Growing Your Own Vegetables: An Encyclopedia of Country Living Guide (2 page)

Most vegetables are about 85 to 90 percent water and require generous and faithful watering throughout the season. The best time to water is in the morning. Plants do most of their growing during the day and need water for photosynthesis. Watering in the morning also allows plants to dry out by evening, which reduces the chance of mildew and rot. Almost all vegetables produce better with abundant water; once stunted by drought, many vegetables will not recover. Count on providing about an inch of water a week from nature or your irrigation system. Hook up your water system or drag a hose out into your proposed garden space to verify its range and confirm that you have both water and sunshine!

Know your irrigation system: how fast water is delivered and how fast the soil can absorb it. Surface runoff, puddling, and evaporation are wasteful. In situations where the land is too wet, you may have to design a ditching system to take water off or a levee system to keep it out. Vegetables will not grow under poor drainage conditions. Know your garden and watch the weather, working with it and not against it.

PLOT SIZE AND SHAPE

Gardeners fortunate enough to have plenty of land and time can make their plots any size they wish, limited only by the number of people to be fed and what they like to eat. However, most people have space constraints or are limited by the amount of time they have to maintain a big garden. Gardens can be any shape—a formal four-square, an irregular plot, or a series of smaller beds or containers that can be tucked into even the smallest landscape.

Beginning and/or container garden

The following crops are suitable for a beginning gardener with a small garden or several large containers. This garden will produce many months of good fresh food, beginning with lettuces and green onions in spring followed by a continuous harvest of the other vegetables through summer until frost.

◗ Bush beans

◗ Bush peas

◗ Leaf lettuce

◗ Onions from sets

◗ Summer squash

◗ Swiss chard (no spinach)

◗ Tomatoes (climate permitting)

Experienced gardener with a small garden

Practiced gardeners with a year or so under their belts may want to expand their crops and their delicious harvests to include a wider range of root crops and longer-season vegetables, as well as some novelties thrown in for fun.
Choose compact varieties wherever possible.

◗ Beans, bush and pole

◗ Brussels sprouts

◗ Cabbage

◗ Carrots

◗ Corn, sweet

◗ Cucumbers

◗ Hearty greens

◗ Herbs

◗ Kale

◗ Onions, green and bulbing

◗ Peas

◗ Peppers

◗ Popcorn, dwarf

◗ Potatoes

◗ Radishes (red/white)

◗ Salad garden, including lettuces

◗ Tomatoes

WARM-SEASON VERSUS COOL-SEASON PLANTS

When planning crops, take your climate into consideration. Tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, melons, and cucumbers are warm-season crops that simply won’t grow well until the days are hot. They are injured or killed by frost, and their seeds won’t come to life in cold soil. On the other hand, cool-season crops like lettuce, spinach, carrots, and broccoli thrive in wet, chilly spring weather, producing flowers and seeds when the weather turns hot. Cool-season plants generally produce a crop of leaves, roots, or stems, while most warm-season crops produce seeded fruits. (See also the appendix on page 167 for more information.)

Gardening in the Deep South

The extreme heat and humidity of summer in the south can make gardening a real challenge. Smart southern gardeners plan their crops to mature in the more moderate temperatures of fall, winter, and spring, save for the following truly heat-tolerant vegetables:

◗ Beans, runner

◗ Chard

◗ Collards

◗ Corn

◗ Eggplant

◗ Jicama

◗ Melon

◗ Okra

◗ Peas, pigeon and southern

◗ Peppers

◗ Squash

◗ Sweet potatoes

◗ Tomatoes

PERENNIALS

Perennials are plants that come back all by themselves year after year. It’s wonderful to be able to go out and harvest without having to plant every year! Rhubarb, asparagus, Jerusalem artichokes, fruit and nut trees, berry bushes and strawberries, certain onions, garlic, and many herbs are perennials. When planting perennials, it’s important to place them at the edge of the garden or identify an orchard or berry patch, so that when you work the soil each spring you can do so without harming permanent plantings.

GARDEN RECORD KEEPING

Your first garden is the hardest one to plan because everything is theoretical. To plan subsequent gardens, simply adapt the plan used in the previous year, making changes based on what you have learned. It helps to keep weekly notes on a big calendar with plenty of space to write. Keep your records going all summer, even during the busy growing and harvesting months; if you wait until winter to think about lessons learned from the previous summer, you may forget an important note for the coming year. In fact, it helps to do a preliminary plan of your next year’s garden each fall while the current growing season is still fresh in your mind.

Your garden records become a valuable tool and offer perspective as you discover that no two gardening years are alike. Weather changes, pest populations fluctuate; even your choice of what to grow will vary. After two or three seasons you will begin to see patterns emerge, and over time you’ll grow to understand the conditions unique to your garden.

Sample Garden Record

1. Varieties planted

2. How much seed you used and how much garden space you were able to plant with it

3. Problems encountered—poor germination, insects, disease, bad weather

4. When you began to harvest

5. The yield from each crop

6. Any changes to be made

TEN SECRETS TO GETTING THE MOST FROM A SMALL GARDEN

1. Make use of semishaded areas unsuitable for tomatoes, squash, or melons by growing leafy vegetables like lettuce, chard, mustard, or endive.

2. Make room for herbs, which contribute a broad range of flavors and variety in a relatively limited growing area.

3. Avoid sprawling varieties. You can plant six rows of carrots, beets, or onions in the same square footage occupied by one row of squash vines; choose compact, “bush” varieties of melons, squash, cucumbers, and pumpkins.

4. Consider planting fast-maturing vegetables in the space between slower-maturing ones that will later spread; for instance, plant radishes or lettuce between vine plants like squash or pumpkin for a quick crop before the neighboring plants need the space.

5. Give preference to continuously bearing vegetables. You can continue to harvest chard throughout the growing season long after spinach has gone to seed with the onset of hot weather. Other continuously bearing crops are beans, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cucumber, eggplant, kale, peppers, squash, and tomatoes.

6. Double cropping will give you the greatest productivity per square foot when you plant another crop as soon as you’ve harvested the previous one, keeping your garden in constant production. Double cropping is most effective with a long growing season, but in most places peas, lettuce, radishes, beets, and carrots mature quickly enough that you have time for a second crop if you plant as soon as the first is harvested.

7. Harvest daily to maximize your garden’s production. Many plants—such as beans, broccoli, chard, cucumbers, and summer squash—will stop producing if the plants aren’t kept picked.

8. Encourage your garden to grow up rather than out by taking advantage of vertical growing space; train vines on supports to free the space at their feet for other crops.

9. Plant tall crops, such as corn or sunflowers, on the north end of the garden so they don’t shade other plants.

10. Practice deep watering, which will encourage roots to go down rather than spreading sideways, allowing you to space plants closer together.

GARDEN LAYOUT

I
t’s time to plant the garden—or more accurately, it’s time to plan how to arrange the plants in the garden space. Path placement should take into account not only access to and movement around the garden but also adequate width to allow back-saving wheelbarrow access and power tool maneuvering. Consider whether you will be planting in rows or establishing raised beds. In a sloping garden, it’s a good idea to create raised beds with shallow retaining walls to prevent soil erosion. The loss of topsoil to erosion is an irreversible tragedy; it takes nature thousands of years to restore fertile conditions. If you garden or farm on a slope or in an exposed windy location, you can help prevent erosion by using summer mulches, winter cover crops, and grass planted in strips across slopes, as well as strategically placed diversion ditches to direct water flow.