How do I plant a garden?
I hear this all the time. And every time I hear, “I’d love
to plant a garden but I can’t” or, “I just don’t know how to plant a garden”
it’s hard for me to stay quiet. I know sometimes I take for granted how
overwhelming it can feel to try and plant a garden the first time, just
remember we were planting gardens long before written words and internet
access.
So when a friend of mine here in Rhode Island said she’d
love to have a garden I decided to kill two birds with one stone, put in a
garden and take enough pictures to help others do it for themselves.
How do I pick a spot for a garden?
First the garden needs to get as much sun as possible, with
a minimum of 6 hours. I prefer the garden to run from north to south, just
because it allows me to put the tall stuff (corn, tomatoes, peppers, etc.) on
the north end and not shade out the short stuff on the south end (spinach,
lettuce, cilantro, etc.) In the picture above I’m standing on the south end of
the bed and we’d already started to dig the turf out.
Next choose your spot and start getting rid of the
grass/turf inside your designated space. I have had good luck with 4’ by 12’
beds, but there is no “right size”, only the size right for you and your
garden. 4’ – 5’ is about the widest you can go, since you’re not going to walk
in the bed itself, that’s about as wide as you can work without being a
contortionist.
In my original beds I spent a gob of money on redwood boards
and galvanized brackets to hold everything together perfectly. On my second set
of raised beds I used scavenged concrete blocks. On this project I didn’t even
bother with sides and still it seemed to work out fine. Gardens are primarily
about quality food, followed by return on investment, and finally trying not to
upset the neighbors with something from the Beverly Hillbillies.
The grass sod that we scraped off the top is the beginning
of the compost pile for my neophyte gardener friend. The grass needs to be
removed so that your garden plants won’t be competing with it. If you think
about it in advance and put cardboard down for a few weeks, it really does make
the project easier. We did not, but we lived to tell the tale regardless. Put
every kitchen scrap (save meat), along with coffee grounds, leaves, cut grass
and all the shredded paper you can find on your compost pile. Water it from
time to time and will give your garden health and fertility. I’ll put up
another post on how to build your compost pile.
My soil isn’t healthy enough to grow a garden…
That’s the next thing I hear, “I’d love to grow a garden,
but – my soil is crap, it’s too rocky in my back yard” yada yada. My solution
to just about every problem you may have? Compost. It really is the elixir of
life for the first couple of years of gardening. To still an old Martin
Lawrence bit, it’s like ‘Tussin for your garden, whatever the problem is put a
little compost on it.
I picked up a cubic yard that at the RI dump for $30. (Yes,
I think the state really does just have one landfill…) The quality of the
compost for a garden may have been questionable, due to the rubber glove,
roofing shingle, and large pieces of wood that we found while moving it. I’ll
let you know in a later post it was radioactive or not...
OK, so now we have a spot picked out for the garden, we’ve
removed the layer of topsoil that has the grass/grass roots in it. What now?
Now my friend, if you do not have a tiller to do this for you, you dig.
Dig! Dig like the wind grandmother!
Beggars can’t be choosers, and since my friend was trying to
do this on the smallest budget possible, we dug with the only shovels available
for free, as you can see above. The flat nose did a great job on the sod, but
as we tried to dig down into the actual ground the lack of a long handle took a
toll on my middle aged back… And pride.
We dug down about a foot and put all of that dirt in a pile
next to our future bountiful garden. Next since the back yard was inaccessible
to my truck we threw the compost from the bed of the truck into a wheel barrow.
This wasn’t your normal size wheel barrow mind you, but one
that had escaped from the kid’s section at Benny’s (a local hardware chain in
Rhode Island). We spent the next couple of hours moving the compost to the hole
and mixing it back in with the soil we had just taken out.
FYI – this is a one-time deal. After the first dig you’ll
simply put a couple of inches of compost on your raised bed (4”-8” depending on
how much the garden sank at the end of the year. My goal with my raised beds is
to only till the soil once.
Note the kiddie wheel barrow
in the background….
When you’re finished recombining the soil and compost your
bed should look something like this:
You can see the future compost pile in the
background.
Finally comes the planting.
You want to grow the things that you love to each. Not what
you’re supposed to eat, or think you should eat, but things you really enjoy
eating. Otherwise you’ll be checking for unlocked cars at the mall and slipping
in kilos of Zucchinis in the ones you find unlocked…
For this garden we put in cold loving cauliflower, broccoli,
Swiss chard, peas, a Mesclun blend, Black Seeded Simpson lettuce, cabbage,
kohlrabi, rosemary, basil and Thai basil (doesn’t love cold, but it’ll be covered
if it gets close to freezing), oregano, and sage,. Later as the weather gets
warmer tomatoes, peppers, squash, and a variety of other plants will be added.
The how deep to plant guidelines are on the back of each packet of seeds. If
you’re unsure how to plant your started plants, generally if you plant level
with where the plant is you’ll be fine.
Remember to chart out where each plant was planted.
Otherwise in a few weeks you’ll be really confused as to what is a plant you
want and what’s not.
We planted the starts in traditional, if cramped rows, and
the lettuces in the square foot gardening style. I did my best to cover, scrape
up the soil around the garden to create a walking path and beat back the grass
growth a bit.
As the garden progresses and the plants get bigger I use two
strategies to combat weeds and make the garden as low maintenance as possible.
I use the square foot method to ensure my production growth is as thick as
possible to choke out undesirable plants, and around plants such as tomatoes
and peppers I use recycled newspaper (the regular, not the slick). I place it
on top of the bare soil and then put grass clippings on top of the newspaper.
This does several things for my beds, it disallows unwanted plants access to
sun – and thus less weeding, it decreases how much water I need to use, and it
gives my red wigglers and other worms all types of organic material to break
down. The one downside I’ve had is it also gives slugs a place to hide out
during the day, but nothing a couple of ducks won’t take care of for you! Back
to the circle of life! I’ve also used blocks of alfalfa hay that had gone bad
with the same affect.
The final step is to water in your garden. Be like
Goldilocks here, not too wet, and not too dry. You don’t want puddles or
runoff, but you do want everything to be moist.
All in all about $80 was spent on seeds, starts, and soil.
I’ll post later on lessons learned, ROI, and things that could have made this
easier.
As always if you have questions or comments post them below!
