I sat and watched it for a week: sun lands about 8am and the neighbour's fence plus a lime tree take it just after noon. Four tomato plants went in there last year and gave me six fruit total, which felt like an insult. The bed is 3m by 1m and I would rather grow something suited to the spot than keep fighting for light I do not have. Mild maritime climate, I sow from March under a windowsill.
Slight pushback on the flat "four hours is a leaf bed" framing. Which four hours matters and so does what is around it. Morning sun on a bed that also gets bright open sky for the rest of the day behaves very differently to four hours of afternoon sun in a hole surrounded by dark fencing. You have morning sun, which is the good kind: leaves dry early, less disease, and the plant is doing its work before the day gets stressful. If your fence is dark, painting the shaded side something pale genuinely moves the needle, I did mine in an off white masonry paint and it was noticeable on the near row. I would not write off a determinate cherry tomato in a pot on the sunniest edge of that bed before trying one.
Agree on the sky. Overhead open sky is worth a lot more than people think, that is why a bed under a tree canopy with dappled light performs so much worse than a bed shaded by a low fence for the same measured hours.
I weighed everything for two seasons because I got tired of arguing with myself about it. Shady bed, same square metreage as yours: kale and chard came in within about a tenth of the sunny bed. Bush beans were down maybe a quarter. Courgette down by half but still more courgette than any household wants. Tomatoes were the outlier, roughly a fifth of the sunny bed by weight and a lot of it never coloured up properly and had to be ripened indoors. So the pattern was not a flat percentage penalty, it was fine, fine, fine, catastrophe, and the catastrophe was always the fruiting solanums.
I lost two full seasons to being stubborn about this. Bought grafted tomato plants, bought a fancy feed, built a little frame, all in a bed with about four and a half hours. Got a handful of fruit both years and blamed feeding, then blamed watering, then blamed the variety. Third year I put the same plants in a big pot on the front step, which is concrete and gets sun until six, and I could not keep up with them. What I actually spent that on was two years of the bed, not the price of the plants.
Four hours grows leaves, roots and most brassicas. It does not ripen fruit. Put the salad, chard, kale, leeks and beetroot there, and stop buying tomato plants for it.
@night_train_ned · last mo. · 3 replies
I have almost exactly this split: a front bed with sun 8 till 1, and an allotment plot in the open. Same varieties, same compost, sown the same weekend. Chard, kale, leaf lettuce, spring onions, beetroot and mangetout are basically indistinguishable between the two beds. Bush courgette in the shady bed produces, just later and about half as many. Tomatoes, peppers, aubergines and anything you want to ripen sweet are the ones that fall off a cliff, because they are not just running photosynthesis, they are running a ripening clock that needs heat as well as light. Give the four hour bed to leaf and root, put the fruiting stuff wherever your longest light is, even if that is pots on a paved bit.
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@springtail_stella · last mo.
That is the answer I was hoping nobody would give but here we are. Mangetout up the fence side is a good call, it is dead space anyway.
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@bootstrap_nadia · last mo.
Do that and put the beetroot at the front. Beetroot in part shade goes leafier and the leaves are the best thing about beetroot anyway.
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