VEGETABLE Self-Sufficiency

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

My first-year garden is strange compared with most first-year gardens. It is not recommended as a first garden for anyone who does not have a goal of providing all their family's vegetable needs directly from the soil. A novice need not make such a dramatic plan.

However, this garden is designed to give a novice confidence in growing and storing vegetables. Onions are easy to grow and store well at any temperature above freezing. Tomatoes and green beans can be canned or frozen. Potatoes and carrots do best in a cool, dark, humid place. A root cellar is ideal, but they can be stored right in the garden under an insulation of hay.

The rest of the crops are there for variety and some summer eating. The second planting of lettuce and the second and third plantings of beans are examples of succession planting. The beans and potatoes are planted together as an example of companion planting.

Planning the Plot

[Illustrations]

The garden is a place for both plants and the gardener. I give myself one foot wide walkways. This allows me to work around the garden without stepping on the soil in which the roots will be spreading. I have found that it is difficult to work soil farther than two feet from where my feet are, so I space the walkways no more than four feet apart.

Each plant is given the space that it needs. For instance, I plot a three-foot-by three-foot square for zucchini. It is a big bushy plant that covers an area with a diameter of three-and-a-half to four feet. When it reaches maturity and overreaches the space I gave it, my visits will be less frequent, only coming by to harvest. Onions, however, grow almost straight up, with slim leaves taking very little space. They are spaced an onion-width apart in rows eight to 12 inches apart. The space between rows is enough to fit my wheel cultivator or a hoe.

The rectangles for each vegetable indicate the space planned for the mature vegetable. The seeds or transplants are planted in the center of these rectangles.

When drafting my garden plot I work in pencil. I have erased through the paper at times as my winter reading has brought a new idea to light. The dates are target planting dates. When I do the actual planting I ink in the date and variety planted, the plot then becomes an excellent record for future reference.

I run my rows north-south. My reasoning is that there is more space between the rows than between the plants in the row. The sun sweeps across the garden every day and will reach each plant more fully if the rows run north-south. In all honesty, if this makes any difference, it's minimal. I just do it because I came up with the idea and because my garden is flat, so I can run the rows any direction I want to. If my garden were on a slope, I would run the rows across the slope, not up and down. You want to do anything you can to prevent erosion.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print