Fresh from the garden

[Hijinks]

How hard is your soil? That could explain why lots of your stuff didn't do well.

I'm not really sure how "hard" it is. The previous tenant hadn't planted anything, and there was one rose bush that had long since gone into hibernation and never came out, and the rest of the beds were all weeds. I spent several weekends digging through the beds with a fork and spade, on my hands and knees (and as someone with major back problems, it wasn't easy). In the flower beds, I mixed horse manure that my dad gave me with the dirt, then planted the seeds. Some seeds I tried just putting loosely on top with a very thin covering of soil, and other seeds I planted an inch or so deep. Nothing came up. In the front beds of my house, it's very shady, so I didn't have much hope there. I tried impatiens because everyone said those are a "shade" plant, but didn't see anything. Of course, I might have drowned those by overwatering.

I thought the soil, once I got rid of all of the weeds and turned it up with a fork, looked nice and dark and meaty. In the veggie garden I didn't want to put manure on stuff I was gonna eat, so that's why I mixed in garden soil I got at the store along with a vegetable fertilizer. Maybe I needed more garden soil - I could only afford one bag and spread it out into about a four feet section.

Maybe my vegetable plants are too close together? I planted all the veggies within that 4 feet. Maybe they got too much sun and not enough water, too. I dunno Maybe I will try pots next year, but those big planters are sooo expensive for someone on a tight budget.

 

[jaerdaph]

I went upstate to visit my parents this weekend and fresh garden veggies was definitely one of the highlights.

 

[Fenris]

Our garden needs to get going, but the strawberries have come in like gamg busters. We also just had our first crop of super juicy and delicious peaches. The limes, lemons and oranges are on their way.

One warning if you want to grow zucchini. You don't grow it for you, you grow it for your whole neighborhood

 

[Pielorinho]

Hijinks, I'm sorry to hear your garden's not working so well. It does sound to me as if the watering and the weeding might be the two biggest culprits.

Here would be my advice on these issues:
1) WATERING: If you want to try again and you can afford ten bucks, buy a soaker hose. This is a fantastic invention: it's a porous hose that you lay on the ground along the base of your plants and hook up to a regular hose. WHen you turn the faucet on, water seeps out of the soaker hose directly onto the roots of the plants. Leave it on for twenty minutes or so (more if your soaker hose is reluctant to seep).

A good guideline for when your soil needs watering is when you can't gather a handful of soil in a fist, open your fist, and have a semi-coherent lump of dirt in your hand. If it falls apart immediately like dust, you need to water. If it holds together like mud, don't water so much. If it's crumbly but coherent, you're good.

Another guideline: if you're not using a soaker hose, a pool of water on the surface should take between ten and fifteen seconds to sink into the dirt. Less than that, and you need to water more.

Young plants are really delicate, and need to be watered sometimes every day. When they're older, their roots go deeper and they're more resilient.

2) WEEDING: Be a total spaz for the first couple weeks, checking the garden a couple times a day to see what's coming up. If you plant in rows, you should be able to recognize your plants from invader monsters by the fact that yours will be in neat rows. Keep an eye on yours, maybe describe what they look like to yourself (especially if you're really verbal), and weed the others. Once your plants get going, they'll need a lot less weeding.

As for soil, you really can't add too much compost to a garden. When we started ours off, we spent about twenty or thirty bucks on soil, which bought us about 400 lbs. of cow manure, chicken manure, and compost down at Lowe's. This was for about 60-80 square feet, allowing us to spread it on to a thickness of about six inches deep. Compost and composted manure make clay soil drain water better, make sandy soil hold water better, make acidic soils more basic, make basic soils more acidic, contain trace nutrients and base nutrients in approximately the proportions necessary for plant life, and encourage earthworms (who are like your little garden serfs over whom you rule with a mighty fist) to move in. Don't worry about putting composted manure on your garden: it's not going to hurt you, and indeed if you eat storebought vegetables you're subjecting yourself to far worse (although admittedly remote) risk of disease.

Finally, although peas definitely need tall things to grow on (we give ours a 6' bamboo pyramid we bought at K-Mart as climbing material), don't worry too much about their withering: peas, while delectable, can't stand heat, and die off with the first suns of summer if not before.

Daniel

 

[RedWick]

I'm doing up my own garden this year and I'm having a blast.