Even if you’ve been working on your soil for a while, you need to keep enriching it every year. Each season you plant, that crop of plants will use the nutrients you add to the soil. So adding organic matter and supplementing the soil are continuing tasks.
Garden soil is not just rock particles, organic matter, water and air. Good soil is alive.
If you’ve never planted anything in your garden before, you’ll need to know the pH level – the level of acidity/alkalinity – of your soil. Dig your soil over and test it for pH. You can buy cheap pH testing kits at the nursery and in the garden sections of large department stores. Some plants like a higher acid soil, some like it more alkaline, but the vast majority of vegetables grow well in a pH range of 6–7. If your soil is too acid – under pH6 – add agricultural lime to help balance it out. If it is too alkaline – pH8 or above – add compost and organic matter. Then water the garden. You are trying to encourage microbes and worms to live there and it must be moist and nutritious for that to happen. As soon as you start adding compost and other organic matter like manure, and if you keep the garden moist, the garden worms will come from nowhere. They will further help you break up the soil because they’ll burrow through it, making tunnels for water and nutrients to flow. They will eat and excrete and, over time, will help develop the life in your soil.
Soil types
To see what kind of soil you have, wet some soil, scoop it out into your hand and roll it into a sausage shape. If the sausage stays firm and doesn’t fall apart, you’ve got clay. If the sausage won’t hold its shape and keeps falling apart, you have sandy soil. If it holds its shape but as you roll it in the palm of your hand, it breaks apart slightly, it’s good loam – the best of all soils.
Clay soil
Clay soil contains a lot of nutrients but it has poor drainage. You will have to enrich it to stop your plants drowning when it rains, but if you improve the structure of the soil and the drainage, and continue to improve it every season, you’ll release the nutrients and have great soil. Add a couple of barrow loads of compost to each garden bed and on top of that sprinkle over a few handfuls of gypsum. Gypsum is an organic compound that will improve the soil structure and help with drainage. When you have added the compost and the gypsum, dig the bed over to mix it all together. Add a thick layer of straw mulch and enough water to moisten the soil, and wait for two weeks before you use the bed.
Sandy soil
The solution for fixing sandy soil is almost the same as the one above for clay soil, but instead of using gypsum, you’ll need manure and compost. Dig the garden bed over and add as much compost as possible. Then spade over horse, cow, sheep or pig manure that you know is weed-free. You can often buy animal manure at roadside stalls on the outskirts of cities; if not, you’ll find it at your local nursery or large department store’s gardening section. Dig it all in and mix everything into the soil. Cover with a thick layer of straw mulch and water it. Allow the bed to settle for two weeks before you plant anything.
Loam
Loam is what we all aim for, but even loam should be enriched before you plant your season’s seeds or seedlings. You’ll increase your chance of success if you plant into fertile soil that is teeming with microbes and organic matter. No amount of fertiliser added later will equal the benefits of having the plant’s roots in rich soil.
Other tips for soil
When you’re starting to set up the garden, think also about your natural fertilisers. Some plants, like comfrey, send down deep tap roots that mine the soil for minerals. Those minerals are stored in the leaves of the plant, so when you use something like comfrey for fertilising or activating your compost, you’ll get the benefit of the high-nitrogen leaves and the minerals they contain. Comfrey will grow in poor soil but it likes moisture while it gets established. It grows better from roots than from seeds. It is a good idea to plant comfrey at the edges of your garden but be sure of the place you plant it in. Even though it does not spread by growing outwards, like bamboo it will regrow from a tiny piece of root: once it’s in, it’s difficult to get rid of.
If you have chooks, let them into the garden while you’re building up the soil. They’ll scratch around, leave their droppings, eat bugs and insect eggs that you can’t see and generally improve the fertility of the soil simply by being there. We let our chooks into the garden in the month before we do our main planting in March. They eat the comfrey down to the roots, pick all the leaves from the capsicums, turn over the compost heap several times and eat every caterpillar and grasshopper in the place. We don’t worry about the damage; the leaves grow back and the chooks do much more good than harm. Because of their hard work, we start off our gardening year with a clean slate. Once you plant seedlings and have your garden in full production, you’ll have to keep the chickens out of your garden.
QUICK SOIL TIPS
Start a compost heap.
Dig the soil over and remove the weeds.
Test for pH and make any necessary adjustments.
Add compost and organic matter like cow, horse, pig or sheep manures.
Let the chickens in to scratch and feed while you’re preparing the garden.
Once you’ve planted your seeds and seedlings, fence the garden off from chickens and pets.
Water the soil and apply mulch to keep the soil moist.
When you take up your trowel and fork and start planting vegetable seeds for the first time, there is a very strong tendency to overdo it or to dive in with no thought of order, outcome or orthodoxy. When the gardening bug grabs you, you’re in it for production; nothing else matters. Or does it?
It will help you considerably if you can think a little about what you’re about to plant, because if you’re in your early years of gardening and you overdo it, or go through a season with few vegetables making it to your kitchen table, you might give up. I don’t want that to happen. Never give up because it’s too difficult – in gardening or anything else. You just need to think about your planting in a different way, work out your strategy and start again. You learn the best lessons from your own mistakes or when times are tough.
The first thing to do if you’re planning your first vegetable garden is to decide what you’ll plant. Find a good organic vegetable gardening book suitable for the climate you live in, or do some research on the internet (check the resources at the back of the book for suggestions).
Write a list of your favourite vegetables, then work out, by reading your book or looking online, what can be easily grown in your climate at this particular time of year. Remember, no matter how dearly you want something to grow, it won’t grow out of season or if you’re in the wrong climate.
There are far too many variables in climate and soil type in Australia for me to give you one good list of vegetables that you should plant in your first garden. However, as an example garden, if you’re in the vast area south of Brisbane, a good spring garden might contain tomatoes, lettuce, green beans, peas, radishes, carrots, silverbeet, beetroot, pumpkin, zucchini and onions. In the areas of north of Brisbane, you could plant these same seeds, but from March onwards, right through to the end of the year. Again, be guided by your reference material and learn as you go. It is a good idea to start a plant diary, listing what you plant and when, and the success you had with each plant and harvest.
Don’t fret about what you can’t grow in your area. Appreciate your successes and focus on growing as many of your favourites as you can. As your gardening skills develop or your living circumstances change, you will be able to grow a bigger variety of vegetables, and plants that gave you problems when you started may suddenly grow in abundance. When you’re a gardener, you never stop learning, even when you’ve been at it for fifty years.
Think big
If you have the space and hope to make your backyard close to self-sufficient, you should plant fruit and nut trees and fruiting vines. The traditional backyard lemon tree is a good start. We have a Eureka lemon planted in our chicken run an
d it gives us lemons almost all year long. We have a big harvest in late winter that I squeeze and freeze. This results in about 12 litres of lemon juice for cordials, lemon butter and general cooking. Then, by January, the tree is full of lemons again, which we pick as we need them. We also have a couple of Washington Navel orange trees, a pink grapefruit, a mandarin and a few groups of bananas.
Fruit and nut trees generally don’t give instant results; growing them is another slow process. We stripped the flowers from our lemon tree for the first two years, which gave it time to establish itself properly before producing fruit. After that we had about twenty lemons the first year, and now it yields well over a hundred per year. The year before we bought this place a pecan tree was planted. It took twelve years to produce nuts and even now it’s only a few handfuls.
Fruit vines are much quicker. Passionfruit and grapes will produce fruit in the first year or two. Kiwifruit vines take a few years to start, but it’s worth the wait. When you buy your kiwi vines, make sure you ask about pollination. Most vines need another vine for pollination.
Berry fruits also earn a place in the sustainable backyard, and they’ll give you fruit in the first year. We’ve successfully grown strawberries, raspberries and blueberries here. All these will grow well in colder climates but if you’re in Queensland, see if you can find a Queensland raspberry – it’s a delicious native. Don’t forget your recycled fruit either. If you’re in a warm climate and buy a good, sweet pineapple with the top still attached, remove the top and strip its bottom leaves. Let the top dry for a week, then plant it in good, rich soil. It will take about eighteen to twenty-four months to produce a pineapple, but if you pick that, twelve months later, another pineapple will grow. After the second year you pull it out and start again.
If you’re in a colder climate you can try apples, pears, apricots, peaches and cherries, as well as almonds, walnuts and hazelnuts.
Food seeds are valuable items. They have the potential to feed the people of the world and without seeds, we have no corn, rye, barley, wheat, rice or vegetables. So we should be concerned about who controls our seeds. For the past fifty years or so, companies have been ‘hybridising’ seeds so they grow to a specific type and size, and in doing so, they remove the ability of that plant to reproduce itself. These seeds are called hybrid or F1 seeds, and are the popular seeds you can buy at the nursery or in supermarkets. They cannot be saved at the end of the season to grow again the following year. When you plant hybrid or F1 seeds, you must go back to the store and buy new seeds every year.
Heirloom seeds
In the old days, before the commercial seed market was established, people collected seeds from their own harvested vegetables and saved them for the following year. This was seen as a very important part of the gardening season because if seeds were not collected and stored correctly, there would be no seeds on hand to grow vegetables the following year. These seeds are what we now know as open-pollinated or heirloom seeds. Seeds used to be swapped with neighbours and bartered for goods; they were a valuable commodity.
Price, availability of old varieties, and the taste of these old vegetables still attract people all round the world to heirloom seeds – myself included. But there is also another advantage: every year open-pollinated seeds grow in your garden, they acclimatise to the specific conditions there. Every year you grow them, they get to know your soils, climate and conditions better, and they will be easier to grow and get good results from.
Whoever controls the seeds controls the food. And that is why it’s important for us backyarders to save seeds and keep this valuable seed pool of old vegetables going. Our great grandparents saved them all so we have the choice. We cannot turn our backs on this heritage because it’s easier or more convenient to buy seedlings or new seeds each year. There is more information about saving seeds later in the chapter.
Sowing seeds
There are many seeds you can plant straight into the soil, but others benefit from being grown in a container in sheltered conditions, and then being planted as a seedling. If you want a very orderly garden, you might want to plant seedlings rather than seeds in the garden because with seeds you can either over- or under-plant, and some seeds don’t germinate so you’re left with empty spaces. Planting from a seedling tray will allow you to plant out the garden exactly to your liking and to fill in spaces as they happen.
Medium-sized seeds like tomato and lettuce are best planted in seed-raising trays and grown to seedling stage before being transferred to the garden. We also prefer to raise capsicum, cabbage, leek and celery seeds in trays and plant them out as seedlings. Seeds for root vegetables like carrots, radishes, parsnips, turnips and legumes (peas and beans), are best planted directly into the garden soil. For the rest of your seeds, be guided by the instructions on the seed packet.
TESTING SEEDS
If you’re using new seeds, you should be fine as long as you check their use-by date. If you’re using older seeds that you’ve had for a while, or seeds given to you by a friend or seed swapper, you can test them for viability before you plant.
Sprinkle some of the seeds you want to test over some moist paper towel or newspaper. Roll the paper up in a long cigar shape and fold in the ends. Keep the cigar moist for seven to ten days and then check to see if any of the seeds have germinated. If they have, the seeds are fine to use.
Sowing seeds in a tray
When planting seeds in trays, use a good-quality seed-raising mix, not potting mix or garden soil. You need a mix that is open and drains perfectly, with no lumps of bark or charcoal that will stop a tiny seedling from emerging.
Fill the trays, poke your finger into each cell to flatten the soil slightly, then top up the cell with the mix again. Plant according to the instructions on the seed packet. Generally, the larger the seed, the deeper it’s planted. So, for tiny seeds, you only have to place them on the top of the soil and scatter seed-raising mix over the top to cover them, then pat down. For a larger seed, plant it at a depth twice its size – so a seed that is ½ mm would be planted 1 mm deep, and a 1 mm seed would be planted 2 mm deep.
Pat the soil down over the top so the seed stays where it is planted, then gently water it in. A hose is too forceful, so get a plastic spray bottle and spray gently. It will take a while to completely wet the soil, but that’s what it takes – gardening helps you slow down. The seed and all the soil in the cell need to be saturated, and then the water should freely drain away, leaving a moist seed and cell. The water is what causes the seed to germinate.
Once the tray has been planted up, you must keep it moist. Seedlings don’t cope well if you let them dry out, so give them a good spray of water every day. Seeds contain everything, except water, to make them grow – they don’t need fertiliser. Once the first few leaves appear you can gently fertilise them, but not before. We deliberately plant more seeds than we need so we can choose the strongest-looking seedlings and discard the weak ones.
Light plays a part too. Seeds don’t need any light before they germinate but when they do, they need strong light – not full sunlight, but enough light to cast a shadow. As soon as you see green growth, move them somewhere they’ll get good light and will be protected from the wind and rain. As they grow taller, they need stronger light. If seedlings don’t get enough light they grow tall and leggy and they’ll be weaker plants because of that. Just before I plant my seedlings out, I move them out of the greenhouse into full sunlight in their tray. This gets them used to full sunlight before they’re transplanted.
Sowing seeds in the garden
Large seeds like beans, peas, pumpkin, beetroot and cucumber can generally be sown straight into a garden bed that has been dug over and enriched. They don’t need the special care some other seeds need. Plants grown for their roots like carrots, radishes, turnips, parsnips and swedes are also sown directly into the garden soil. If you sow these seeds in a tray, then transplant, you run the risk of the root being damaged or misshapen. Scatter th
em along a shallow trench then cover with soil mixed with sand. It’s better to use this sandy mix because the lighter soil colour will remind you every time you’re in the garden that you have tiny seeds in that spot.
You can sow very small seeds like radish and carrot together. Get an old spice or salt shaker, and put the seeds in it along with a spoonful of fine dry sand. Prepare a trench for sowing and shake the seeds in. Cover with soil, and water in very gently with a fine spray. In about a week, the radishes will germinate and grow; the carrots take longer. By the time the radishes are ready to pick, the carrot tops will be showing and they’ll be putting on root growth. Harvesting the radishes will make way for all those carrots.
When you plant seeds in the garden bed, you usually plant in dry or almost dry soil. Give large seeds a good watering only once – they will absorb enough water to keep them going until they germinate. When you see green growth, water again. Small seeds can absorb much less water but will easily be dislodged if you blast them with the garden hose. A fine spray once a day is all they need to keep them moist until you see green growth. Then water as normal.
The seeds of legumes need to be treated a bit differently. When planting peas or beans, water the ground well before you plant the seeds. Then place the seeds into the moist soil, according to the spacing directions on the seed packet. Don’t water again until you see the new shoots emerge. If legumes get too much moisture, they’ll rot.
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