Top 5 Ways to Improve Your Yield
Have you ever worked hard in your garden all season long only to get a disappointing amount of produce at harvest time? It can be really frustrating to spend all that time and effort without a lot to show for it. The good news is that if you increase the amount each plant produces (the yield), you can get more food with the same or less work. Here are five ways to improve the yield of whatever kind of plants you grow.
1. Choose Varieties for Your Area
No matter what kind of plants you grow in your garden, they probably have certain growing conditions that they produce best in. Whether that’s hot, humid weather for tomatoes and melons or cool, sunny days for salad greens and peas. But, within each kind of plant, different varieties may do better in different conditions. There are tomato varieties that mature faster for those with short growing seasons, or split less for those with frequent large rain events.
If you carefully select varieties that are adapted for your growing conditions, you can expect better yields without any additional work on your part. One of the best ways to find good local varieties is see what is being sold at your local farmers market. You can also check with your county extension office if you have one, or local Master Gardener program. Or, you can do some trial and error yourself. If your current variety isn’t producing well, rather than just saying “I can’t grow cucumbers (or whatever) here!” Try a couple different varieties, looking for traits that might help with your area’s specific challenges and see what you find.
You should also check if what you are growing is a determinant or indeterminant variety. Basically, determinant plants will provide one big harvest in a short harvest window. Indeterminant plants will continue to set and ripen smaller amounts of fruits until the plant dies. Choosing an indeterminant variety can increase the yield for a specific plant if you have a long growing season to continue harvesting.
2. Improve Your Soil
Another way to improve yield that can apply to almost any kind of plant is to improve your soil. What you need to do to improve it will depend on what you are starting with. You don’t necessarily need to spend a lot of money on soil testing – especially your first year gardening. But, if your results are not what you were hoping for, taking a look at your soil nutrition can almost always help.
The first thing to address is soil texture, is your soil sandy, full of clay, or compacted? If so, adding more organic material through compost, sheet mulching, or chop-and-drop cover crops can help. Basically adding organic material to your growing area and letting it break down can add nutrients and improve soil texture at the same time. Improved texture will improve water retention or drainage and make it easier for your plant roots to get their food and water and grow without restrictions.
If your soil texture is OK, then you can work on nutrients. Compost, mulch, and cover crops can help here for general nutrient improvement, and other fertilizers like compost tea, wood ash, lime, or seaweed mixtures can also boost your soil. If most of your plants grow OK, but certain kinds don’t do well, it might be worth a soil test to see if you are missing certain key nutrients. There are often several different ways to add a specific nutrient, so pick one that is locally available, and/or fits your budget. Improving nutrition can give your whole garden a boost and make it much easier to reach your garden goals with the same amount of effort.
3. Optimize Spacing
Deciding how far apart to plant can be a “Goldilocks” kind of decision. You don’t want to crowd your plants too close together so they can’t get enough nutrients or water and they end up competing with each other. But, you don’t want them too far apart where you have to spend all your time weeding and/or mulching and they take up too much space in your garden. Assuming you have good varieties for your area and healthy soil, it can still take some trial and error to find the right spacing for the best yield.
Overall yield can also be maximized in different ways. If you have limited space in your garden, you could choose to put your plants closer together. Even if each individual plant produces less, it allows you to fit more plants into your space and the overall yield is higher. You can also test different growing spaces, like raised beds or containers and how they affect your yield. Or different structures to support plants that grow long vines, like trellises, cages, or training them to a fence. Getting vines up off of the ground (if you have the space to do it) can sometimes increase the yield by improving pollination and airflow around the flowers and fruits.
4. Succession Planting and Season Extension
A relatively obvious way to increase overall yield is to squeeze multiple harvests into the same growing season. Having an early crop and a later crop (or two) doesn’t increase the yield of each specific plant, but being able to harvest for longer will get you more produce overall.
Succession planting works best with shorter growing season plants. Planning to re-plant at regular times throughout the growing season will make sure you have a consistent supply of those short season foods. There are also cool weather crops that can be planted in both the spring and the fall, like peas, spinach, and other greens.
For plants that take longer to mature, you can sometimes get an extra harvest or two by starting seeds indoors before your last frost and using row covers, cloches, or cold frames to protect your plants in the early spring or late fall. There are various types of greenhouses that you can use to grow year round, or growing indoors if your climate doesn’t allow year round gardening outdoors.
5. Prevent Pests and Disease
One final way to improve yield from any kind of plant is to prevent pests and disease. If a plant is spending it’s energy fighting off disease or recovering from pest damage, it won’t be able to maximize production of leaves or fruit. Getting locally adapted and/or disease resistant varieties, having high quality soil, and using appropriate spacing can actually help prevent diseases as well.
Protecting your garden from pests can mean putting up protective barriers, or planting at times to avoid when certain pests are around. You can also use companion plants that repel pests, like planting strong smelling herbs or flowers in between other crops.
