Getting a garden started

Gardening is so fun! First, composting is pretty easy – take grass clippings and shredded fallen leaves and layer them with your kitchen scraps (no meat products). You may have to add a small amt of black dirt at first. Keep it damp as a wrung out sponge, let it heat up, then turn every so often. The thing about compost is that it takes a while. We usually put all of one year’s pile on the garden in the fall which we rototill in in the spring.

Starting plants indoors can be a pain, but very rewarding. Since this is your first garden I suggest just buying plants for tomatoes and peppers rather than growing from seed. Take this year to learn about the process and the equipment you’ll need for seed-starting. A good book is From Seed to Bloom. Other plants grow best being planted right in your garden as a seed. This includes things like beans and cucumbers, pumpkins, carrots, and some herbs. A note on herbs – some are very difficult to grow from seed so its best to purchase it as a plant. A brief amount of internet research on what you want to grow will help you tremendously.

Plants are divided into cold season and warm season, which has to do with when you plant – either before the last frost or after the last frost in your area (determined by your zone – easy to find via Internet). Cold season things are lettuce and spinach, peas. potatoes, I think carrots too. Warm season stuff would be tomatoes and peppers, beans, squash, etc. A note on growing peas – you need a whole lot of room to get anything much out of the plants. This I learned the hard way :).

A really great book for gardening in general is The Square Foot garden. I admit I don’t use his methods completely b/c they haven’t really worked for me. But he has a lot of info on planting and harvesting dates, etc.

Since this is your first year, I suggest starting with only a few things and see how you do, then add more over the years. Gardening is an inexact science – every year is different! That’s something I really like about it! BTW, we live in town with a very small garden and its pretty amazing what we’ve grown for our family. We don’t really look at it as practical for canning and freezing so much – with the exception of tomatoes – but we eat really well all summer long! I buy produce from the farmer’s mkt for freezing and canning. This November we purchased a house on 3 acres so now I can have a HUGE garden. I can grow pumpkins anywhere I want! 🙂

Ok, sorry this became so long – can you tell its a subject I’m passionate about? LOL

Have fun – feel free to ask more questions!

Becky

BTW, organic gardening is pretty easy – just don’t spray anything! Ha! 🙂

No really, after a while you’ll catch on to companion planting and you’ll figure out what bugs are causing problems and you just look them up on the internet or in a Rodale book. Those are also awesome – check out OG magazine and and books by the Rodales – they’ve been doing it for decades. My library has a pretty good selection of both.

The reason you have to start tomatoes and peppers and eggplants inside is because they take to long to grow to fruition once its warm enough to plant them outside. Again, I would suggest just buying plants of these to begin with. You won’t plant them until May or so depending on where you live.

And plan on weeding by hand. Which I like to think of as my private war that I wage outside. I actually really love to do it. I’m so weird.

The best thing for pest control is you!  Everyday I check UNDER all the leaves of my plants to see what is lurking there and I hand pick them off and dispose of them.  A lot of people don’t know that they hide under the leaves not on top.  Encourage predator insects, ladybugs, lacewings and predator wasps – I do not use chemical pest control on the lawn or garden – I only use organic fertilizer and compost.  I also use raised beds and plant in pots so I have a variety of methods to utilize for planting.  I am not allowed a greenhouse where we live, so that makes life more difficult – in the UK I had one and it was the best for starting things early.  The raised beds work for me because the soild heats up faster and I can get my young plants out sooner – but it depends where you are in the country.  I also water and weed by hand and if I need to mulch something I use straw and not commercial mulch.  Most of my garden is landscaped for flowers and trees which I started when I first got here – but I am not going to turn more over to veg as it is a good thing to do in the economy.  An organic garden is wonderful, but it does take time and effort to keep it bug free, once you get into the routine then it is not bad at all.  I love gardening and find it therapeutic, it is also wonderful to involve the children they make great bug spotters, just teach them the good from the bad.  I also like Squarefoot Gardener and the Rodale books.  First thing to do is to check what planting zone you are in for your area and then I would do a soil test – you can get an inexpensive test at Lowes or any place like that.  Once you know what type of soil you have, you can amend it accordingly to get the best growing soil for your needs.  If you are in the far north or have snow on the ground you may have to wait to do that test.  Anyway, good luck it is a great thing to do.  Linda

Raised beds are very awesome. The soil just gets better and better over the years as you add compost. Also, you are less likely to churn up dormant grass and weed seeds from rototilling. The Square Foot Gardener is going to be a good resource for you. I usually get my seeds from a local farm store, but there is a ton more variety ordering from a place like Burpees. They also sell plants too. BTW, berries need a little time to get going – a year or two depending on size of plant and if you’re growing something like strawberries vs. raspberries or blueberries.

An interesting thing is that the huge corporation Monsanto who are responsible for the Genetically Modified products are now trying to get the government to allow it to sell the terminator seed.  That seed would devastate all heirloom seeds eventually and render them sterile as well.  It would mean that Monsanto would have the monopoly of all seeds growing which in my mind is a very bad thing.  I would encourage all gardeners and people who care about what foods they eat to stick with non hybrid seeds to grow and oppose anything that is GM – the GM products will destroy all organic gardeners because you cannot control pollination – it is a large worry.  Sorry a bit political, but health and well being are important to me and my faily and I am sure they are to you too – so it pays to be aware.

2flowerboys, gardening is an exercise in trial and error – I was a very successful gardener in the UK – here I have been on  steep learning curve, as soild, climate and bugs are very different to what I am used to.  I have had many mistakes over the years I have been gardening and one piece of advice I would have is find out the items that grow well in your area – some areas are better than others for certain things – I got a book here about growing in Illinois and it was most helpful, maybe there is something like that for your area.  We also had heavy clay soil and I have spent a lot of time, energy and some money on amending it – now I have lots of earthworms and that is a very good sign.  Preparing a bed from scratch is hard work and I am a bit older so I find that these days raised beds work well for me, Here are 4 books that I refer to often are

Gardening when it counts by Steve Solomon – it is A Mother Earth News book – this is great for those with little or no experience as well as more advanced gardeners

Raised Bed Vegetable Gardening made simple by Raymond Nones – also ideal for the novice

Great Garden Companions by Sally Jean Cunningham – a Rodale book which shows how to plant a chemical free garden – I highly recommend this as I do all these titles.

finally I really recommend

Storey’s Seed Sowing and Saving, which gives step by step instructions for collecting and growing 100s of veg, herbs and flowers and how to collect and save seed.

I think these books would be a great start and may be all you really need to grow a great garden.  Blessings, Linda

I can recommend a couple of great sources for seeds. 

http://www.fedcoseeds.com/

Fedco Seed – this is my number one seed shop, they don’t sell monsanto seeds, they sell very rare heirlooms, and their prices are the lowest – what a great combination LOL.  I find a lot of those beautiful heirloom seed catalogs to have very high priced seeds.  Fedco has a newsprint catalog, but you can look up illustrations online if you want – they are thrifty!

http://www.johnnyseeds.com/

Johnny’s Seeds is a great resource – if you want to avoid monsanto you can stick with the original Johnny’s varieties which are marked in the catolog.  Also the catalog/site is a great resource for gardeners.

http://www.willhiteseed.com/

And last here is a plug for a small seed company in the south – that is not easy to come by LOL, and we southerners have special requirements that sometimes seed from Vermont and Washington State just can’t meet.  Wilhite is in Texas, and they specialize in watermelons but sell a few varieties of lots of other veggies in their catalog.  If you are a southerner, then give them a try!  I am a loyal customer.

Have fun!