VEGETABLE Self-Sufficiency

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

The first plot is designed to give a novice gardener confidence while introducing a number of gardening techniques. You will notice that most of the planting for the first year is done on Memorial Day weekend. This is the beginning of the frost-free season in my garden, and the time most gardeners in this area do most of their planting. The idea is to focus on planting for a day when the motivational juices of spring are running high.

Tilling and Planting

Ideally the garden spot was tilled between a week and two weeks before planting (see "Turning Sod into Garden Soil," in the January issue, #153). During the 10 days, give or take, since tilling, thousands of weed seeds have sprouted. They send hairlike roots down and a fragile stem up. You can easily dispatch these thousands of weeds by raking, hoeing or otherwise cultivating the soil surface before planting. Do it.

Onions

Onions are easy to plant, easy to grow, and easy to store. One hundred feet of row will yield as much as 100 pounds of onions from two pounds of sets. Sets are small onions that were started from seed and had their growth interrupted. I make a trough two or three inches deep with the corner of my hoe, push the sets into the bottom of the trough root-end down, pull the soil back into the trough, and firm it.

Zucchini and Cucumbers

To plant zucchini and cucumbers I spread the fingers of one hand as widely as possible and push them into the soil in the center of the designated area, making five indentations about half an inch deep, drop a seed in each, fill with soil, and firm with my hand.

Tomatoes

Tomato seedlings are practically indestructible except by cutworms. The defense against cutworms is to make the transplanting as stress-free as possible. We're talking about the plant's stress, not yours. Seedlings are, after all, babies, and should be treated as such. They have been growing inside, so make their transition to the outdoors gentle. Expose them to the sun an hour the first day, two the second, four, six, in successive days. This is called hardening-off. I put them in a place where the sun's movement will cause them to be in shade after approximately the time I plan for, so that they will not get sunstroke if I forget.

The next trick is to separate them without damaging the roots. The roots will have become tangled together in the planting mixture of the seedling flat. I remove the flat and place the mat of roots in a bucket of water, into which I poured a couple of tablespoons of liquid seaweed. I work the plants back and forth in the water while pulling them gently apart. Some roots will break-it's inevitable. But tender loving care will keep the damage minimal. Plant them two or three inches deeper than they grew in the potting soil in holes three feet apart. They love it when you work some compost into their new home. Firm the soil around their roots. When they are all planted, empty the bucket of water on them equally. Then give them some more water so the soil is soaked down to the bottoms of their roots. The best time of day to do this is evening so they don't have to withstand a blazing sun all day while they are trying to adjust to their new environment.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print