Who among us has not longingly passed the colorful seed rack at the dollar store or the tomato plants in front of Giant, or had a hopeful little one come home from school with a lanky bean plant in a Styrofoam cup? Whether your gardening urges have been fleeting thoughts of free vegetables, a half-hearted response to an urgent five-year-old, or grandiose dreams of buoyant flower beds, there is a way to have a satisfying gardening experience without breaking your back or your budget.
I remember a family friend who spoke of listening to all the advice and marketing about double digging, soil amendments, fertilizer spikes, plant supports, and watering systems. After one season of such madness, he gave up in disgust. “At four dollars a tomato, it wasn’t worth it,” he said. He was right: It wasn’t worth it – and it wasn’t necessary.
Here are the keys to a cheap and successful vegetable garden:
1) Start small: A few tomato and cucumber plants in a one-by-six-foot area are more likely to give you satisfaction than an elaborate planting of many vegetables and flowers. You will have time to take care of them, which in turn increases chances for success. Next year, when you are full of confidence, is soon enough to add a few new items.
2) Plant vegetables, and most flowers, in full sun: Really keep track over the course of a whole day after the trees have leafed out. Your chosen spot should be in unobstructed sunlight for at least six middle-of-the-day hours (or eight hours if some of the sunlight time is early or late in the day). If you don’t have such a spot anywhere in your yard, stick with shade plants such as impatiens, ferns, and hostas. No, sorry, none of these are edible.
3) Prepare the soil: Dig in a bag of compost plus humus from the garden center or one of the big box stores. Mix it well with the existing soil. If you had to dig out grass to make your bed, shake the loose dirt back into your garden, but get rid of the clumps with the roots.
4) Plant the right plants in the right season: Peas, carrots, lettuce, and beets are cool weather crops. Get them in the ground around Purim. Tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, beans, squash, and cucumbers like hot weather. They are not planted until night temperatures stay around 50 degrees.
5) Choose vegetables for beginners: Tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants are easy to grow and are best bought as plants. Cucumbers, beans, squash, and melons have nice big seeds that germinate quickly in warm soil, so they are best planted from seed. The same goes for peas, but they need to be planted as early as Purim – too late for this year – since hot weather usually kills them. They are a great first garden crop, since they taste so much better than any peas you can buy in the grocery. Try to find the peas called Sugar Snap. The whole pod is eaten together with the peas when they get fat (unlike the snow peas in Chinese food).
Carrots are challenging for a first garden in Baltimore conditions. You probably want to skip them. Sweet potatoes, on the other hand, love our Baltimore summers. To grow these, it is necessary to plan ahead. In late winter, soak a sweet potato in a bowl of water with a splash of vinegar for 20 minutes. Rinse it off. Cut it in half and dangle it, point up, in a jar of water on a warm windowsill. (Does this sound familiar from kindergarten?) Stems and leaves should start to sprout after a few weeks. When these are a few inches long, pinch them off, and put their stem ends in a glass of water – on the same warm windowsill. They should grow roots. Plant these cuttings in your prepared soil in late May and mulch as above. Let them grow until September. Then dig cautiously in an area well away from the stems. Work with your hands once the soil is loose. You should find “buried treasure.” One of the most exciting play dates my boys had with their friends was sweet potato digging day. It really is exciting when you are seven years old to dig and find food. (Come to think of it, just plain digging is pretty exciting when you are seven.)
6) Plan support for climbing plants: Climbers, such as tomatoes, need a stronger support than you would guess by looking at the little plants. Once they are full of leaves and fruit, a windy rainstorm will topple all but the most deeply “rooted” supports. Unless you want to fuss with setting posts at least a foot into the ground, the cheapest and strongest support is an existing fence, porch railing, or deck. Strings can be dangled from the deck and tied to a big stick resting on the ground. Tie tomatoes loosely with strips of fabric. The tomato cages that are sold in garden stores are considerably shorter than your tomato plants will grow – and are an added expense.
Poke the tips of the bean vines through the fence. They “know” how to twine around by themselves. Cucumbers have little tendrils along their stems that will wind around a thin support such as string, or the wire of a chain link fence. Sometimes they need to be loosely tied to their support so their seeking little tendrils come in contact with the strings or wires.
By the way, almost all climbing vegetables come in bush varieties. If you have no fence, look for tomatoes labeled “determinate,” and for beans and cucumbers with “bush” in their description. Of course, if you are planting peppers, eggplants, or zucchini, you won’t have to worry about supports.
7) Spacing: Instructions on seed packets are addressed to the gardener with a large plot. In your little one-by-six area, you can plant two tomato plants a foot apart, and three or four cucumber seeds or plants, six to eight inches apart. Or, if you are not using climbing plants, you can put in pepper plants one foot apart in all directions. Bush beans can be four inches apart in all directions. Peas can be planted two inches apart in a double row next to whatever fence you will have them climb. Zucchini takes up more space. Each plant needs an area about three feet by three feet. However, you don’t have to dig up all that grass. Just dig a hole big enough to mix in your humus. Plant your seeds, and then mulch the surrounding area right on top of the grass. (See Mulch, below.)
8) Depth to plant: Most seeds should be covered with soil to four times their thickness. For most summer vegetables (beans, squash, and cucumbers) this means an inch or so. Smaller seeds, such as the kohlrabi, discussed below, are planted half an inch deep. This is flexible. No ruler is necessary!
9) Mulch: Once your plants are in, or your seeds have sprouted to about two inches high, surround them with a layer of dampened cardboard. Spread it out and fold as necessary to cover all the soil around your plants. Press it down. Don’t let the cardboard actually touch the stems of your plants. Weigh this mulch down – and hide its ugliness – with a layer of at least four inches of crumbled leaves mixed with grass clippings or wood chips, or any other attractive mulch you can find.
The mulch serves three purposes: it almost totally prevents weeds, it keeps the roots of your plants moist and cool, and, as it decomposes, it returns needed organic matter to the soil. Straight grass clippings or non-chopped leaves tend to mat and prevent rain from soaking in, hence the suggestion to crumble the leaves and mix them with grass clippings. Of course, you can buy mulch, but remember, we are looking for cheap or free for this garden. Whatever mulch you use, replenish it as it decomposes.
10) Watering: Since your garden is small, and well mulched, no sprinklers or fancy irrigation is required. If it doesn’t rain an inch in any given week, bring a bucket of water out to the garden and scoop out a cupful for each plant. Pour the water gently near the stem. The leaves don’t need the water, nor does all the area where the leaves spread. When the plants are bigger, give them two or three scoops of water. (If you want to see how much it is raining, put a straight-sided container in a flat place near your garden. Let the kids – or the kid in you – stick a ruler in the water after a rain, and you will know if your plants got their needed inch of rain.) When it is very hot and dry, watering twice a week is probably a good idea.
11) Don’t be discouraged: Yes, failures can happen. A voracious bug can chomp off your emerging beans. Or your cucumber plants can succumb to the frustrating bacterial wilt. If it is still early (say, July), plant again. If you have planted more than one type of vegetable, chances are you will have something to show for your efforts. If you have planted a few different things and kept up with watering and weeding, you should have something to show for your efforts. Meanwhile, the kids learn from the failures if they are cushioned by some success.
And that is really all there is to it. There will be many who vehemently disagree with the above advice. It is true: Gardening can be more sophisticated if one has the time, inclination, and money. For that, there’s plenty of information out there. However, even the professional gardeners who write those books or blogs started with a few plants and a little simple advice. Enjoy!
Sidebar
Oh, Deer
by Ilana Smith
A word about deer: In our garden, one block from Reisterstown Road, we have been spared deer damage, but friends in more open areas have their vegetable plants chewed up, even in pots on their porches! Unlike some husbands and children,deer love vegetables. You can google others’ experience with sprays and other deterrents to keep them away, but a tall fence is what definitely works. It needn’t be Fort Knox, just tall. Amazingly, deer can leap over a three- or four-foot fence. Or, the fence can be around a small enough area that the deer won’t be able to jump in and back out. For a small starter plot, a roll of rigid fencing could encircle your garden with just a single stake to keep it from tipping over. When you work in the space, you could just lift it off, or enter through the side where the two ends meet. You should probably lay a piece of fencing over the top, as well.
