Be adventurous. Experimentation is one of the most enjoyable aspects of having a garden. Try growing some unusual edibles just for fun — purple-fleshed potatoes, white pumpkins, or kohlrabi, for example.
Easy Veggie Picks
While the list of easiest crops varies from region to region, there are a few super-simple standouts. Radishes and green beans top most gardeners’ “no-fail” lists. Other easy crops include cucumbers, summer squash, zucchini, garlic, leaf lettuce, snap peas, Swiss chard, and kale. Tomatoes are a bit more difficult but not by much. The newer compact hybrid tomatoes developed for patio culture are especially easy.
Start small
Carefully managed, even a small plot will produce quite a bit of food and will leave you time to learn about and enjoy caring for a vegetable garden. If you have lots of space and want to try a larger garden, make it no more than 10 feet by 20 feet. Keep in mind that the ideal size for your garden depends on the crops you want to plant, too. Crops like bush beans, lettuce, spinach, peppers, and carrots are perfect for a small garden, since the plants are small enough to allow you to fit a variety of crops into the available space. However, if pumpkins and winter squash are high up on your planting list, you’ll need to prepare a bigger garden, as just one of these plants can cover half of the bed pictured above.
Getting More from the Garden
If you’re hoping to make the most of a small space, you should do some advance planning. Learning about site preparation, intensive gardening practices, crop rotation, and succession planting can help you increase yields considerably.
Start your vegetable garden with a plan, just as if you were designing a flower bed. Lay it out on paper, using tracing pads or graph paper. You’ll have a choice of several grid sizes; four squares to the inch is most practical for laying out a garden to scale.
Tracing paper allows you to overlay this year’s garden plan on last year’s (and even that of two years ago) to plan crop rotations easily. Note each vegetable variety in the layout and, after you plant, the date of planting. It’s important to ensure proper spacing so you can calculate how much seed to purchase.
To get maximum sun, plant the tallest crops on the garden’s north side so they won’t shade shorter ones, or run your rows north and south. Plant vegetable families together so you can plan the rotation of crops in subsequent years.
Know Your Vegetable Groups!
Brassicas
cabbage, kale, broccoli, collards, cauliflower, kohlrabi, Brussels sprouts
Leafy Greens
spinach, chard, lettuce
Legumes
peas, beans, limas
Nightshades
peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants
Root Vegetables
beets, carrots, turnips, salsify, parsnips, radishes, rutabagas, onions, garlic, leeks
Vine Crops
cucumbers, melons, squash
A Sun-Blocker Rotation
Trellised tomatoes, beans, peas, and cucumbers, along with corn, can grow 8 to 10 feet tall. To avoid these taller plantings casting shade on other crops, keep these in one rotation on the northeastern side of the garden.
Garden Planning Chart
Raised Beds: Easier Gardening, Healthier Crops
A raised bed is a mound of loose, well-prepared soil, 6 to 8 inches high. The beds can be permanent, with edgings of stone, blocks, timbers, or railway ties, or they can be re-formed each time the garden is planted.
Raised beds are particularly helpful if you are working with heavy soils that drain poorly. In the long run, easy maintenance and the use of hand tools make this method extremely appropriate for the home garden.
What are some other benefits? First, no one actually steps into the raised beds, so the soil always stays porous and loose and never compacts. This loose soil provides good drainage, enabling water, air, and fertilizer to penetrate easily to the roots of your plants.
If you make permanent raised beds, the garden path next to a raised bed is never used for growing vegetables. Because it is constantly being walked on and packed down, it stays dry, clean, and relatively weed-free.
Because the beds are isolated by the paths between them, you can rotate the varieties of vegetables you plant in each bed each year. This allows you to keep one particular family of vegetables from consuming all the same kind of soil nutrients. It also discourages insect pests and pathogens from remaining in the garden soil over the winter and infecting the next season’s crop.
Finally, the raised-bed gardening system makes a beautiful garden that is always orderly and organized because it is so easy to maintain. You can reach into every corner to cultivate the beds and to pull young weeds as they appear. Succession planting will keep the garden constantly filled with vegetables and pleasing to the eye.
Raised beds can be supported with boards (as shown above) or other materials, or they can simply be raked into hills (as shown on the facing page).
Getting Started with Raised Beds
1. To make a raised bed, mark the area with stakes and strings. Sixteen inches is a good width, but some gardeners prefer beds 3 to 4 feet wide. Make your bed any convenient length. Walkways can be up to 20 inches wide.
2. Using a rake, pull the soil from the walkway to the top of the bed. Stand in one walkway and draw soil toward you from the opposite walkway. Do the same on the other side.
3. Enrich the bed with compost, manure, or other organic materials. Then level the top of the bed with the back of the rake. The sides should slope at a 45-degree angle. A lip of soil around the top edge of a new bed helps reduce erosion.
Grow More in Less Space with Less Work
Wide, deep, raised-bed planting has many practical advantages in addition to offering a better growing environment. Because of the high ratio of bed space to walking space, you can grow substantially more vegetables in substantially less space. Switching from “gardener-centered” to “plant-centered” spacing results in dramatic savings. Raised beds are also less work, because they’re easier to weed, water, and fertilize. And after the first year, weeding is almost a thing of the past.
Paths are narrower in a bed-based garden because they are used just for walking, not for wide cultivating machines. There are also fewer paths, because they do not occur between every row. In a traditional garden, the recommended spacing between rows is determined more by the needs of the cultivator than by the needs of the cultivar. In beds, most vegetables can be grown much closer together, resulting in a further saving of space.
Each of these beds takes up 4 square feet of garden space. But planted in a row, beets yield only about a dozen plants in this amount of space, whereas a staggered, wide-bed planting scheme yields more than three times that many.
Successful Crop-Rotation Practices
Succession Planting
1. Harvest your early crop and then turn over the soil, incorporating any remaining plant material. Add a little fertilizer, such as dehydrated manure, to the row.
2. Level off the soil, pulling your garden rake straight down the row.
3. Sprinkle the seeds in the row and then pat down the soil by hand. Bury the seeds with about four times their diameter of soil, then pat it down again.
4. Water the seeds and watch how quickly they come up during the warm summer months. Weed frequently to eliminate competition for the young plants.
Stagger Plantings for Better Control
Even in the smallest garden, an important technique for keeping the work manageable is to plant in dribs and drabs: Plant a little lettuce seed now and a little more two weeks later. Though you’ll want to plant some crops all at one time — like peppers or tomatoes — planting small batches of many crops is a good garden habit to cultivate. Whatever size garden you tend, you’ll find that staggering the planting spreads out the harvest, and much of the attention that plants need in between, too. Instead of having a 20-foot-long row of lettuce or beets to thin on a given day, you’ll have only a foot or two of seedlin
gs to thin. Cover with plastic soil that’s not yet planted to help it warm up, or cover it with grass clippings to keep it moist and suppress weeds. Or let the weeds germinate as a short-term cover crop and then slice them off before you plant your seeds.
Making a Garden Plan
A garden plan doesn’t have to be complex. In fact, it probably shouldn’t be, or it won’t get done in the first place. These drawings show a kitchen garden, first in early summer and then later when the fast-growing crops are replaced by succession plantings. Each plant is identified by a number.
Early Summer
Late Summer
Key to Plants
1. Beets
2. Bush beans
3. Carrots and radishes
4. Oregano
5. Carrots
6. Pak choi
7. Lettuce
8. Chives
9. Summer squash
10. Swiss chard
11. Broccoli
12. Onions
13. Savoy cabbage
14. Peppers
15. Parsley
16. Spinach
17. Arugula
18. Red orach
19. Cucumbers
20. Dill
21. Tomatoes
22. Basil
23. Marigolds
24. Potatoes
25. Peas
26. New Zealand spinach
Mid-May
Mid-July
Early September
Key to Plants
1. Spinach
2. Beets
3. Lettuce
4. Radishes
5. Celery
6. Garlic
7. Leeks
8. Parsley
9. Marigolds
10. Nasturtiums
11. Tomatoes
12. Peppers
13. Basil
14. Kale
A Small Garden, Through the Seasons
Whether your garden is large or small, a garden plan is important to its success. With succession planting, it can provide a steady supply of great-tasting vegetables from spring through late fall, with a few ornamental herbs and flowers adding good looks, too. The plans shown here are just a starting point; you can adapt them to grow the vegetables you and your family like most.
A New Way to Grow Vegetables
Many vegetable gardeners grow food for their families in the good soil of their backyards. But what if you don’t have a backyard? How can you keep the kitchen stocked with ripe tomatoes or fresh greens if all you’ve got is a patio, deck, or balcony?
What about a garden of containers? Gardeners have, after all, been growing flowers, herbs, and ornamental plants that way for ages. If you can grow pansies or petunias in a pot, why not peppers, peas, or pak choi? In some ways, gardening in containers is easier than gardening in the earth — the garden plots are small and simple to manage, plants are less likely to be bothered by diseases or pests, and there are almost no weeds. That’s the good news.
Compared to an earth garden, though, a traditional container garden requires frequent watering. Because vegetables tend to be larger plants that grow quickly, they need a lot of water and they need it all the time. The constant watering also creates another problem: All that water coursing through the container takes with it some of the soil’s water-soluble nutrients. As a result, container gardeners need to fertilize regularly.
Self-watering containers draw water up from below, which avoids the loss of nutrients traditional pots experience. The reservoir also supplies plants with consistent moisture; as long as the reservoir is kept full, the plants will have as much water as they need.
One solution is the self-watering container, which is different from a traditional one in that it doesn’t have a hole in the bottom. Instead, it has a reservoir for water and a wicking system to make that water available to plants on demand. The result is a constant supply of water for plants and no nutrient leaching. An additional benefit for cold-climate gardeners is that, because the soil in containers warms up quickly in the spring, heat-loving plants get off to an earlier start and grow more rapidly in self-watering containers than they do in the ground.
What to Grow?
Now, what to grow? And what size container to grow it in? Much of this will depend on the varieties of plants you choose. For instance, you can grow miniature ‘Micro Tom’ tomatoes in a window box or hanging planter, but you’ll need a large self-watering container with lots of soil capacity to grow a full-size ‘Brandywine’. Another consideration is how many containers you’ll be gardening in this season. If you’re starting with just one, you’ll be better off with a container with lots of soil space, so that you have room to grow a few different kinds of plants if you choose to.
Best of the Bunch
Conventional gardening wisdom tells us that although you can grow vegetables in containers, they won’t grow nearly as well as they would if they were in the ground. This conventional wisdom is not always true. In fact, many vegetables actually grow better in self-watering containers than they do in the ground. Often these are vegetables that, in addition to thriving on the consistent moisture a self-watering container offers, grow better in the warmer soil of a container or enjoy the lack of competition from weeds and other plants.
basil
broccoli
Brussels sprouts
bush beans
cabbage
cauliflower
chard
eggplant
lettuces
onions
pak choi
peppers
tomatoes
Incredible Edible Flowers
What would a garden be without flowers? Well, if you’re planting a food garden, you’ll probably want flowers you can eat! Edible flowers bring a spot of color and spice to the menu, in addition to dressing up the garden.
Bachelor’s button (Centaurea cyanus)
Also known as cornflower, and sometimes listed in catalogs under its botanical name, bachelor’s button has flowers that are often used as a garnish in salads and desserts. Butterflies and many pollinating insects are attracted to them. Deadhead regularly to keep the plant producing.
Calendula (Calendula officinalis)
This large, daisylike flower adds a boost of color to any container combination. It also provides tasty petals for a garnish in salads or with cooked vegetables.
Dianthus (Dianthus barbatus)
Sometimes known as sweet William, sometimes as “pinks” (though its flowers come in many other colors, too), dianthus provides colorful and spicy petals whose scent and taste are somewhat clovelike.
Marigold (Tagetes tenuifolia)
Not all marigolds are meant to be eaten. The ones you want in your dinner are called gem marigolds or signet marigolds. The other varieties are edible but don’t taste good.
Nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus)
Like any other edible flower, the fragrant blossoms of nasturtium can be added to salads or used as a garnish. That’s easy enough. They also make a tasty appetizer when stuffed with cream cheese (this is also a good way to eat squash blossoms, by the way). Most vegetable gardeners know that the leaves are a special, spicy addition to mesclun mixes, especially when harvested on the small side (silver-dollar size).
But wait! There’s more. The seeds are edible. Don’t rush out and start opening seed packets for dinner, though. What you’re after are fresh, green nasturtium seeds, harvested right from the plant. Wait until the blooms have faded, then harvest the fruit that remains behind. The fruit is made up of three compartments, each of which contains a seed; separate the compartments as you harvest them.
To pickle the seeds, bring them to a boil in vinegar with salt, peppercorns, and a bay leaf and then store them (after cooling) in a clean jar in the refrigerator. Use the pickled seeds in place of capers.
Sunflower (Helianthus annuus)
This is edible at several stages. The immature buds are edible steamed or sautéed. If you eat the buds, th
ough, you don’t get the flowers, the petals of which add a tangy taste to salads, soups, and cooked summer vegetables. If you eat the flowers, you don’t get the seeds, which are a well-known and well-liked snack.
Harvest buds before the flowers start to open. Harvest petals by pulling them from the flowers. If you don’t want to share the seeds with birds and squirrels, cover the flowers with paper bags until the seeds are plump and move a bit when you wiggle them.
Violas (Viola spp.)
This is a catchall name for a whole bunch of related flowers: pansies, horned violets, tufted pansies, and Johnny-jump-ups. There’s not a flower in the garden that is more likely to put a smile on your face.
Cool- and Warm-Season Vegetables
The Backyard Homestead Page 2