Gardening

by richard

4 comments

1 Trevor Acorn { 03.20.06 at 1449 }

Go buy “Square Foot Gardening”

I’m hoping to get a garden in by next year and everybody I’ve been talking to recommends that book for small scale jobs.

2 Kelly { 03.20.06 at 1602 }

What seeds did you buy? It’s not at all too late to start. We just planted our early peas last week and we’ll be planting root crops this week, but tomatoes and peppers and squash and stuff won’t go in till after Easter.

Were you planning on digging up a plot or building a raised bed? I prefer raised beds, myself; they’re so much easier to work with, and they look so neat.

I’ll give you some more info when I know what you’re wanting to grow.

3 richard { 03.20.06 at 1605 }

We bought seeds for yellow squash, tomatoes, and something else…I think red/green bell peppers.

Thanks for the advice, Kelly. :^)

4 Kelly { 03.20.06 at 1711 }

You’ll need to start your tomatoes and peppers indoors right away so they’ll be big enough to plant outdoors at the end of April – according to my Farmer’s Almanac, the last four days of April will be the best planting dates for them.

When you set them out, be sure to bury the plant at least half way up the stem – they’ll develop a stronger root system that way. Best results come from leaving only the top two sets of leaves above ground. It’s best to go ahead and put cages around your tomato and pepper plants on the day you set them out – you might injure the plants if you do this after they’ve gotten big enough to need the cages. Some more info on tomatoes can be found here.

Squash seeds can go right in the ground at the same time you set out your tomatoes and peppers, but they can be started indoors if you want an earlier crop. I’ve never done that before and I’ve read that they don’t transplant well, so you’d have to start them in peat pots in order to transplant them without disturbing their roots, which makes them more expensive to raise.

Something I’ve always done is to plant lots of marigolds around my tomato and pepper beds – they repel nematodes (the worms that love tomato and pepper roots), and most insects just don’t like the smell, so they help repel the bad ones. Be sure to get a very aromatic variety or they won’t be any help.

This year I’m planning on planting basil and parsley along with my tomatoes also – it is said that basil improves the flavour of tomatoes and repels pests, and that parsley both repels pests and attracts beneficials.

You’ll also need start preparing your bed(s) right away. My favorite method is called the “lasagne bed.” Normally, you would have to till up the soil and kill all the grass before you can do anything, but with the lasagne method you just put down several layers of stuff to kill the grass and build up the soil. In the best bed we ever made, we put first a layer of cardboard boxes (we’d just moved), and then a layer of newspapers, then a layer of dried leaves we raked up, and topped it with a layer of compost and soil. We watered it thoroughly and let it sit for two weeks (or more – maybe a month; I can’t remember right now).

This bed was about 6″ deep when we made it, and it was a raised bed with sides about 8″ high to hold in all the stuff, but deeper would have been better. When we set out our plants the cardboard had not quite dissolved, so we punched a hole through it with a screwdriver in order to make each hole deep enough.

We also put the plants much closer together than is usually recommended, which means that the plants shade the soil when they get bigger, keeping it cooler and moister, and deterring weeds. We have very few problems with weeds when we plant this way. Also you only need about half as many cages, since they plants are close enough together than you can put one on every other plant, and the unsupported plants can be easily tied up to its neighbors’ cages.

We’ve always built raised beds before, but we bought a tiller along with this house, so we’re tilling fairly large plots and planting much more this year than we ever have before. One thing you’ll probably want to do is to keep your beds no wider than four feet. In this way you can fairly easily reach the center of the bed from either side without having to step on the soil. You don’t want to step on your garden soil as it compacts it and good soil needs to be loose.

Gotta run now, but that’s probably enough info to get you started. Happy gardening!

Leave a Comment