I can't believe the summer's almost over. I've been very busy gardening this summer. When I became unemployed back in February, I decided to really learn about gardening, since I had the time to learn. I've always had a garden, but just always planted things without knowing anything. I bought three books: Carrots Love Tomatoes, The Vegetable Gardeners Bible and Square Foot Gardening.
Great resources!
Carrots Love Tomatoes is all about companion planting, which means some plants grow better near each other and don't do so well planted near certain things. Beans & cucumbers like to be near each other, spinach & lettuce like strawberries. I made sure to keep my cabbage family plants away from my onion family plants.
The Vegetable Gardeners Bible is a great overall resource on gardening. It has a nice chart on companion planting. It talks about raised beds and extending your gardening season. Each vegetable has its own couple of pages devoted to it.
Square Foot Gardening was my favorite. You know how you've always planted in rows, and if you don't keep up with weeding, you get these huge rows of weeds? Square Foot Gardening does away with all of that and drastically cuts the size of your garden. You basically build raised beds and lay a grid on top, which divides the raised bed into 1 foot by 1 foot squares. In each square, you plant a different type of vegetable, herb or flower. Some plants, like lettuce, radishes, carrots & spinach, can be planted very close together, so that you can get 16 plants out of 1 square foot. Some plants, like beans & peas, you can plant about 9 per square foot. Other plants, like cucumbers, peppers and tomatoes can be planted 1 per square foot.
My boxes weren't ready by the time I was ready to start planting, so I just drew an imaginary squares in my existing garden, and planted according to the spacing guidelines. It turned out great! A lot less weeding.
I have 2 square foot beds ready now and have started putting my fall crop of lettuce, radishes, carrots and spinach in it. It's so easy & quick. Just drop a few seeds in, pluck a stray weed here & there, and you're done.
The Square Foot Gardening book suggests you use a certain mix of soil called Mel's Mix. It uses peat moss, compost and vermiculite. I couldn't find vermiculite in my area, and it's really expensive to order, so I substituted 4 bags of perlite per 4 foot by 4 foot boxes. I then used 1 large bale of peat moss, 2 bags of organic mushroom compost, and 1 bag of organic peat hummus per box. I spent about $35.00 on soil. Not too bad. Seems like a nice soil mix, but I'll have to see how well the plants do in it. So far so good.
Next spring I'm going to add 2 more square foot gardens & maybe more after that. The book recommends spacing the boxes 3 feet apart, but I spaced mine 2 1/2 feet apart. That seems to leave plenty of room between them. I'm going to lay down black paper and put rocks on top to beautify things a little. I still have to put stain on the outside of the boxes too.
The book also discusses continuous crop planting, which is where you plant things a little at a time, so you don't have huge crops of one thing ready at once. The book has a great section at the end with charts on when to plant your crops in order to have a continuous supply of fresh vegetables from spring to fall.
My next venture is to learn how to grow vegetables indoors during the winter. I would really love to have fresh lettuce and tomatoes in the winter!
Growing your own vegetables is a great investment. It saves money. You know the vegetables are fresh & are pesticide free, so growing your own vegetables is better for your health. There's also no transportation involved, so growing your own vegetables is also better for the environment. It's also good exercise, and gets you outside in the sun, so you can get your natural source of Vitamin D.
If you are looking for a new hobby, gardening is a great one to try.
UPDATE 3/29/13: I just discovered there is now a new version available of the square foot gardening book I recommended above. Here's the link: All New Square Foot Gardening, Second Edition: The Revolutionary Way to Grow More In Less Space
BTW, I now have 4 square foot gardening raised beds and they are working out great! I've also been growing a few vegetables here and there indoors. I haven't had much luck with flowering vegetables such as cucumbers and tomatoes, but herbs and lettuces grow great indoors with the setup I have. Here are couple of posts with the details on that:
http://ice-princess-healthy-living-naturally.blogspot.com/2011/10/indoor-organic-vegetable-gardening.html
http://ice-princess-healthy-living-naturally.blogspot.com/2011/12/indoor-organic-vegetable-gardening.html
More Gardening Info
Comments
Post a Comment