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PLANNING
The usual way to start any project is to define what the project is. So what is vegetable garden? Hey, this is an easy question. I’m sorry for the joke but a vegetable garden, to me, is a place where you grow food to eat. It might be several acres or a couple of containers of tomatoes on the balcony of your apartment. This is a vegetable garden.
The real key is that you grow something. Everyone can grow some of their own food. Why is it important that you grow your own food? The next few sentences may scare the daylights out of you. This country has the lowest reserves of food in its history.
If you doubt this do your research. Google is wonderful but scary. Search for such things as “US food reserves”. You might want to search for something like “US grain reserves”. When you do these searches you will find two groups. Those that want to scare you into thinking you will starve tomorrow and those that think the government has it all taken care of. Both of these groups are wrong. You will need to make your own choice. In any case no matter who is right you need to be prepared. You must be prepared and one part of being prepared is growing your own food and becoming as self sufficient a possible. This is what this section is all about.
So, your back and have decide to grow a garden. Let’s get started. It is time to make a de-cision about where you are going to grow your garden. Here are a few options:
• A container garden on your door step: This is an option if you don’t have a yard.
• In a multi-family public garden area.
• Till up part of your front lawn if the locals will let you.
• Till up your back yard.
• If you have a little extra acreage—then dedicate it to a garden.
• There are lots of other options to consider in finding a place to grow a garden. You have decided to grow a garden. You will find a place.
MEASURE YOUR GARDEN AREA.
I mean take a tape measure and measure the area where you will put your garden. This is a must for the following reasons:
It will help you to decide what you are going to plant.
Measurements will help to decide what kind of garden you want for example an inten-sive raised bed garden or a plane old flat garden.
• You measurements will help you to plan for the cost of your garden:
• Cost of materials
• Cost of seed and bedding plants.
• Cost of irrigation as needed.
• Number of hours you must spend tending your garden.
• What the return from your garden can be.
After you have measured the area where you want to put your garden you will need to make a scale drawing of it. Also do a scale drawing of the lot surrounding your garden with the garden in it. I admit that this is one place that I have not followed my own advice. My excuse is that I have many acres that are setting idle. Just because I didn’t do it doesn’t mean that you don’t need to create this drawing. Bite the bullet and do it.
HOW BIG SHOULD YOUR GARDEN BE?
The general rule given is this, if you are a beginning gardener, start small. I don’t neces-sarily agree with that. My motto is to grow all of your own food that you can. The end choice on garden size is yours. You need to develop a balance between these factors:
• How much time do you have for gardening?
• How much “land” do you have for a garden?
• What are your gardening goals?
• How much will you spend on your garden and is the return worth the investment?
• What do you expect to gain from a garden personally?
If you have never gardened before and have the room a 20x 50 garden will keep you real-ly busy. On the other hand if you have the land a 200 x 200 garden is okay, provided you have some power equipment to help out. This is another one of those choices. A relatively good garden will produce one pound or more of food per square foot.
YOUR GARDEN NOTEBOOK
This is one aspect of gardening that gets neglected. You need to keep a garden notebook or journal from day one. Look at all the information that you have collected so far and we are only a few pages into the subject.
My garden note book is a three ring binder labeled Garden Notes. I put things in this binder that are worth something to me. Do I keep as good a set of notes as I should? The answer is no. I don’t have frost date or total production for any of my gardening years. I do have some rough sketches of what my garden will look like. I use these for ordering seed and preparing or buying bedding plants.
Here is a list of things that it would be helpful to have in your garden notebook:
• Last frost in the spring and first frost in the fall dates.
• What seeds you bought where.
• What produced best each year? Different plants produce better some years.
• Where you bought your bedding plants. Were they what was advertised or what they were labeled? We have had some interesting result from bedding plants.
• What pest bothered your garden and what you did to control them?
• What kind of fertilizer you used and when.
• Any information about what works for you and what doesn’t.
• Any information you want to pass on to your children.
Many people make their garden note book a simple journal of their summer lives. Keep this notebook. It will pay for the effort in many unexpected ways.
Contrary to what the Extension Service says, there are no master gardeners, only some gardeners that work harder and study more than others. Anyone that grows a successful garden is a master gardener in my book. (And this is my Book.). Any garden that produces some food or a few flowers is a successful garden. Don’t get discouraged if your first results aren’t as good as your neighbors.
WHAT SHOULD YOUR GARDEN BE?
It is now decision time. You have most of the information that you need to plan your garden. It is time to decide what kind of garden you want:
• Just a flower garden.
• A garden that produces a few great tasting vegetables for dinner.
• A garden that produces most of the produce for your family during the summer.
• A garden that is all of the above and produces surplus food to be stored by can-ning, freezing or winter storage.
For myself I always choose the last option. We have lots of room and love fresh vegeta-bles. Our crops range from spinach in the spring to potatoes for winter storage.
As mentioned before there are basically two types of gardens. These are intensive bed gardens and field or flat gardens. These two types of garden can take many forms.
An intensive bed garden can be intensive raised beds with a wall around them to hold the soil. An intensive bed garden can be a mound of soil that has been prepared to enhance plant growth. Raise intensive beds are my favorite type of garden. What are some reasons for raised intensive beds?
• Their production is incredible. We had a 5 foot by 5 foot bed of beets a couple of years ago that produced beets for the family throughout the summer and we canned 38 quarts by fall.
• After the beds are constructed most of the gardening work is done. Besides a bed that is 2 feet above the ground is a lot easier to weed. My beds are designed so that I can reach the center of the bed from either side without too much stretch-ing.
• Preparation for planting of an established bed is simple.
Here are the only disadvantages that I can find for raised intensive beds:
• They take a lot of work to construct. I spend at least 20 hours to construct a 5 foot by 5 foot two foot high raised bed with a wall around it. A lot of this construction is hard work.
• They cost more to prepare initially than a flat bed or mounded bed.
I recommend ordinary field gardening for crops like corn and potatoes and with potatoes there are a lot of things that must be done.
The field garden is just that. The ground is plowed up or tilled and then smoothed. I like to add manure and fertilizer at this point. Then I till it again. The steps for a field garden are these:
• Lay it out.
• Till or plow the garden.
• Rake or smooth it.
• Fertilize it.
• Till it again.
• Rake and smooth it to prepare a surface layer for planting.
• Plant your garden.
• Maintain the garden until it is harvested.
• Love it.
A derivative of the field method is sometimes called the French Intensive method. This method adds an additional step. It is called double digging and is just what it means. The area to be planted is dug down at least a foot to two feet. The soil is removed and then re-placed as the digging proceeds. I like to add a lot of organic material at this time to loosen up the soil. This is the best method to make a garden for heavy clay soil. This method really teaches you the meaning of the word intense. It is a lot of work to create a garden using this method. I have to confess that I use this method a lot but here I garden by John Deere. My tractor does most of the work.
Given the right conditions, all of these methods will produce a respectable garden. Being lazy I don’t mind working hard once and harvesting the results for a number of years. That is the reason that I am slowly converting my garden to raised bed with walls around them.
WHAT TO GROW?
How do you know what to grow? These are the things that I ask myself about what to grow in my garden:
• What does my family like to eat, if nobody is going to eat it why grow it?
• What will my climate allow me to grow?
• What will my garden support? This becomes a question of size and available plant resources.
• Have I checked the time required to grow each item from planting to harvest.
• If I grow too much can it be stored or given away? Try giving away zucchini squash around here in the summer.
These are the criteria that I use to select my garden plants.
Your climate is a definition of your growing season. The best source of information is the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map. The web site for this map is http://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/PHZMWeb/. This is a really nifty site please check this one out.
After you determine your zone it is easy to find the average last frost date and first fall frost date. Here is a nice site for length of growing season. http://www.basic-info-4-organic-fertilizers.com/hardinessmap.html I don’t even have an affiliate link to them. After I have determined the hardiness zone and the length of the growing season it is time to proceed to the seed catalogs. Here you will need to look at each plant you plan to grow to determine if it will grow in your climate. This book can’t do that for you. We live in the Mecca of garden-ing. Our hardiness zone is 7a on the 2012 map and our growing season is usually from about May 15 to about October 15th. You must do your own research. I say it again you must do your own research for the location of your garden.
WHAT ARE MY FAVORITE THINGS TO GROW?
Here is a list of my favorite vegetables:
Peppers
Corn
Potatoes
Tomatoes
Peas
Beets
Lettuce
Kohlrabi
Parsnips
Carrots
Radishes
Cabbage
Broccoli
Brussels sprouts, (This is one vegetable that I have not been very successful at growing.)
Rhubarb
Turnips
Spinach
Chard
Various Squash
Pumpkins
If I have missed anything that you want grow, please feel free to add it. I realize the rhu-barb might not be classified as a vegetable; however, it grows like a vegetable.
This should get you started with your garden planning. There are three P’s of a successful garden:
Prayer
Planning
Persistence
TOOLS
Any project requires tools for its completion. Gardening is no different. There are a few specific tools that you need. There are a lot of tools that are available that may not be needed. I like tools; therefore, I spend too much on tools. The following tool list is similar but different to the one listed in raised bed gardening. This one is aimed at flat gardening instead of raised bed gardening.
Buying tools is necessary and there are a few things to keep in mind before you purchase a tool. Always buy the best quality tool you can afford. Price is an indicator of quality; how-ever, the highest price tool is not always the best quality. You will need to judge the quality of tools that you purchase.
Buying used tools is an option. There are yard sales, second hand stores and various in-ternet sites that sell used tools. One of my friends has obtained nearly all of his tools at yard sales and they are top quality tools.
If you are only going to use a tool once or twice it might be better to rent the tool in-stead of purchasing it.
Here is a list of what I consider the needed tools. Yes this is duplicated in the section on raised bed gardening, but you will notice if you read closely that there are some significant differences. Buy power tools only if you need them as they are expensive and require quite a bit of maintenance:
Hand Tools
Round pointed shovel
Spading fork
Bow rake
Garden hoe
Small hand hoe
Various trowels and planting tools
Stirrup hoe
Pitch fork
4 tine rake/cultivator
Clippers/pruning equipment
Heavy scissors
Small stirrup hoe
Hammer, screw drivers, pliers
Post bar, any kind of heavy steel bar for starting driven posts and digging post holes.
Hand post hole digger, only if you have a lot of fencing to do.
Gloves
Wheel Barrow
Power tools—only buy those that you really need.
Lawn Mower
String trimmer
Mini-tiller
Garden tiller
Lawn and Garden Tractor
Compact tractor
Chipper/shredder
WHEEL BARROW
Buy or obtain a good quality wheel barrow. My favorite is the model with two wheels in front. The two wheeled wheel barrow has better stability and will carry a larger load with less effort. The single wheel model is more maneuverable in a garden.
TOOL MAINTENANCE
Garden tool maintenance and storage is a do as I say not as I do issue. Frankly I don’t maintain and care for my garden tools as well as I should. Your tools need to be stored in a shelter out of the weather and sun. So please do as I say and not as I do (No one is perfect, right.).
Wooden handled tools need to have their handles maintained. The original finish on garden tools handles is not usually very durable. The best finish for wooden handles is the old linseed oil finish. This is applied by lightly sanding the old finish off the handle and then applying several coats of linseed oil. This is not the only finish to use but it works. You can visit your local home improvement center for other options.
Keep your tools sharp. This not only makes you tool safer but it reduces the amount of effort needed use the tool.
Good tools should last a life time with proper care. Many tools are passed down from parent to child.
POWER TOOLS
There are two power tools that you will want to have for a garden and the good thing is that if you have a lawn and a yard you already have these two. You will need a lawn mower and a string trimmer.
Buy a lawn mower that is appropriate for the yard that you have. If you have a small to medium size yard a push mower with a rear grass catcher is adequate. Personally I cannot see a lot of difference in these mowers so almost any will do.
For a string trimmer my opinion is to buy the best that you can afford. I like those that use a detachable power head. This allows you to buy various attachments’ such as a mini-tiller. If you do raised bed gardening, a mini-tiller can be very helpful. If you have a fairly large row garden, then a mini-tiller is almost a must have tool.
If you have a fairly large row or field garden then a roto-tiller is probably necessary. At least it is necessary in the beginning. If you setup you garden using one of the methods that require less tillage, you may not need to own a roto-tiller. Consider renting a tiller when you need it. Maybe you can borrow one from a neighbor.
Buy a lawn and garden tractor only if you really need it. They are expensive and this is all about producing food and saving money. If you buy a lawn and garden tractor try to get a model that has attachments available for various tasks.
Compact tractors are necessary only if you have a lot of ground and need to maintain it. My compact tractor is a John Deere 755 with a loader. I got mine in a pile of parts and rebuilt it about 10 years ago. This tractor, to buy it today, would cost about $10,000 on the used market. If you need a tractor, shop around.
This chapter is not meant to be a comprehensive guide to tools but as a place to start. Do your own research and reading to find those that are best suited to you.
SOIL AND GROUND PREPARATION
The life blood of a garden is the soil. The soil provides nutrients for the plants and holds the water that the plant needs to pick up the nutrients and move the nutrient up the plant stem. The root system of the plant is the supplier of the solid material that a plant requires. Your soil determines what you plant root system will be like. You need to provide the best possible place for your plant roots. Soil test for nutrient levels will provide valuable infor-mation. You can get a personal test kit or your County Extension Office can tell you where to get your soil tested.
FIELD GARDENS
Field gardens are those that are fairly large in area and are usually used for such crops as potatoes and corn. Many people plant their whole garden this way. The garden is laid out like a farmer’s field and tilled to prepare the seed bed. The plants are planted in rows with a space between for growth and a path for maintaining the rows. This is the conventional method of gardening. This method is fairly labor intensive as these patches require yearly tilling and a lot of weeding.
You can combine one of the intensive gardening methods with field gardens. This will re-duce your labor and increase your yields. You won’t see a great decrease in labor the first year but the second year, if you apply mulch generously the first year and the second year the amount of weeding needed should decrease.
How do you start a new field garden? I like to start a new garden the fall before it is to be planted. These steps to put a garden in order for spring planting are somewhat like these, there probably is no one method better than another, so just do what feels right.
First you need to clear and cleanup your garden patch. Remove all of the weeds and mow the area.
Till the area two or three times. I usually till it first by going around the garden. Then I till it from corner to corner from two directions.
Let it set a while.
Rake out the roots and other stuff. This goes into the compost pile.
Till it again. These few steps should be completed before the first snow or when the ground freezes.
Early in the spring cover your new garden with manure or compost.
Till in the compost and manure.
You can raise a good garden without compost and manure by using commercial fertiliz-ers, however, these never seem quite as good as using natural materials. Even with natural materials it may be necessary to provide additional plant food by using commercial fertilizer.
Rake you garden to get as even a seed bed as possible.
You should now be ready to plant. If it sets for a while and weeds start then till it or rake it to remove the weeds.
A variation to the conventional garden us a layered garden. I have used these with great success. These are the basic steps to build a layered garden.
Locate where you want your garden rows.
Cover the area that will be planted with cardboard old newspaper old paper sack com-pletely. Be sure that you have a couple of layers at least.
Strip the sod from the areas between the rows and throw it on the paper layer.
Put a layer of organic material on the sod. This can be compost, manure, old grass clip-ping, old hay, and so forth.
The next lay is a layer of soil. I usually get it by digging between the rows. Put several inches of soil over the organic layer.
My last layer is a layer of compost or aged manure and this layer is mixed with more soil.
This layer is the planting layer.
After the plants have started and the first weeding is done you should mulch this type of garden. The mulch can be old hay, grass clipping or if you are really short of material buy a couple of bales of peat moss at the garden center.
Next year you just add a layer of compost, pull back the mulch where you want to plant and plant your garden. In a couple of years the soil will decompose and you will have a fine garden bed.
In summary soil and ground preparation is fairly simple:
Dig it up.
Fertilize it.
Rake it.
Plant it.
Oh yes, enjoy your garden. This is the most important step. If you don’t enjoy a garden you won’t take care of it and your plants will know it. Tell them that they are doing well and they will.
Now, here are a few words about compost.
There a volumes of material written about compost. So what is compost? The common definition of compost is that it is decomposed organic material called humus. Really that is just what compost is decomposed biological junk. It might be old leaves, hay, straw, kitchen waste, animal waste, manure or just about any biological material. In short good compost is a light brown material that smells like good fresh earth. It does not smell like the smelly waste it came from.
How do you make compost? Compost is created by mixing various organic materials to-gether and letting them decompose. The decomposition is carried out by small microscopic animals and by bacteria. The science of decomposition is a whole life time in itself. You make compost by putting all this stuff together and letting it cook. Good compost reaches a fairly high temperature, in fact, if certain conditions exist composting or decomposition can cause a fire in the compost pile. This is most widely known as spontaneous combustion. If hay is too green and not allowed to dry properly before processing or stacking it can spontaneous-ly combust. Compost is formed by the same process.
There are two types of decomposition of organic materials. These are:
Anaerobic, which is the decomposition without air. This is the one that is stinky and messy like sewage. In some instances this is a very valuable process for the decomposition of organics. A methane generator or bio-digester uses this process to produce methane gas for fuel.
The other process is aerobic digestion. This is the process that is generally favored for the creation of compost. It is a controlled decomposition in a pile, bin, or tumbler. The secrets of aerobic digestion are the carbon to nitrogen ratio, the moisture content and the size of the particles of organic matter.
This may sound like an exact science but it isn’t. Generally you just place all of your old grass clipping, kitchen waste—organic and your weeds in a pile. Add some soil to get things started and wait. Many methods exist to speed up the composting process but in my opin-ion they are not necessary. To avoid problems I use two compost piles. One that I use in the garden this year and one that I add waste to this year for next year. Next year I have great compost with not too much effort. The only labor is to turn the compost pile a few times during the year to ensure aerobic decomposition.
That is the story of composting.
FERTILIZERS AND SOIL PH
This is not a book about organic gardening. Organic gardening is great once that you have an established garden, lots of compost and other organic material. This is usually not the case for starting a garden. (I never have enough compost even though I make it by the ton.) At some point you are going to need to add commercial fertilizer. If you do add fertilizer do it the right way. The first question is what do you need to add? This depends somewhat up-on the plants that you are going to grow in your garden.
Many berry plants like an acid soil. The acid or base content of the soil is measured by PH this is a log scale of the hydrogen ion ranging from 0 to 14. PH of 7 is considered neutral. Many garden plants like a soil that is slightly acid with a ph of 6.5 to 6.9 do your research. You will need to do your research for the specific ph that your plants require. In general a slightly acid soil allows the plants to absorb the nutrients from the soil easier.
The best way to find out what your soil requires is to have it tested. Your County Exten-sion Office can tell you how to do this and where to send the soil sample. Another way is to buy an inexpensive soil test kit at the garden center.
I have an instrument that I poke in the soil to measure the ph. This is not the most accu-rate method but it is good enough. Generally my soil is tested with a store bought test kit. These are not the most accurate but are good enough for growing a great garden.
My one challenge for ph has been blue berries. Our soil is quite alkaline from years of ir-rigation and high nitrogen fertilizer. In addition about ten years ago our farm was burned over by a very high temperature ground fire. This removed most of the organics from the soil. This has created a real challenge to return the soil to a productive state. One successful method to rebuild the soil is building raised beds.
Your soil PH can be adjusted by adding sulfur to alkaline soil or lime to acid soil. Be care-ful when you do this. This is one time to really do a good job of researching what you need and asking around the neighborhood. The really great thing about gardening as we have de-scribed it is that you won’t have these problems after your garden is established. The excep-tions are those plants that require a quite acid soil or a very alkaline one. These types of plants will require special care for soil preparation. As I stated before, getting your soil test-ed for nutrient level is not a bad idea.