Help me start a garden!
 

Ok spring has spung and aside from growing some radishes last year I have zero gardening/farming experience. Only about 1/4 of the radishes I planted bloomed, all I did was water them however and was on vacation for 9 days and they were left to whatever happened by.

I live in the city/suburbs so I'm looking at a max of about 50'x20' of space... just regular old yard...

What should I do? Where do I start? I'm in NW Indiana.

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

take potatoes out of cupboard, the old ones with roots growing out, put them on the ground, cover with dirt. water frequently at first, occasionally thereafter. dig in dirt for potatoes before first frost. that is a good way to get started.

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

This is a very good book on the subject:

by Steve Solomon

He also has a great, resourceful website:

http://www.soilandhealth.org

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

Till the soil. (Take a spade and piece by piece turn it over so the wet soil is on the top and the dry former top is now on the bottom. Try to break apart large clumps of soil)

Hoe the soil (Take a hoe and beat the large clumps into small slumps. Loosen the soil so you can dig it easily with your hand.)

Plant (potatoes sound good, tomato sprouts are probably available at your local garden center. Zucchini grow well in your area.)

Water (initially, then wait for rain, and perhaps water on your own, depending on how the plants looks)

Harvest

Oh, wait, you need a fence too.

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

50x20 is a big area to start with.

I started by getting all the turf up (lotta work manually!) , doubling digging (google it) down to about 18 inches while removing most of the rocks bigger than a grape (I had wheelbarrows full of them froma small area , but my area is named after rocks so it wasn't surprising I guess) and adding lots of compost and peat moss and vermiculite. I laid some 2x10's with a brick underneath every few feet to support them so as to have a place to get in among the plants without compacting the soil all the time. This is a square foot gardening type setup I have as opposed to rows.

You may probably be too late for your zone to start a lot of stuff from seed (like tomatoes, peppers,broccoli, cauliflower and the like that have long payoffs) so you can buy some plants and put them in maybe.

Might be pushing it too with the Spring type crops I'd guess (like peas, lettuce, spinach etc.) if your summers come early.
I'd shoot for a big batch of summer crops - zucchini, peppers, tomatoes, eggplant from plantings; and corn , beans cukes from seed. And stuff which you can plant from seed through the season like beets, carrots, chard.
And get the garden ready for a fall planting of greens etc.
Just thinking out loud.
Good luck- I'm putting my summer crop stuff in this weekend too. Except the eggplant , I wait another couple weeks on them. Cusp of zone 5/6

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

I don't know how to grow stuff either, but I just built two 8 foot by 4 foot raised bed gardens (google "raised bed garden" and "square foot gardening"), and I've transplanted my seedlings into it. I started them from organic seed a few weeks ago. RBG / SFG is supposed to be an intensive, high yield, type of gardening well suited to urban settings.

I'm growing tomato, okra, bell pepper, poblano pepper, jalepeno pepper, and some herbs. These are all said to be easy to grow. If I'm successful with my first attempts, I may branch out next season and grow some eggplant, summer squash, winter squash, etc. I'd like to grow onion, garlic, carrot, potato, but I'm not sure if those crops are well-suited to RBG / SFG. Would love to grow some snap beans too. This is a process of experimentation and education for me.

I bought a 30qt pressure canner, a canning book and other equipment, jars and lids, and I plan to can the tomatos and okra that I don't immediately eat. I may pickle the jalepenos. I'll probably dehydrate the other peppers.

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

I have some redneck potatoes buried under a short stack of tires.
Was told to add dirt and more tires as soon as foliage starts to show, continue adding tires, dirt and water until fall, kick the stack over before freeze up and gather up potatoes.
I expect to at least get more potatoes than I started with. I will report back in the fall.

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

These two books helped me tremendously.

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

Where I live, down south here in NC, potatoes don't make it to the fall. Once the hot summer hits, they are done. Sometime after they flower and about the time they start not looking so good, is the time to take them. You being in Alaska, well.. your milage may vary. Maybe you can grow them all summer?

I like your tire plan very much.

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

soil prep, soil prep, soil prep. The rest just about takes care of itself.

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/organic/
informative forum

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

I'm gonna have to go with the square-foot gardenind myself, especially with a limited space like that.

I have 3 gardens set up of 4'x 4' which gives me a total of 48 squares and each square can have a different crop. It's also VERY easy to set up and learn...

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

Agree, just finished reading it. Very good.

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

My first garden I prepared 2 feet by 6 feet and got an amazing amount of food. My tomato was vertical mostly in its oversized cage, and in that climate in a kind of sheltered spot I still had some in early Dec, a summer squash grew leaves out of the bed, it was a bush yellow variety, meaning somewhat more compact - squash to eat every day for months. Cukes also vertical and even cantaloupe, though i had to make a sling for almost ripe fruit. Earlier when it was too cool for the summer stuff I had sugar snaps in tall cages, some carrots and lettuce in the same spaces.

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

I'm in central Indiana and swear by lasagna gardening, do a yahoo search for it and start saving newspaper and lawn clippings.


Brett

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

I would start by purchasing a tiller. 1,000 square feet is a lot of hand digging.
Rear tine tillers seem to be the most sought after and are easier to operate but a front tine tiller will work fine. No less than 5 horse power. If you know of a good small engine shop ask them about a used one. Often times these shops pick up inoperable equipment and repair it for resale. I bought a used tiller 20 years ago for $125 and am still using it. Since you only run it a few hours per year they last forever if you take care of it. [don't leave it out in the rain]

If it ever gets dry enough, till the garden space. Let it dry some and till it again. You might also till in some fertilizer while you're at it. If you till when it is wet you will have lots of large hard chunks of dirt. I plant in traditional rows. Leave 18 to 24 inches between rows.

The following things grow pretty good with a minimum of care and skill. Green beans, tomato plants, radishes, cucumbers, zuchini, spinach, green peppers. I've never had much luck with melons of any kind but this may be due to my soil. I live about 100 miles south of you and have a lot of clay. I imagine you have pretty good soil in the NW part of the state.

I'm surprised you had problems with radishes as they usually take care of themselves and are ready to harvest in 6 weeks. Don't plant them to deep, maybe just a half inch.

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

Thats the max size of my gardening area, I was just throwing it out there as teh area I have to work with, I don't have to do it all and honestly, I'm not buying a tiller. Low costs here.

Might be part of the problem, I had them down about 1 to 1.5 inches.

Thanks for all the ideas, I'll have to come up with something soon.

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

Pound for pound, and hour for hour, I think your best bet is some raised beds and tire potatos as many have mentioned. Start with easy produce such as onions, radish (by the seed tapes if you can), lettuce and tomato. Plant a crop every 3rd week and you will have fresh salad all summer and it will be a good training/learning time. As your knowlege grows, expand and experiment.

Oh, and don't feed your plants.......feed your soil.

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

Potatoes also grow great in leaves.

In the fall when all your idiot neighbors rake to the curb or bag up their leaves for municipal collection, beat the truck to the punch and get them. Make rounds of concrete re-inforcement wire, or any type of good, stiff fence wire, about 4-6' in diameter and dump the leaves in the rounds, 3'-4' deep. About late Fed or early March, remove a foot of leaves, lay your cut seed potato pieces on the remaining leaves in the wire rounds, and replace the foot you took off. The potatoes will sprout and spread like mad in the 1/2 rotted leaves....they love the loose material to grow in, and you have no weeding to to at all.

You can harvest small, almost skinless "new" potatoes anytime after they flower, or wait for the tops to die back in late summer/early fall, and remove your wire rounds, and harvest your crop of larger potatoes with more mature skins on them. Take the leftover leaves which will now be fairly rotted down, till them into your other garden space, great source of organic matter, then get more fall leaves to repeat for next spring. Around here, if I come thru town in the fall, I can come home with a pickup truck full of nicely bagged leaves by simply stopping and picking them up at the curbs.

Hint about planting: When you cut the seed potatoes, leaving one or two "eye" sprouts will result in less, but larger potatoes.....leaving more eyes will result in more potatoes, but smaller ones.

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

Andy, awful nice of your neighbors to bag all of those leaves up for you. Everyone around here rakes up leaves and burns them. I just let them lay, the way my property is layed out. Nice ground cover, and I can hear anyone or anything approaching my house at night. Sometimes it sounds like someone walking through the leaves, and it's only a bird, or a lizard. Leaves are a good early warning system!

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

Really IS nice of 'em.....I especially like those heavy duty Hefty leaf bags......ahahahaaa....the only ones we rake are those that collect right around the garage door where the house and garage meet in an inside corner, the wind deposits quite a few there...or in some of my open faced sheds I have to rake them out sometimes......other than that, I don't touch them either.

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

Just a sidebar, to people starting off home food plots. Try to not get caught in the farmer's paradox. It's great to eat those clean, fresh veggies as they ripen, but don't forget that that's when the same food is cheapest in the markets. You save some money by eating your own immediately, but you'll safe a load more if you can store yours for when the stores up their prices.

Of course, if you're lucky enough to grow enough to cover both instances, you've got it made.

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

This is a great point professur.
I grow radishes, but don't eat them much. Let's be honest, there's not much you can do with a radish. They end up in the smoothies more than anything. Salads I guess, but not much where I live anyway accompanies them in the first planting. My radishes are up and ready for harvest before memorial day. Not much else here is ready for the salad tray by then. Maybe I'll start lettuce indoors next year and see. Certainly no tomatoes of your own to go with the spring radishes.
It's not like asparagus where you can plan a meal around it for Spring dinner. They're radishes after all.
But even then , prof is right, I can mozy down to the farmers market and buy oodles of radishes for close to the price of soil this time of year.
Probably time better spent elsehwere.
In all honesty , I think the only reason I grow radishes is because they are so fast , so early and so idiot-proof. It's like a kind of confidence builder for the idiot gardener.
This fall I am going to plant my first freezer garden. With the sole intention of freezing for later use. I am thinking broccoli and cauliflower.
These do well here when planted for autumn harvest, better than summer. the plants like the heat to send out their greenery and then enjoy cooler climate for the actual production. I'm looking to freeze a bunch this year after harvest in october. In November aroud here lets' just say broccoli isn't on sale.
Will be first year canning as well ( and large part in thanks to the people here).
I'm just a novice of course, but so much of the value of the whole process is starting to think like a farmer a little bit as opposed to a defenseless suburbanite.
My best bet , always, and maybe because they are favorites, are beets and chard (and kale if you like it , which I don't particularly). Fresh beets never seem to be abundantly cheap, maybe because not many farmers grow them.
You can eat the greens and they are delicious, and store the rest. they are awsome in smoothies, as sweet as strawberries some varieties and chock full of nutrition.
Chard in my zone grows basically throughout the season. Just stagger your plantings and enjoy a staggerred harvest.
Same goes for carrots , but until this year I've had mixed results. This year i french dug deep, to two feet, sifted the soil and am going to refrain from watering (god isn;t that the hardest part for the SF gardener) much more than weekly.
Once your carrots hit an inch and a half high, (guessing the carrort under one inch)you will get all kinds of splits if you continue to water heavily. let nature do most of your work.
My berries almost all end up being frozen , that but for what we don't pick and eat. Berries are cheap in June and July around here. But in October, an arm and a leg.
If you are going to freeze softer berries , harvest in small containers, toss them on cookie tray or baking sheet, one high and then freeze for an hour or more, then transfer to a bag or tupperware whathaveyou, back intio the freezer. Raspberries even 3 or 4 deep , will brusie easily.
Gardening to can and freeze is something we should all be learning more about i think, TnAndy has had some good posts on the topic.
This is my first year of doing such, look forward to sharing victories and defeatswith the small time gardeners here.

PS - if you are going to use leaves from neihbors, my advice is to make sure they haven't sprayed their treees recently.
As for clippings, use your own. I haven't put chemical one on my land inyears, but my neihboor still buy into the ScottsMulti Season poison thing.

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

Can you elaborate, maybe give some basics?
Thanks in advance.

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

Add about any kind of organic material.....leaves, sawdust, etc.....manures are great, really "hot" ones (nitrogen rich) like chicken you will want to till in and not plant much on this year.

Green manures, which aren't animal, but a crop of something like annual rye, oats, or wheat ( buckwheat works good too ) that you let come up about 1/2 way and then turn under. Green manure cover crops should be planted EVERY fall after the garden is harvested, then turned under in the spring to build better soils.

IF your soil is a heavy clay, adding sand and gypsum helps a lot.

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

Biggest part of getting your hands dirty in gardening is... GETTING YOUR HANDS DIRTY!! :) :) Jump right in and follow the advice above and GET SOME SEEDS PLANTED!! :) Ask at your local nursery or even Home Depot what will grow well in your area. Get crazy. Plant a bunch of different stuff. see what happens!! Timing IS important in gardening, but the most important thing is to go and start doing it! :) :) :)

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

OK, because no one else mentioned it.

DON'T FORGET TO PLANT A HERB GARDEN. Most of the herbs are perrienials and once properly set, will come back year after year. Make sure you heed the 'how much sun this plant needs'. Most will take full sun, but some prefer a little shade.

I started mine three years ago. Added more last year (I found lemon tyme - mmmm). I am looking to add more this year. Mine has chives, rosemary, two types of tyme, spearmint, oregano and sweet basil. I should note that you need to keep an eye on the spearmint and the sweet basil, because they will take over if you let them.

Eventually want to have a herb garden and a strawberry patch to go with my 400 sq ft garden. I generally grow onions, peppers, tomatoes, zukes, cukes, and I've been working on carrots and lettuce.

Here in Colorado, the dry climate and the cold weather makes having a garden very challenging. We get snow, even in June. If you plant BEFORE Memorial day, you will probably have to replant, due to weather. My garden will go in within two weeks.

Good luck with your garden and post some pix in about three or four months.

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

Do you really want to grow and eat radishes? hehe...

Some easy crops that can basically be picked and eaten (and is there any better way?) are peas and carrots. Peas require a trellis to grow up. Tomatoes can also be grown in poort soils just require a cage to grow in.

Not sure what the seasonal conditions / soil is like where you are, but the above will grow in pretty poor soils usually. Other plants worth having around include, rosemary, mint, parsley, thyme, fennel, lavender, chillis. They look after themselves and require almost no care.

Pests are always an issue, so investigate natural ways of keeping pest numbers down and deer etc. off your crops. This is mainly important for things like tomatoes.

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

I grow radishes, lettuce, spinach, chives, bush beans and cherry tomatoes in planters on the deck and railing. Not much effort other than pick some daily and to water every couple days. Out in the garden areas (I use sq foot techniques, too), I plant potatoes, beans, chinese snow peas, larger tomatoes, watermelons, pumpkins, zuchinni and cukes. I have about 300 sq ft total, plus all the deck planters. I basically try to concentrate my effort planting things that are easy to maintain.

Re: Help me start a garden!
 

Has ANYONE tried the 'growing tomatoes upside down' thing?

I've seen them a couple of times. But never talked to anyone who tried it.

Seems like an interesting concept, as all the fruit hangs down and is very easy to pick because of that.

So, if you have, let us know.

thx.