HOME GARDEN'S EXPERTS DESIGN A VEGETABLE MINI-GARDEN FOR $10
May/June 1974
By the Mother Earth News editors
No, you don't need a couple of acres-or a small fortune in seeds, plants and tools—to grow a healthy patch of garden truck. Back in 1970, the staff of Home Garden magazine set out to demonstrate that fact . . . and here's their recipe for good summer eating . . . with all prices brought up to date for the spring of 1974.
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Reprinted by permission from Home Garden magazine, Vol. 58, No. 2, February 1971, Copyright 1971, Universal Publishing and Distributing Corp.
Last year about this time the question came up in Home Garden's editorial department: "Why can't we do a story on a vegetable garden small enough to fit in any yard, yet big enough to give a harvest that will make the effort worthwhile?"
After considerable thought, we decided to grow this garden so that we could talk from practical experience.
So, during the 1970 growing season the Home Garden Vegetable Mini-Garden was actually grown ... and proof that it did produce bountiful crops is shown in the photograph at left. All the vegetables in the photograph actually came from the minigarden ... picked by Editor Bill Meachem and his son last September.
The garden we thought about last February was to be just
10 by 20 feet. But growing even a garden of this size was out of the question in our editorial office in midtown Manhattan, New York. Our friends at W. Atlee Burpee Co. came to our rescue. They volunteered not only to help us in the selection of types of vegetables to grow in such a small area, but also to actually grow the garden for us at their Fordhook Farms in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.
Our main purpose in designing and growing the minivegetable garden was to dispel the idea that you need vast areas of ground to grow vegetables. Even a city gardener can often find a plot 10 by 20 to keep him in fresh vegetables for almost six months . . . at a cost of less than $ 10.00 for seed.
The vegetables we used were typical "small-garden" kinds and all seeds and onion sets could be purchased for $8.95. Following are the varieties that were used in our experimental planting.
The first reaction many old-hand vegetable growers might have is that our harvests are too small to be practical. Our purpose was to provide fresh vegetables for immediate table use, and we did not expect to reap harvests that would allow.
for canning or freezing. However, at harvest time last fan, our tomato crop was abundant enough so that a few jars could have been put up before the frost demolished everything.
For all practical purposes, ours is primarily a salad garden. Everything we grew could be used fresh from the garden with no preparation. (The only exception would be the beets, but we have several people on the editorial staff who feel that pickled beets are a "must" in the summer salad.)
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