Published: March 25, 2009 10:41 am
Grow a vegetable garden
By Joe Lamp’l
Scripps Howard News Service
Food gardening is the hottest trend in home gardening today. According to a recent survey by the National Gardening Association, 7 million more people will start a food garden this year, up 19 percent over 2008. Obviously, the economy has a lot of us looking for ways to reduce our grocery bills, and growing your own can save big money compared with store prices. In addition, we want to know that the food we’re putting in our bodies is as healthy as possible. And the best part is, homegrown food simply tastes better than anything you can buy at the store.
A home vegetable garden is easy to start and doesn’t require as much effort as one might think to keep it growing strong. Following a few simple steps will ensure you’re enjoying the fruits of your labor in no time.
Here’s what you need to know:
Location is key: Most vegetable plants do best in full sun. Find a location that gets at least six hours of it each day. To provide the most sun exposure to all your plants, place the tallest ones, such as corn, indeterminate tomatoes or pole beans on the north or west side of the garden so they do not shade the smaller plants.
It’s all about the soil: The best soil suitable for vegetables includes lots of organic matter, such as composted leaves and ground or shredded aged bark. Whatever you’re starting with, incorporate enough organic material so that the amended soil is neither sandy nor compacted. When the mix is right, it will bind together when you squeeze it but break apart easily when disturbed.
Water wisely: One inch of water per week, including any natural rainfall, is adequate. Use soaker hoses and drip lines. These deliver water slowly and on target, allowing time for the soil to saturate and for the roots to absorb the moisture. Automatic timers are a great way to take the effort and worry out of this all-important step.
Use mulch: Add a 3-inch layer of organic mulch around your plants and over the irrigation lines. Mulch will insulate the soil, help retain moisture, suppress weeds and acts as a protective barrier from diseases splashing up onto the plants from the soil.
Use patience with pest control: Although pest insects are a given at some point in any vegetable garden, by exercising patience, nature will usually take care of the problem. Surprisingly, of all the insects in your garden only about 3 percent are actually harmful pests. Practice the steps mentioned so far, and you’ve already taken adequate measures to promote the growth of healthy plants, which are better able to stand up to potential pest invasions.
If you must resort to insecticides, apply them responsibly! That means only late in the day — or in the evening — only on the affected plants and then only when necessary. Never apply pesticides in the morning when pollinators and beneficial insects are most active since you’ll likely kill them as well. Rather than using chemicals in a food garden, focus on growing healthy plants with great soil and sunny conditions and let nature take its course. Synthetic and even many organic/natural pesticides are non-selective, meaning they will kill beneficial insects, too.
Don’t overfertilize: Too much fertilizer, especially nitrogen (the first number on the fertilizer package), can promote plenty of lush green growth at the expense of less fruit and a smaller harvest. Excessive fertilizer can also be harmful to plants and soil. Instead, add plenty of organic compost, up to about 20 percent of the total soil volume. Incorporate it into the rest of the planting bed and you’ll be supplying your plants with the nutrients they need to thrive naturally. In other words, feed the soil and let the soil feed the plants.
If you put into practice what I’ve suggested, you’ll get your garden off to the right start and set it up for a more enjoyable growing season. Preparation is key, with the reward being a healthier, more productive garden and fresh food that tastes great. What could be better than that?
http://www.northwestgeorgia.com/features/local_story_084104938.html
Vegetable gardens can please eye as well as palate
March 26, 2009
‘Tis the season when everyone gets the urge to plant. And if you choose to grow vegetables, there’s no need to relegate them to a far corner of your yard, where they are sure to suffer neglect.
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A vegetable garden need not be an eyesore. It can be an oasis of beauty, pleasing your eyes as much as your palate.
Just visit or find a picture of Villandry, the famous French potager (”kitchen garden’’) near Tours, France, with its patterns of geometric beds filled with growing vegetables. Some beds are bordered with low boxwood hedges — 19 miles of them — and the whole garden is interlaced with white, gravel paths.
In fact, call your vegetable plot a “potager’’ and right away you might find it more charming.
When locating your potager, keep it close to your house, and consider that it needs at least six hours of full sunlight each day.
As the old saw goes, “Put your vegetable garden no further from your back door than you could throw the kitchen sink.’’ Or maybe even from your front door. (And that old saw dates back to when kitchen sinks were made of cast iron!)
Whether it is near or against your house, establish connections — visually and physically — between it, the house and the rest of the landscape. For instance, mimic in or around your potager some design element from your house or yard: a decorative fence, a row of clipped hedges, a piece of statuary.
Paths create visual and functional connections. Choose paving for paths that matches that of a nearby patio or echoes the pattern on a floor in a room looking out at the garden.
Straight paths have a formal air, if that’s the tone of your yard, while curving ones lend themselves more to informal settings. To further tie everything together, run paths from your house right up to and into the vegetable garden itself.
Paths, paving, fences, hedges, statuary and other “tie-ins’’ help overcome a common limitation of vegetable gardens: their often dreary appearance in winter, when, too often, they are just dirt.
These tie-ins can help carry the overall design of the garden through the winter. Create beds in your potager, perhaps geometric in shape, perhaps flowing; in either case, beds whose shapes create year-round patterns of beauty. Define your garden with hedging, arbors, fencing and paving.
Finally, remember, a potager isn’t only for vegetables. No rule says you can’t plant some ornamentals to help keep up appearances through winter. The shapes and lines created by small, densely twigged plants, such as potentilla, shrubby dogwoods and cotoneaster, as well as boxwood, heather and other small evergreens, make their statements year-round.
Come spring and summer, add vegetables themselves to your designer’s
palette: frilly red or green lettuces in all shapes, blue-green leaves of kale, a backdrop of feathery asparagus leaves. And some flowers — for distraction from those temporary bare spots where you’ve picked delicious vegetables for eating.
http://www.app.com/article/20090326/LIFE/90324049/1006