seedlings can planted into the garden if you had the foresight to sow them a month ago. I always like to sprinkle in a few handfuls of wood ash on to the ground before planting as it helps the roots of the beetroot grow sweet and vibrant, but apart from that they will be happy with the nutrients left in the ground from the lettuces. The bonus with replacing lettuce with beetroot is that as summer kicks in you can swap out lettuce in your salad for tender beetroot leaves while you wait for the roots underneath to fatten up.

Combo # 4 - Broad beans followed by sweetcorn

This is a fantastic combo. Broad beans – like all legumes – have nodules on their roots that fix nitrogen into the soil. You do need to keep the roots in the ground for this to benefit the soil, and you can do this by either cutting off the plants at ground level and leaving the roots in, or you can chop the roots up into the soil. Broad bean roots are very large, so I find it is easier to just leave them in the ground and plant the corn around them, putting them in the gaps between the rows the broad beans were in. This way the sweetcorn won’t be fighting the beans bulky roots, but they will be benefitting from the nitrogen fixing elements they provide.

Combo # 5 - Maincrop potatoes followed on with leeks

If you can get your timings right, this is a fantastic combo. It works best for a potato patch that is cleared early, because in a perfect world your leek seedlings will be in the ground and growing before the end of summer. The leeks love the friable rich soil left from the potatoes, and it makes for easy digging which is a good thing - leeks like to be planted in deep trenches that have had generous additions of manure added.

There are many more combinations that will work together, it is just a matter of considering the season you are in and what will grow at this time, timings your plantings out so they work together, and each plants nutritional needs and what each plant provides to the environment it is growing in.

You will also need to be careful you aren't following one crop on with another crop from the same family which could spread disease (for example you wouldn't want to follow spring broccolis on with summer planted cauliflowers, as these crops are both from the brassica family, and without rotation detrimental diseases such as clubroot can take hold). This blog post here explores this concept further and lists the plant families which should never be planted in the same spot year on year.

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