Starting From Scratch

Kathy of Skippy’s Vegetable Garden recently made a post about starting a vegetable garden.  After lots of great ideas, down at the bottom is a survey asking how many of her readers are starting a new vegetable garden this year.  As of the time of my making this post, 58 people had responded to the survey, and 45% said they plan to start a new garden this year.  Wow!  That’s a huge percentage.

I know that Kathy and I have many of the same people reading our blogs, and to think so many of you may be starting new gardens is really amazing.  I hope a lot of you also join the world of blogging and start your own blogs, it would be great to have the company!

This is always the time of year when the number of people reading this blog increases.  The number of unique readers is now in excess of 10,000 per month, roughly double that of last year at this same time.  This number includes people who visit via search engines and aggregation services like Bloglines and Google Blogs, and excludes most spammers and robots.  It’s my own estimate, based on my own analysis, mostly counting by hand with the help of some computer programs.  It’s just an estimate!  For those of you who want to compare your traffic with mine, the number of visits from unique IP addresses is roughly twice this figure.

If you think about it, if there are 10,000 of you reading this and anything close to 45% of you are starting a new garden, that’s thousands of new gardens this year, possibly hundreds or thousands of new gardening blogs coming online in the next few months.  This is nothing short of a revolution!

Advice for Starting a New Garden

If you ask 100 gardeners for advice on something, you will surely get 100 different answers.  Here is my advice for starting a new garden:

Test your soil: If you live in the US or Canada this is probably easier than for most people living in other areas, but if you have access to a lab who can test your soil it’s a good idea to have it done.  If you live in or near a city, the chances of ground contamination is high, and you should know this before you start.  A soil test can also give you an idea of what problems exist in your ground.  If you don’t have a lab that can test your soil, you can tell a lot by taking an inventory of your weeds and researching the conditions they do well in.  I made a post about this before. There are a few books around on the subject, and a little information available on the Internet.  You can also simply watch your plants as they grow, and look for signs of deficiencies as they grow.  Once you understand what your soil may be lacking, then you can decide what to do about it.  At the very least, I would suggest testing the pH of your garden, and many simple and cheap kits are available in garden centers for doing this.

Add lime as necessary: If after testing your soil, you discover it’s too acidic, then add lime to your garden according to the label instructions.  Most plants prefer a pH between 5.5-6.0, but many have other needs.  Fruit trees generally needs more alkaline ground, and blueberries like it more acidic for example.  Do this in early spring.

Avoid unnecessary inputs: Just as important as what you do to prepare your garden, is what you don’t do.  At best these can be a waste of money, at worst they can cause long term damage to the natural systems in your garden.  We live in a world where places like garden centers make money by selling you things, and this promotion can carry over in the form of advice from friends or others on the Internet.  In most cases your garden will need few, if any, inputs.  You will have a healthier and more productive garden in the long run if you don’t get trapped into the mindset of needing a box of this or a bottle of that every time you suspect a potential problem with your garden.  These are like feeding your plants vitamin pills.  Importing unnecessary topsoil or peat moss products, generally doesn’t accomplish very much either, unless your own topsoil is unusually poor.  Many cities around the world have compost available made from organic waste, and this is a much better alternative to peat products and is often available free for the taking or at low cost, although this can sometimes contain pieces of trash that have to be picked out by hand.  Most gardeners don’t need to do anything but recycle their waste by making compost, and putting this back into the garden.

Avoid fresh manure: This is often a cultural thing, more common outside of North America.  Fresh manure can cause a lot of problems.  It contains a lot of soluble nitrogen, that is just too strong for most plants.  It can kill small seedlings, and cause a wide range of diseases in others.  It can also cause long term nutrient imbalances.  Alliums (onion and garlic related) are particularly sensitive to manure.  If you use manure at all, it needs to be well aged (2+ years) or properly composted.  In order to compost properly, you need to mix it with a vast amount of high carbon material like straw, making it impractical for most people to do on a large scale.  If your compost smells like ammonia, it has too much manure in it, and needs to be stirred and sit longer before using.  Manure coming from industrial farmers is often highly contaminated with antibiotics, hormones and other chemicals and can contain E-Coli, salmonella and other dangerous diseases.  There was a serious problem with contaminated manure last year in Northern Europe.  If you use manure, know the animals it came from!  If you must use manure, horse manure is usually considered a better choice over cow manure.

Use Only Organic Fertilizers: If you use fertilizer at all, and many people simply don’t need it, use only organic.  The best fertilizers are those you make yourself, for example compost tea or tea made with green plants.  These often work best when sprayed on the plants to be fertilized, as they can often be absorbed through the leaves.  If you want to purchase a fertilizer, consider something like fish emulsion, kelp extracts or similar products made from natural sources.  Products like blood/bone meal or chemical fertilizers are almost always products of industrial farming, too strong for a home garden, and can have many of the same problems as fresh manure.  Home made fertilizers or those similar to fish emulsion or kelp extracts can simply be applied in moderation as needed, while others need to be carefully managed and applied during certain times of the year.

Over use of fertilizers can create a sort of dependence on them, because it creates an expectation that your plants should be big and green, and can cause long term nutrient imbalances in the ground leading to the perception that more fertilizer is needed.  It’s better to play it safe, not use any at all, then only use small amounts when you are certain they are needed.  Fertilizers are of no benefit, unless there is something missing from your garden soil in the first place.

Plan rotations: In order to avoid pests, diseases and maintain nutrient balances, you need to rotate your crops.  In order to maintain nitrogen levels in your garden you need to grow peas/beans or similar nitrogen fixing plants from time to time, perhaps in the form of a cover crop.

Make a planting plan: Make a list of what you’re going to plant and when.  Know what needs to be started indoors, and when it can go out into the garden.  Baker Creek publishes a good guide with general gardening advice.

Grass and Soil Compaction

One of the most difficult problems for the beginning gardener is getting rid of grass!  More than anything else, this can lead to long term discouragement and problems.  The problem is often not the grass itself, but the weeds hiding in the grass.  For the organic gardener, this just takes time.

Using mechanical methods for removing grass almost never work.  Digging with a spade, will always leave pieces of roots that will simply regrow within a few months.  Using a rototiller on fresh grass is simply a recipe for disaster, as all it will do is break the grass and weeds into tiny pieces which will regrow and thrive in the newly loosened ground you’ve just provided for them.  So called ‘sod-cutters’ may be great if you own a business selling sod, but for the home gardener they won’t work.  All sod cutters will do is strip the top of the grass off, and leave pieces of roots in the ground below.

If you prepare your garden with one of these mechanical methods, then put your plants in, the grass will come up with your plants and it will be much harder to deal with at that point.  In this way, you can easily be left with a lingering problem that lasts for years and is a tremendous amount of work to deal with.

Building raised beds on top of grass won’t work either, unless they are at least 1 foot (30 cm) high.  Grass and weeds will simply grow through the raised bed otherwise.

Getting rid of grass is never problem free, but the best way to approach the problem is by smothering the grass.  The so-called lasagna or sheet mulching method, involves putting down a layer of cardboard or several layers of newspaper, then covering this with ordinary dirt or compost.  Then seeds can be planted in the ground above, and the roots will penetrate the cardboard layer while the grass below dies.  Beans are a good choice as a first crop, because they will help replenish the soil.  If you use this method, you will still probably have problems with soil compaction.

Another good way to prepare your garden is to cover the grass with black plastic mulch or 1 foot (30 cm) of high carbon mulch like straw or wood chips for 6 months, preferably this will include the spring months.  Then after you remove the plastic or mulch the grass and weeds will be mostly dead.  At this point, you can dig or till the ground if it needs to be loosened or build a raised bed on top.

A last method of getting rid of grass is the ‘lazy-bed’ method of growing potatoes, which originated in Ireland.  I described this in a previous post.

Raised Bed Tips

Many people prefer raised beds, but there are some important things to keep in mind if you are considering one:

Don’t use treated wood: Many garden centers don’t properly label their wood, and it’s easy to buy treated wood by mistake.  While there is some debate over how dangerous treated wood really is, for sure if you are an organic gardener you won’t want to grow your vegetables with these chemicals.  Special wood is available that is naturally rot resistant, or you can use ordinary wood but will need to replace it every few years.  The usual advice is that if you are now using treated wood, don’t panic, but when you are ready to replace it use another kind of wood.

Consider alternatives to a wood border: Many materials can be used to build a raised be border.  Consider using something recycled, like old paving stones.  This is what I use for my raised beds.  Another option is so called ‘borderless raised beds‘.   In fact a raised bed doesn’t have to be raised at all and can simply be a spot in the garden.  The important thing is you must never step on the ground, and it must be narrow enough so you can comfortably reach all spots from one side or the other.

Raised beds that are raised, do have the advantage that you don’t have to bend over so far to reach your plants.  In fact, many handicapped accessible gardens are built with high beds for just this reason.

If you are going to build raised beds, with a constructed border and have the intention to allow them to truly sit off the ground, consider just building the frames at first, not adding anything, simply loosening the soil inside by digging it a bit and plant straight into this.  Another possibility is to kill existing grass using the lasagna method explained above, directly into the bottom of the raised bed.  Over the years you can add home made compost to bring the level up to the top of the frame.  If you feel the need to fill the frames right away, consider using recycled waste compost from your city.

Choose the Right Seeds!

If you intend at some point to save your own seeds, make sure you don’t start your garden with commercial varieties, or you won’t be able to save seeds from these plants.  If you must buy your seeds from a store, have a look at the links in the link section of this blog off the front page.  Better yet, have a look at the Blogger Seed Network!