For your average person, though, a garden is a place where they grow some stuff, usually vegetables, that they eat some of and give most of away because they don't know what to do with way too much of something. We'll all meet someone trying to give away a bucket of massive zucchini, sooner or later.
So here it is late June and I'm going to talk about garden planning. Yes, really. I won't be offended if you stop reading and bookmark this for January reading. Promise. There are some things that I've learned over the years that I need to put down, so here goes.
Philosophy of Gardening
From a homesteading perspective, your garden is a significant portion of your food for the year and must be very well planned and very efficient. That will probably mean different things to different people. For some it probably means that it needs to be laid out and organized to allow mechanized cultivation and maybe even harvesting. If your family goes through a lot of potatoes and you have heavy clay soil, nobody on this planet would argue with using a tractor and potato digger. I can't think of a worse job on this planet than hand digging 1/4 acre of potatoes in gumbo. Mechanization is efficient in this situation.
But, here I'm going to talk about what I do. If you've read much of this blog, you've probably realized that I'm a bit of a luddite when it comes to my gardening and animal raising techniques. I despise rototillers, I'm probably a bit snobbish about use of any chemicals, and I take great pride in the fact that between my gardens and my chicken setup I haven't spent $500 combined in the last 5 years. All of my tools were homemade or obtained secondhand. Much of our seed is saved from the previous year. To me, this is what it means to be functional and productive. What am I gaining by growing all this food if it costs me hundreds or thousands of dollars to do so? I can buy a whole lot of veggies at the farmer's market for the cost of a rototiller, expensive seed packets, commercial fertilizers, etc.
Garden Design
In keeping with the ideals of efficiency and productivity, my gardens are designed to all be hand worked. Most of the garden is made up of raised beds 4 feet wide by 25 feet long. These beds are easily worked by hand. Some of it is made of 10'x10' patches that corn, melons, squash and potatoes are rotated through. These beds are small enough to reach into with a rake or hoe to cultivate, minimizing foot traffic and compaction, but still square to help make better use of space for vining plants like pumpkins.
Spring Prep
The first thing I do with all garden beds in the spring is rake them off. There's usually some debris and certainly some mulch still laying on the raised beds. This gets raked off and becomes the beginning of this year's compost pile. Step 2 is to test for compaction and do a light aeration of the soil with a fork. I use my big fork for this, if I can bury all 10 inches of tines in the soil easily, I consider the soil ready to plant. If there is some compaction due to foot traffic or excessive rain, I'll lightly lift soil throughout the bed with the fork, but don't turn it over. I don't want to destroy the soil structure by tilling unless it's absolutely necessary. After all that, I pull any remaining weed stems or old plant stems and rake smooth and the bed is ready to plant.
Seed Starting
Under no circumstances should you ever put yourself in a situation where you have to pay $2 for a plant to put in your garden. Learn to start your own plants indoors. Even if you only start them 3 weeks early by putting them outside during the day. Seeds are cheap - free if you save them yourself. If you get good enough at this, you can even sell some of your starts to pay for some of the soaker hoses you're going to need later on.
Planting Planning
If there's one thing we've learned from Square Foot Gardening, it's that plant spacing recommendations on seed packets are pretty much wrong. For example, you do not need 36 inches in all directions between tomato plants. Most other vegetables will behave similarly. I have great looking broccoli heads right now, with plants spaced about 10 inches apart in a grid compared to the standard recommendation that broccoli be planted 18 inches apart in rows spaced 24 inches. What an astounding waste of space that would be. Use your head when it comes to plant spacing. Don't let the seed packet think for you. If you know the plants you're growing, why don't you decide how far apart they should be?
Intensive Planting
I think that generally, plant spacing recommendations are designed to get the maximum yield from each individual plant. If I had only one tomato plant, I would probably keep everything at least 3 feet away from it. Thing is, I don't. I can plant as many as I want. I can blanket an entire garden bed with tomato plants if I want. Why would I want to do this? Well there's a few reasons. Every bit of soil that's not growing a plant is lost space. Think for a moment - would you rather have 2 tomato plants that yield 20 pounds of tomatoes each, or in the same space, 3 tomato plants that yield 15 pounds of tomatoes each? You can do this with just about everything in your garden. Currently, I have two garden beds dedicated to tomatoes. That's 200 square feet that contains 60 tomato plants. By staggering the grid and pushing the plants to about 18-20 inches apart, I make better use of the space. No, none of my individual plants will compete with someone else's plants when it comes to individual yield, but overall, I'll take more tomatoes out of that 200 square feet than I could using traditional plant spacings. There are other benefits to this too - A dense pack of tomatoes that keeps weeds down by choking out light penetration to the ground. The ground on the entire bed is shaded as the tomatoes mature, meaning I lose way less moisture from the ground during the heat of July and August. Mulch helps, living mulch is even more help.
This applies to most things in the garden. Cabbage don't mind being packed together at all. Stagger them and you can get stonehead cabbage to grow well even if planted 3 across in a 4 foot bed. That comes out to something like 30-40 cabbage heads in 100 sq feet of garden. Maybe more. As with tomatoes, does it matter that each cabbage head be the biggest it can be? Or do we want the most cabbage per area of garden? I don't know about you, but I'm not trying to win any state fair ribbons. This is food, man.
A lot of what we're talking about has been said repeatedly by those espousing the benefits of square foot gardening, but we're not going to exist in such a rigid structure. If I have a spot where a pepper plant dies, I'll drop some radishes or lettuce there. Maybe a handful of turnips. Just remember, efficiency is the goal. I have to weed the whole garden, I might as well be growing something on the whole thing.
Companion planting
This is a great way to make better use of space. Do you really need a dedicated space in the garden for short season crops like radishes and spinach? Why not plant them between your slower growing plants like tomatoes? All that garden just sitting there in between those 3 inch tall tomato transplants, waiting to be used. You have to weed it and water it and mulch it. You should grow something on it too.
The whole sun-facing side of your corn patches can be planted in beans, pumpkins, squash, etc. I have planted 'connecticut field' pumpkins IN a corn patch (6 feet from the edge) and so long as they're started early enough, they find a way to send vines out of the patch and find sunlight to feed themselves. Train the vines around the edge of the corn stalks and you'll take 100 pounds of pumpkin out of your corn patch too. Free chicken feed if nothing else.
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| Pumpkins harvested from a companion planting with corn |
Mulching Early and Often
Man, I could go on about mulch for days. You know how you manage a garden that's enormous in minimal time? Mulch it. There is no single thing you can do to reduce the amount of time and effort required to maintain a garden that is more effective than mulching. Minimize weed growth and moisture loss at the same time. I have only one concern about mulch and that is that you don't want to mulch too soon. Cool season crops can be mulched immediately after the soil warms to about 60F. In fact, keeping the roots of your broccoli and cabbage cool will actually help them grow faster. Warm season crops like tomatoes and corn need to be mulched a bit later to prevent stunting their growth waiting for the soil under that mulch to warm up. Typically I mulch cool season crops as soon as they're 3-4 inches tall, and I mulch warm season crops as soon as we have a few 80 degree days to warm the soil.
Mulch everything. If you've got a lawnmower with a bagger, you have all the mulch you need.
*Safety note - Don't use grass clippings from sprayed lawns.
*Advice - In fact, don't spray your lawn either. Clover, dandelions, dock, wild lettuce, they're all infinitely more beautiful and rewarding than a monoculture of tall fescue or kentucky bluegrass. If your neighbors complain about the big native bumblebees and the pretty yellow or white flowers, remind them that the flowers and bees were there first.
Water Efficiently
Ideally, we would all have nice gravity fed drip irrigation systems fed by rainwater catchment. If you do, that's great. This is the most efficient way to water that I can think of. There is cost associated with the drip supplies, but it pays for itself if you're not paying for water. If you're like most of us that water with a well or a municipal/rural water supply, your best bet is soaker hoses. Soaker hoses are better than all other types of watering. They're better than overhead sprinklers because there's no water waste due to wind and overspray, and because you're keeping the water off the foliage, reducing dramatically the risk of fungal growth. Soaker hoses are better than sprinkler hoses for the same reason. Soaker hoses are better than hand watering with a wand because it requires almost no time, and because it waters deeper and slower. Hand watering is ok for very small plants, but your more mature or larger plants will not develop properly without adequate deep watering. Hand watering almost always results in soaking the top 2 inches of soil and leaving the rest dry. If you don't believe me, go try it. Soaker hoses are one of the reasons that my garden beds are 25 feet long. A 50 foot hose goes down and back. If I need to water a bed that is planted in an edge-to-edge grid as would onions be, I use 2 hoses down and back. There's a hose about every 8-10 inches that way, and it fully waters the bed in about 45-60 minutes. I advise you check the flow rate of your soaker hose so you know how much water is coming out of it. You can then use this information to calculate how long you need to leave the hose run in order to properly water a particular area.
Harvest Time
If you've established a mindset of efficiency, getting as much out of your garden as you can based on what you put into it, you're already a step ahead when it comes to harvest. Not all your tomatoes are going to be pretty. If it's split or scarred, so what. You can trim those right up when you can them. The same goes for everything else. Don't let cosmetic flaws turn you away from part of your harvest. It's important to get out of the grocery store mindset, not all veggies look the same and meet the same standard of shape and size.
Even those things that are damaged beyond the point of salvage can go to good use. My chickens eat anything that doesn't go into the basket. If you don't have chickens or pigs or horses you should be composting anything that can be composted. There shall be no waste.
Food Storage
Treat the fruits of your labor with respect. Don't waste something because you didn't get around to freezing or canning it. Plan your harvest so that you can invest the time to properly store everything. If you can't take the time right now to can it, you can probably at least blanch and freeze it. Tomatoes don't even need to be blanched before freezing if you're going to can them or make sauce later. If you're harvesting large amounts of something, learn different ways to store it. Consider drying and freezing as alternatives to canning.
Seed Saving
Many of the vegetables we grow are very easy to save seeds from. The more seeds you save, the less you have to buy. A brief and partial list of things I save seed from: spinach, lettuce, broccoli, tomatoes, pumpkins/winter squash, summer squash, cucumbers, melons, peas, beans, corn, potatoes, peppers and probably other things I can't think of right now. This will take you back to your planning phase - the more open pollinated heirloom-type varieties you use, the more seed you can save and the less money you spend next year.
Do it all again
Gardening is an interesting situation we put ourselves in. We don't get many repetitions to get it right. How many times are you going to plant tomatoes in your life? We only have so many summers to practice these lessons. It's important that we learn from what we do every year and then make improvements year over year. Besides, everything is more fun if we're successful at it.
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