What Is A Catch Crop?

When you want to get more vegetables from the growing space that you have you need to be a bit cunning. I double the amount of vegetables that I can grow in my allotment by growing catch crops. It's really easy to do once you understand the principle and well worth it it terms of the rewards.

In a nutshell, what you do is sow a quick growing vegetable alongside a slow growing vegetable in the same space. The trick is to find compatible plants that have similar cultural needs but mature at different times.

I'm practising catch cropping in my vegetable garden and I've found more than one benefit to the system. Take a look at the photos of the catch crops in my vegetable garden and see if it's something you could do in your garden too.

All images by Greenspirit

This is the runner bean bed in my garden. Early, every spring it gets a 2 foot deep trench dug right down the middle which is then half filled with horse manure and covered over again. This is where the beans and their canes go once the soil warms up and all chance of frost is over.

This bed is always very fertile because of the annual manuring and gets regularly watered in summer to keep the beans happy, so I tend to inter crop a lot in this spot. In this picture you can see young lettuces growing between the beans.

Once the runner beans get mature there won't be any room between them for lettuce, but they will provide some shade for a close sown row of baby spinach alongside them in high summer.

Currently this area, which measures 3m x 1m hosts runner beans, chives, nasturtiums, lettuce, baby leeks and some yet to emerge coriander. When the beans pass over in autumn, I'll sow a green manure that can be dug in next spring when I redo the trench again. That's intensive catch cropping for you!

Runner beans and lettuce make a great cropping partnership because they both prefer good rich soil, moisture and sun. It's safe to put out lettuce much earlier in the season than runner beans, so as soon as I've got the bean trench dug, manured and filled back in, I plant young lettuce seedlings from the greenhouse along the bed.

Once this lettuce crop is harvested there should be time for one more lettuce sowing. So on a one foot wide strip it is possible to grow a crop of runner beans, two crops of lettuce, and quite a few other things alongside.

Do you catch crop in your garden?

I've planted a new strawberry bed this spring. (If you would like to see how I did this you can go to Strawberry Growing where I have described the process in detail with photos.)

I bought twelve bare rooted strawberry plants that filled just half of my planned strawberry bed because I know these plants will produce enough baby plants by the end of this summer to fill the whole bed.

So in the meantime I have empty space. There's no point in planting anything permanent there, or any a crop that stands in the ground over winter because I want to plant the baby strawberry plants there in their final places before winter sets in.

I'm growing a catch crop of rocket in the empty space. It's a quick and easy crop, and I won't feel bad about discarding it in a few months time. (You can see in the picture here where one baby strawberry is already developing on a runner and looking for a bit of earth to settle in.)

• Eliminating bare earth between young plants by growing something in the gaps keeps the soil cool in summer and helps reduce water evaporation.
• Densely planted rows and blocks seem less prone to predation by birds and insects.
• Some plants have a beneficial effect on each other when grown together. This is called companion planting.
• Some plants seem to improve the health of other plants when planted close by.
• Plants seem to flourish better when growing in a community. It could be because of the reasons above, but I think that they also like company, just like us.

Nothing smells like summer in the greenhouse and kitchen garden than the smell of basil and tomatoes on a hot day. When I stand and just breathe that perfume into my lungs I feel that all's right with the world.

Growing basil with tomatoes is not a cache crop as such, but growing it amongst tomato plants definitely improves the amount of fruit produced, so I thought I add it in for good measure.

If you look at the bottom of the picture you can just see the basil leaves at the bottom of the tomato plants.

When a friend of mine heard I was writing on catch cropping, he pointed out an amazing intercropping project in China, where carp are reared in paddy fields. The principle goes something like this:

Carp lay eggs on the stems of the rice plants in flooded paddy fields.

Eggs hatch, and the fry (baby fish) flourish in the paddy field water.

All carp feed on the rotting leaves of the rice plants.

Plankton grows in the plant rich, fish rich water.

Carp excretia feeds and fertilizes the rice crop.

Makes my rocket and strawberries sound pretty tame! (link for study below)

If you want to read more deeply into this subject, there are some in depth articles that examine many more combinations of plants, and methods for maximising produce from the garden. Here are a few that I found: