One last gardening post and then I swear we’ll be back to food full time, at least for a few months until my garden starts doing very cool things that I’d be remiss in not sharing them with you.   I have been hearing from friends and readers (who really are friends too) alike that they are thinking of starting a garden for the first time this year due to either the economy or a desire to be more involved with their food or both.   Since I’m a horticulturist by trade, I wanted to take the piecemeal advice I give them and compile it into a post so anyone interested in starting a garden for the first time could have a look.   These 10 steps are best applied to a garden being created from scratch.  However, a few of them are good to repeat with an established garden once in awhile.  

It’s only fair to add a bit of a disclaimer here too:  these steps are a tad idealistic and presume you all have plenty of time and resources on your hands.   Reality may not allow you to take all of these steps.  Don’t let that discourage you.  These steps are just what I’d do if I were starting over from scratch.  Use the ones that make sense for you and learn what you can from the others. 

#1 ~ Get a soil test.
Before starting any growing project, it’s advisable to get information about the pH of the soil, the mineral levels, and something called CEC which has to do with how much your soil leaches out the fertilizers you’ll be applying.  Usually soil testing is done through a local extension office, which is part of a state university.  Information on how to contact these offices can be found in a phone book or online by googling your state + “extension office”.  You can get detailed instruction from that office on how to collect a soil sample.  The nuts and bolts are as follows:  go around your proposed growing space with a trowel when the soil is dry and dig about 5-10 samples at least six inches deep, scoop a bit from the bottom of each hole you dig and put it in one bag.  When you have all your sample, shake that bag up well to combine all the soil.  Using the bag you’ll get from the extension office and the form they usually include, submit one collective sample (about a cup’s worth) for your garden.  Test’s are either free or very reasonably priced.  When you get the results back, it will tell you if you need to change the pH (by adding either lime or sulfur) and add any amendments (i.e., lots of compost versus just some or minerals like nitrogen and potassium).    Click here to see a scan of the test results I got back for a test I did on my garden last year.
 
#2 ~  Start a compost bin or pile ASAP.
If you’re reading this article with any real interest, you’re probably already well aware of the benefits of composting for environmental reasons.  Composting your kitchen waste, newspaper, grass clippings and leaves keeps tons of garbage out of our landfills and provides a natural fertilizer for your garden.  What you might not realize and what I personally can attest to is the tremendous impact adding compost to your garden has on soil structure.  Even if you have no intentions of growing an organic garden, you’ll want a boat load of compost the first few years to fluff up the soil to make planting and cultivating easier and to improve drainage.  If you have sandy soil, the compost will add much needed humus (carbon-rich)matter and water retention.   If you have clay soil like I do, the compost will do worlds of good for loosening up those clods so water can percolate through it.    Improving your soil structure is a long and slow process so it’s best to get a pile of compost going right away so you can start adding it as soon as you turn the soil in your garden for the first time.    Having your own compost source is best as it will get costly to go to the garden center and buy the quantities you’ll need to add in the first couple years in your garden.  Plus you have more control over the quality of the final product.  Quick rule of thumb for compost:  it’s ready to use when you can no longer identify singular objects in it like a leaf or a twig.

#3 ~ Apply sheet mulching.
This application is best done under certain circumstances, but I’m including it because it’s a great way to prep a new garden space if you’re turning a patch of lawn into new beds and you have the luxury of time on your side.  It’s also another reason for why you should start your composting efforts as soon as possible.  Sheet mulching simply involves layering first manure, and then cardboard and newspaper over the area you intend to cultivate, soaking it, and then piling on unfinished compost, leaves, straw, etc. Let the whole thing sit for several months, during which time the existing grass and weeds will be killed for lack of light while the cardboard and compost breakdown further and provide you with a wonderful layer of super rich soil by the time you do put in your first plants.  I’ve also heard that sheet mulching can be used on concrete to create a layer of soil for growing, but I think that would take several applications and years to accomplish.  Still, if you plan on sticking around your current site for a long time, sheet mulching is a handy way to turn just about any ground into a suitable plot for gardening.  That being said, it’s not very handy if you want to plant right now this spring.   To learn more about sheet mulching, click here.

#4 ~   Plan in advance.
The first three steps are ideally done at least six months before you actually plant anything.  Believe me, I know how hard it is to put off getting your first vegetables and herbs into the ground.  As I look back now at my first year with my own garden, which I started on a balmy April day with no substantial forethought, I wish I had taken the time to really think out a few things.  For starters, it’s important to really consider the layout and your purposes in the garden.  Once you start digging your beds and establishing your paths, you won’t want to start over when you realize it would have been better if you’d just…   Long straight raised beds about three feet wide are preferable for vegetable production and you’ll want your paths at least two feet wide so you can use a wheelbarrow or bucket or even just drag the hose around without wreaking havoc.  Draw a basic overhead view and pencil in where you think things might go (like this).  If it’s the end of summer or early fall, it’s a great time to buy some of your basic equipment on sale as stores clear out their inventory for the winter holidays.  Items like hoses, rakes, shovels, landscape fabric, trowels, gardening gloves, pots, pre-made trellising, tomato cages, and so forth are good for stocking up.   Get online and start browsing some seed sites such as Johnny’s, Renee’s or Burpee’s.  Don’t buy anything yet!  What you’re looking to do is educate yourself the stuff you’d like to grow:  how many days to harvest (longer means it’ll take up space in your garden all summer), is it best to sow the seed straight into the ground or grow it in a pot inside first to be transplanted to the garden later,  and how big do these plants get generally (to help you eyeball how much space to give them on your plan). 

#5 ~  Talk to a seasoned gardener and visit a farmers market.
If you’ve never had your own garden before, chances are you will be overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of variety in the plant world.  If you’re buying transplants from a local garden center, which might be the best strategy the first year if you’re a bit timid, there won’t be too many choices.  However, if you go to buy, say, tomato seeds, you’ll find yourself swimming in options: red, yellow, orange, green, heirloom, hybrid, determinate, indeterminate, cherry, grape, plum, big beef…  See?  The best thing you can do for yourself is find a seasoned grower, be it a gardening friend or a local farmer.  Ask them what they grow and what they’d recommend for just starting out.  If you have a specific vegetable in mind, ask questions about what bugs it gets, is it easy to grow, what variety is tastiest.  Try to discover if a plant you want in your garden has special requirements that may affect where you put it.  For example, eggplant likes it very hot and very sunny.  You might think your whole garden is in the sun, but there might be spots that get more or less sun.  Make a note to put the eggplant in the sunniest spot of all if you want a good harvest.   And to go back to our tomato dilemma example, buy several types of tomatoes and have an at-home taste test to see which you’d like to have in large quantities.  Try to get that plant next year.  If you know you want to grow heirloom varieties of vegetables but don’t like the idea of starting your own seeds just yet, it’s worth mentioning to your local farmer(s) that you would like to buy transplants next spring as they very well may agree to bring some with them to market for you.

#6 ~  Determine your plant list.
in conjunction with talking to other growers, it’s wise to start jotting down what you think you’ll be growing and answer a few questions.  What vegetables do you eat the most?  What herbs to you most often throw into the pot?  Are you interested in canning or freezing?  Will your neighbors be happy to get bags of surplus squash from you? Would you enjoy having some bouquets of fresh garden flowers in the house?  Do you adore pesto?  If not, don’t be tempted to put in more than one basil plant.  Are you going to make your own spaghetti sauce?  If not, you’ll really not need more than one or two tomato plants per person in your household.  Would you like space to try things you’ve never heard of, like ground cherries and logion berries?  Like packing for a trip, make a list of everything you want to have and then slash that list in half.  You’ll thank yourself later.  After the first few years in your garden, you’ll start to get a feel for what works in the space and how much you really use of what, but this first season it’s going to be far easier to limit yourself from the outset so you can enjoy gardening instead of feeling guilty about the literal bushels of tomatoes you’re throwing into the compost bin each week (not that I’ve ever done that…). 

#7 ~  Amend your soil as determined by the soil test.
By this point you’ll have your soil test results.  From it you should be able to tell if you need to raise or lower your pH.  Generally, the ideal range for vegetable production is 6.5-7.0, but certain plants like it higher or lower (information you can get from the seed supplier or tag in the transplant).   If your pH is lower than 6.5, you might consider adding some lime to it to raise it up a bit.  If the pH is over 7.0, you’ll likely want to add some sulfur to tip it back down.  In most soils, pH will naturally lower over time so it’s more likely you’ll need to add lime than sulfur.  When adding either, be extremely careful not to add too much as this can be toxic to plants.    The soil test should also tell you if you are lacking in any macro or micronutrients, the “food” of plants.   If these are lower than the recommended levels, visit your local garden center or ag supply store and ask for help of finding the right fertilizer to address these deficiencies.  There are organic amendments you can apply too, such as fish emulsion, bone meal, pot ash, and, of course, compost.   If your nutrient levels are only slightly lower than desired, just adding compost from your bin is likely to correct the problem.   In all cases, it’s wise to add at least a 2 inch thick layer of compost to your garden plot when you turn it over each spring to bulk up the organic matter and improve drainage. 

#8 ~  Measure out and dig your beds.
Don’t just go into your garden with a shovel and start hacking out beds willy-nilly.  Start by consulting your plan overview and use a tape measure to mark out the beds accurately.  Then use a piece of string attached to two stakes and stretched along the to-be-dug beds and paths to guide you as you dig.  This careful approach ensure you’ll have nice straight lines in your garden that not only help make it look tidy, but also assists with easier weeding with a hoe, covering the rows with fabric, or using soaker hoses or other irrigation.    If you take the time to layout your garden right the first year, you’ll have a lot less work to do in subsequent seasons. 

#9 ~  Mulch now and later.
At this point you’ll want to think about what mulch(es) you’ll want to use in your garden.  First off, let’s establish that you will want mulch of some kind as it greatly enhances moisture retention and weed suppression in your garden, making your life a heck of a lot easier.  There are several options in the way of mulch: plastic sheeting (black, white, etc.), straw, landscape fabric, leaf mold (decayed leaves), wood chips, and even compost, to name some of the more common ones.   Black plastic warms up the soil fast in the spring and let’s you plant earlier than might otherwise be advisable.  It also does a great job with weed suppression and retaining moisture.  However, it’s not very good for the environment since it can’t generally be recycled and it can stress your plants out in really hot summers by absorbing too much of the sun’s heat.  The mulches consisting of plant material (straw, leaves, etc) are great for the environment and break down in time to add to the organic matter in your soil.  However, they aren’t always so successful at weed suppression since sunlight does get through it.    I personally favor black landscape fabric because the kind I use is biodegradable (though I remove it from my garden each fall to avoid retaining any pests seeking shelter under it) and it does a comparable job in weed suppression and moisture retention as black plastic does.  Plus it’s a heck of a lot easier to handle than the plastic.  Since I add so much compost to my garden anyway, I don’t really need to additional organic matter that a plant-based mulch would supply.  I do use wood chips in my paths though to keep the weeds and mud at bay.  I lay soaker hoses down first on the beds I’m covering in fabric as I like to water plants at their roots, rather than overhead.  When you have your beds established, apply your chosen mulch to the beds in which you’ll be planting transplants.  If you are sowing seeds in a bed, you may wish to leave it bare for the time being to give the seeds a start and then mulch later when they have a few inches of growth on them.   I’ve had moderate success with sowing seeds through wide slits in my fabric mulch.   

#10 ~  Start Planting!
Finally you can start growing things in your garden!  It’s been a bit of a process to get to this point, but now that you’re here you should have a fantastic garden space in which you’ll harvest the right amounts of the stuff you’ll really use and enjoy.   After a year or two, you’ll be an old pro and hopefully you can pass along your knowledge to another new gardener.

May all your flights of fancy take wing today…

Ah, the sound of shoes squishing through soggy spring soil….

Well, the rainy days continue here just when the blooms of the magnolias, flowering quince, cherries, forsythia, tulips and anemones are at their peak.  In between showers, I slipped on my slicker and goulashes and went to take a few photos before all the beauty got washed away.  Spring is such a lovely season, but its flowers are awfully fleeting, which no doubt makes them all the sweeter. 

What’s your favorite spring flower?  I think I’m rather partial to magnolias as a whole and to this specific apricot shade of the flowering quince.  But really, when you get down to it, they are all shockingly beautiful in their own unique ways. 

Enjoy!

It’s early March.  Do you know where your seeds are?  Mine have been arriving in spurts as each different supplier gets them shipped to me.  My two favorite sources for seeds are Renee’s Garden Seeds and Johnny’s Selected Seeds.  I think I should be ashamed to admit to you that I’ve got more than 35 packets of seeds in my storage box and more on the way, but I’m rather addicted to seed starting.  If you’ve ever started your own seeds, you’ve probably gotten hooked too. 

With a small bench in a greenhouse currently at my disposal, getting seeds started is easier than ever.  Three weeks ago I started my ‘Frontier’ onions, and they’ve done a tremendous job popping their long skinny necks up out of the flats.   When I start seeds, I fill my packs or flats with a very loose germination mix and soak it thoroughly with a gentle mist from the hose before sowing the seeds.  By soaking the soil/media first, the seeds don’t get clumped into groups by water droplets from overhead watering, and they start off with a wealth of moisture to get them happy and growing.  

 
My seeds tend to germinate much more quickly than the seed packet says thanks to a rather homemade system for keeping them in a perfect little pocket of moisture and warmth.  I use one of those flimsy flats that hold pots at the commercial greenhouse and invert it over the tray holding my seeds.  Then I cover the whole thing in clear plastic, sealing in and protecting the little seeds against drying out or getting hit by any chilly drafts.  The need to water them is cut in half, which is hugely helpful considering seeds need fairly constant and even moisture to germinate. If you’re going to give this system a shot, just be sure to use the kind of flats that have big openings in them so that plenty of light can still get through to your seedlings when they start popping up their heads. 
 
I typically leave this little incubator system in place for about a week after the first signs of germination since the seeds have headroom thanks to the inverted flat keeping the plastic off of them.   After that first week’s growth though, I take the plastic and inverted flat off the seed tray to let the seedlings have the maximum amount of light possible as they get their photosynthetic wheels turning.

 
As I mentioned in the post about my garden layout for the coming season, I have a lot of crops I want to grow and the vast majority of them are being started from seed.  Seed starting is not a once-and-done deal; each crop requires a different timeline, both in sowing and in transplanting.  Adding to the challenge is the fact that I want to do succession plantings in my garden this year, both in the form of multiple sowings of a particular crop (i.e., string beans) and of switching out a spring harvested crop for a summer or fall harvested crop (i.e., sugar snap peas and summer squash).  

To accomplish this intricate dance of the seeds, I’ve created several spreadsheets, have a calendar I write notes on, and have organized my seeds in a box by sowing month.  Keeping the whole ball of yarn from unraveling is a very basic schedule (pictured here) that says when I’m supposed to sow the seed and when it gets transplanted into the garden.   By planning in so much detail and so far in advance, I’m pretty confident that healthy plants will get into the ground where and when they need to and hopefully it’ll be a very productive year as a result.  I’m already planning loads of recipes for the French melons, pattypan squash and ground cherries (as well as all the rest)!

Oh, and yes, I realize this is a food blog…or at least it used to be.  If you are not a gardener (in spirit or in act) and you are getting fed up with all this crazy plant talk, I apologize.  Please bear with me as I sooth my cabin fever with thoughts of spring.   I promise there are new recipes coming soon!   How does Celeriac & Ginger Soup sound for starters?  Stay tuned!! 

I’ve just returned from a great little workshop hosted at the fabulous historical Wyck Garden on the topic of applying permaculture principles to the urban landscape.  Led by Phil Forsyth, director of the Philadelphia Orchard Project, participants got a great tutorial on how to put permaculture to use here in our Philadelphia neighborhoods.  Many of those in attendance were already practicing sustainability in their gardens and found the principles overlap quite a bit with permaculture.

Sheet Mulching Step 1: Cut back any vegetation, soak the ground, place a single layer of cardboard and/or newspaper on the ground and soak it again.

I bet several of you are scratching your heads, wondering what the heck permaculture means.  I won’t bog you down with a detailed history on what amounts to an interesting marriage between science and philosophy-bordering-on-spirituality.  If you want more on that, you can start your reading here and here.   The short and sweet version is that the term was coined in Australia in the 1970s to describe an official movement to design agriculture practices that were more….well, sustainable and permanent (as in not depleting our earth to the point that it would cease to be productive).  But the practices of permaculture have been around a lot longer than that; they are really the mantras of any indigenous people that has had to live off of the land, particularly in wooded areas.  At the end of the day, permacutlure, like the more mainstream sustainable agriculture philosophy, is all about balancing our consumption and waste in the natural world. 

Sheet Mulching Step 2: Cover soaked cardboard and
newspaper with two inches of compost.

In my limited experience, it’s my understanding that  permaculture has four main principles: care of the earth as a whole, care of people in our neighborhoods, reducing consumption in all areas of our lives, and sharing our surplus with others, including knowledge on such topics as growing food.  Practitioners of permacutlure carry out these principles by employing multifunctional tools (i.e., putting chickens in your garden to eat pests while also fertilizing and giving your eggs), striving to be self-sufficient (i.e., use solar energy and grow your own food), and re-using everything they can (i.e., putting down cardboard and newspaper in the garden to suppress weeds and create a base for composting).

Sheet Mulching Step 3: Add a layer of leaves and then add another layer of compost and of leaves (4 layers altogether and about 8 inches deep).  Rake out to be even and wet down if leaves are blowing away.  Wait patiently for six months, and you’ll have a beautiful bed in which to plant.

So….how does this apply in our modern cities?  That’s what I went to this workshop to find out.  Turns out there are outstanding examples of permaculture being applied to cities around the world and those in the U.S. are a bit behind the curve.  The ones held up for admiration in the workshop were Curitiba (Brazil) and Havana.  After discussing the finer points of permaculture, we were asked to grade ourselves on how much we use permaculture principles in our lives at the moment and then to set a goal for ourselves for the future.  I felt I got a decent grade but there are certainly areas to be improved.  I drew up this little scorecard for myself.

My goals moving forward are to use public transportation more often and to work at energy conservation in my home.  Oh, and get some worms for the compost bin.  What do you think your score is?  What goals would you set for yourself?  Do you have experiences with permaculture you’d like to share? 

We finished the workshop off with a demonstration on sheet mulching/composting.  This technique is great for anyone who wants to start a garden plot on a currently less-than-desirable plot with bad soil and/or an abundance of weeds and grass.  In other words, anyone looking to garden in the city.  The photos in this post outline the steps to sheet mulching.

Any of you who have a garden surely are familiar with the yin and yang of winter.  These months of dormancy in the garden are a blessing in that they provide the busy gardener with time at his or her desk (or kitchen table) to sort through the catalogues and draft up the plans for the coming season’s garden.  But winter, as it trudges along to late February, can be downright painful for the gardener psyche, having been penned up inside for so long.  I have turned with new zest to house plants this winter, having missed my garden so very much.  I have also been soothing the burning desire to get in the garden by meticulously planning on paper every detail of my little patch of green goodness.  

Plotting out all the details of the garden has become increasingly important for me, thanks to both my experiences gardening in a small plot with an ambitious crop list and my reading list over this winter.  One of the books I read from front to back and then again was Sarah Raven’s The Great Vegetable Plot.  Just like her The Cutting Garden, this volume is jammed full of great tips for getting the most out of a small piece of land, focusing in great detail on succession planting, trellising, the most productive varieties of any given vegetable, and how to push the limits of the seasons.  With these words of wisdom in mind, I drafted my layout for this year’s vegetable garden. 

Perhaps you’ve noticed that one entire row of my vegetable garden isn’t even for vegetables.  I made a tough decision to dedicate a quarter of my veggie space to cut flowers.  As I see it, I only have a family of two (three if you’re talking about melons, in which case my cat has a near frantic obsession with eating them), and we don’t need great quantities of any one thing, besides some of the crops that will store for long periods (carrots, beets, rutabagas, etc).  So instead of growing 19(!) tomato plants like I had last year, I’m only going to put in three this year.  Following this pattern, I now have a free row for all the varieties of cut flowers I’ve been so desperate to trial.  I can’t wait for that profusion of blooms in Row 1!

Another push I’ll be making in this year’s vegetable garden that’s reflected in the plan is the addition of some vertical elements to make the garden more visually appealing.  Since this vegetable plot sits directly behind my ornamental plot, I’d like it to be a continuation of the overall design scheme of an English cottage garden.  I’m going to try my hand at building two “tunnels” (pergolas really) of bamboo for the peas, squash and cucumbers to climb.  These tunnels will make it interesting to walk down the center path, slipping in and out their shade.  Also there will be at least three “teepees” of bamboo and twine to get the sweet potato, winter squash, and melon vines off the ground.  Picking the vines up off the ground does more than just increase the aesthetics of the garden; it also makes harvesting easier and allows me to grow more vine crops than I could otherwise if I left the vines run wild. 

Even with the flowers taking up one row, I’m still going to strive to grow over 30 vegetable crops in this space.  That level of ambition demands an equally high level of organization.  Besides this plan view to serve as a visual cue for placing my crops and being sure there’s enough room for each and that they’ve been rotated out of the bed they were in last year (to avoid some pesky disease and pest issues), I’ve plotted out a detailed sowing and transplanting schedule that I’ll also be posting shortly. 

I don’t consider myself an expert just yet by any means, but I feel like I’ve learned an awful lot in this little garden of mine that’s extremely transferable.   If there’s any garden planning questions on your mind, feel free to fire them at me and I’ll see if I can help answer them for you.  What’s your plan for the 2009 growing season?

SFTF is officially on Christmas vacation for a few days.  But below is a little slideshow to keep you entertained.  Christmas at Longwood Gardens is in full swing.   I’ve certainly honed my night photography skills in an attempt to capture the magic.  

Also, I’m giving away a box of my handcrafted, organically grown, loose leaf herbal tea.  Yep, you guys have been nothing but nice this past year and deserve a little gift.  I wish I had a box for all the thousands of you that read this blog regularly (merci!) but since I don’t, it’s time for a yuletide give away!  Leave a comment below about your favorite SFTF moment this past year or something you hope to see here in the upcoming year.  Make sure the email address you enter is accurate as that’s how I’ll contact you.  I’ll put the names in a hat and draw one out after the New Year. 

Best wishes to you and yours this holiday season! 

~

more photos after the jump