Claude Thompson

IT’S THE GOAL: to use each square foot of vegetable-growing space to best advantage. But the puzzle of what goes where and when, and of course how to execute the plan without wasting time or money or water can be tricky. I asked Carol Deppe, author of the new book, “The Tao of Vegetable Gardening: Cultivating Tomatoes, Greens, Peas, Beans, Squash, Joy, and Serenity,” to share some wisdom.

She is someone I have often heard called a mentor and inspiration by some of my most respected garden friends, especially in the Pacific Northwest. No wonder, because Corvallis, Oregon-based Carol Deppe–also the author of the popular book “The Resilient Gardener”–is pragmatic, but also scientific in her approach, armed not only with precisely the right hoe for the job but also with a PhD in biology from Harvard and a long background in plant breeding.

Read along as you listen to the March 30, 2015 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here). We talked about choosing vegetables to grow in combination (and when some crops are most productive and easiest grown alone); about strategic steps to avoid late blight in tomatoes, and more.

read/listen:

my vegetable-garden q&a with carol deppe

https://robinhoodradioondemand.com/podcast-player/919/margaret-roach-with-a-way-to-garden-march-30-2015-carol-deppe-on-vegatable-gardens.mp3

Q. In your previous book, “The Resilient Gardener,” the sub-headline on the cover includes five crops: potatoes, corn, beans, squash, and eggs. In the new “Tao” book, there are also five: tomatoes, greens, peas, beans, squash. I see that two of my favorite foods made both lists: beans and squash.

A. But the beans this time are green beans, and the last time were dry beans. In “The Resilient Gardener” I was focused more on staples—the things that would produce serious amounts of carbohydrates and protein. In this book, I’m focused on all the other stuff you grow, too—that people grow even if they have very tiny gardens.

If you’ve got a tiny garden, you’re not able to grow very many of your own staples; you’ll probably buy them. But you can do a dynamite job of growing your own tomatoes, and greens—and it’s almost impossible to buy good greens.

Q. In various chapters in “The Tao of Vegetable Gardening,” you touch on your approach in the home garden to pairing crops up, with different strategies. I don’t know if we call it polyculture or…

A. …you can call it multicropping, or some people call it companion planting. But the classical “tomatoes loves carrots”—I don’t go for that at all.

Q. Funny that you say that, because people ask me to write about it, and I’m like: It’s not my thing.

A. There is a lot in gardening that gets written about that’s very romantic but actually doesn’t work at all. [Laughter.]

The practical thing to do with tomatoes is to put them in relatively crudely worked soil, since you’ll be digging a hole anyway, and they’re vegetatively aggressive, and don’t need a fine seedbed.

I usually put my tomatoes that the tiller only went 1 inch deep on; you can’t really plant hardly anything else there. But since I’m digging a hole for the tomatoes anyway, it doesn’t matter.

With the tomatoes I water the planting holes for the first three weeks or so, instead of actually watering the whole patch, so the surface of the ground dries up and I don’t get any weeds. If I try to interplant anything else, that knocks that whole pattern out the window—and I have to actually invest labor in the tomato patch beyond the transplanting. I’d much rather throw the tomatoes into some rough piece of ground, and the only labor I have to do is watering the planting holes.

By the time I have to water the tomato patch along with the rest of the garden, the tomatoes have pretty aggressively sent their roots out into the space between the plants. Nothing else is really going to complete with them, anyway.

Q. So we’re not putting any carrots between the tomatoes, folks.

A. No and especially not the wimpiest, slowest-germinating vegetable around. [Laughter.] That won’t work at all. But there are combinations I really do like.

I love to plant vigorous, big, viney squashes—even summer squashes—in rows a certain distance apart, because later they will fill up all the space between. If you plan to be able to get into the patch at all later on, you need at least 6 feet between the rows.

But they don’t need all that space at the beginning of the season, so that’s a wonderful place—right in between the rows–to put anything fast-growing at the beginning of the season. Something that you can grow a whole crop of and get it out of the way before the vines need the space.

One of my very favorite multicropping combinations, I discovered completely by accident, when I put my squash patch on an area where I’d had a failed seed crop of ‘Russian Hunger Gap’ kale.  I have so many birds, they’d gotten all the prime seed, but apparently the soil was full of ‘Russian Hunger Gap’ kale seeds. So virtually 100 percent of my “weeds” where I planted the squash were my very favorite kale variety.

I weeded them away from the squash, and basically harvested and ate whole kale plants, but between the squash rows I just left them.  I knew the squash wouldn’t need that space until August, so we’d see what happens in August. Up till then then these plants wouldn’t compete at all.

It was perfect having what was going to become my overwintering kale right there in the squash patch that I was watering anyway. I usually have a whole separate piece of ground for overwintering kale that was mostly just empty the rest of the time.

Q. So that could be used for something else.

A. When August came, the squash plants made it out to where the kale was, but the kale was a couple of feet high, and it actually looked happier than I’d ever seen it look in August. I think it actually liked the shade of the squash.

Q. It’s funny how if left to their own devices, plants find their own home.

A. And basically they weren’t competing for soil space or nutrients—the root systems of the squash were back in the root rows, and the kale between those rows. They were really only competing for air space. Then in the fall, when the squash all died back, I had these lovely kale plants—and with practically no aphids.

So at this point I don’t ever plant separate overwintering kale beds; I plant all my overwintering brassicas in swaths—wide rows—in between the beds of squash.

Q. It sounds like it looks great, too.

A. It gives you a wonderful, jungle-like effect. You know, there are different styles of gardening—and the style you should go for isn’t necessarily the same from gardener to gardener. It’s the matter of what gives you the most satisfaction.

Something I talk about in all my books is how to get the most delicious produce from a given unit of land.  I also care a lot about how to get the most delicious produce per amount of labor. In “The Tao of Vegetable Gardening,” I up the ante once more: about how to get the most joy from your gardening.

Q. Is this the “joy and serenity” part of the subtitle?

A. Yes: how to get the most joy for the amount of land or labor. Some people find things that are very ordered to be aesthetically pleasing and satisfying: everything is in rows, and the spacing is exact.

I’m exactly the opposite; I’m sloppy. I like my garden to look like a jungle, with all kinds of plants that are just thriving and if you stand still for three minutes they’ll grow over you.

It’s a very disordered look; my gardens are full of weeds. I do all kinds of things wrong, but I get good production anyway.

One of the points I like to make: You can be really sloppy, and do all kinds of things wrong, and still grow lots of wonderful food.

Q. No matter how good our plan and our pairings, we need to keep it weeded. It helps, of course, if you’re armed with the right hoe. You have two favorites, I think.

A. There are two style of hoeing: one where you lift the hoe and drop it, and for that you need a sharp but heavy hoe, so you can let gravity do most of the work.

The other style you’re going to be pushing or dragging along the ground, and for that kind any extra weight is unnecessary, so you want a very sharp, lightweight hoe.

My peasant hoe is the big, heavy blade—I use that if a patch of pigweed gets away from me, and wants to argue about whose garden it is. Or if the stalk’s woody—you can forget about using a light hoe on that. [Above, Carol with peasant hoe.]

Q. Do you use the Eliot Coleman or Collinear hoe for the other tasks, for finer work?

A. The other hoe I used most is the stirrup-style or oscillating hoe, for areas between the rows and paths. I also have a wheel hoe with an oscillating hoe on it that’s really good for paths.

But when it comes to fine weeding or thinning, where the plants are maybe just a few inches apart—like onion plants, for instance—you don’t want to do any chopping action, or to use a big hole. I like the smallest Coleman hoe [above], with a 3-3/4 inch blade, for that.

Q. I want to take a moment to talk not about the polycultures we discussed earlier, but about a monoculture called “eat all greens” that you discovered by accident.

A. It turns out that some greens grow so fast that if you sow them in beds at the right density, then grow them to a foot or a foot and a half high in two months or less–with the right variety, the entire plant will be succulent. You can clear-cut the whole patch about 3 or 4 inches above the ground, and produce huge amounts of food this way.

But the caveats are that the crop and the specific variety has to grow very fast, and be able to shade out any weeds, and when they’re grown in that density the entire stem needs to stay succulent. It’s all edible, and all weed-free.

[More on eat-all greens: Carol grows greens this way for freezing and drying (as well as fresh eating). Read most of the “Eat All Greens Garden” chapter from “The Tao of Vegetable Gardening” in this preview from Chelsea Green Publishing.

Carol has identified 11 specific vegetable varieties so far that work this way, provided they are planted at the right time and in the right density, and sells seed for some in her Fertile Valley Seeds listing. Huazontle, or Indian spinach; certain kales and mustards, loose-leaf Chinese cabbage and leaf radishes are among the possibilities.]

Q. I loved the section on your tactical measures to help reduce chances of late blight in tomatoes. I think this is a very good time of year to share that, too—it starts with the right plants in the first place.

A. If you buy your transplants, it’s really increasingly critical to buy from reliable local sources. If you go and buy them from a big-box store, a lot of times they’re raised in Florida, where late blight is endemic year-round. So know who you are buying transplants from, and know absolutely that they come from your region.

There have been a couple of times in the Northeast that the late-blight pandemics were traced to tomato starts that came from the South.

Q. Oh, there sure were! And we find that with downy mildew in basil, for instance.

A. So if you don’t do your own transplants, that’s fine, but buy local, from farms you know—or from nurseries, but the plants should have the farm sticker where they come from on them.

Also: If you buy any commercial tomatoes to eat, don’t put any waste from them into the compost. Those tomatoes can come from Mexico, and that is the heartland of new late-blight varieties.

One of the other measures that helps a lot is good potato hygiene.

Q. That’s the truth, isn’t it?

A. Some forms of late blight are more fierce on tomatoes, and some on potatoes—but some affect both.

Q. And potatoes can be a vector for late blight because they overwinter even in our Northern gardens.

A. Exactly—the tubers are living all winter. I think we gardeners are coming under increasing pressure to buy our seed potatoes each year. I don’t go along with that—that’s essentially saying forget heirloom potatoes. But [if you are going to save your potatoes to plant next year] it really pays to learn how to evaluate your potato tubers for late blight and other diseases—in “The Resilient Gardener” I write about that.

[Some of Carol’s tips: Rogue out any “off” plants through the growing season. Store tubers for next year’s “seed” only from plants that yielded average or above-average, because sometimes low yield is the only sign of disease. Don’t save tubers from plants that show any signs of rot, or from the plant’s immediate neighbors. Select the cleanest tubers from the best plants for your seed.]

Q. We didn’t get time to talk about it, but you’re a longtime seed breeder and sell seeds, too—through your Fertile Valley Seeds company on your website.  Thank you for all this, Carol.

enter to win the books

I’VE BOUGHT an extra copy of “The Tao of Vegetable Gardening” and of “The Resilient Gardener” by Carol Deppe to share with two lucky readers. All you have to do to enter is answer this question in the comments box at the very bottom of the page, after the last reader comment.

What combinations are winners in your vegetable garden–things you like to grow together, for any reason?

No answer, or feeling shy? Just say something like “count me in” and I will, but an answer is better. Winners for each book will be chosen at random after entries close at midnight Sunday, April 5; good luck to all. U.S. and Canada only.

prefer the podcast version of the show?

MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its seventh year in March 2016. In 2016, the show won three silver medals for excellence from the Garden Writers Association. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the March 30, 2015 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

(Photos courtesy of Carol Deppe, except tomato seedlings by A Way to Garden. Disclosure: Books purchased via Amazon affiliate links yield a small commission.)

Source: awaytogarden.com

As gardeners, we all suspect that our efforts are saving us money. After all, the work, patience and worry that go into producing a vine-ripened tomato or a perfect zucchini must yield some monetary savings as well, right? Being a bit of a data nerd, I set out to prove the value proposition of vegetable gardening in my own backyard.

It’s important to note that mine is not the story of someone who achieved complete food independence after buying five acres in rural America. My husband and I live on a corner suburban lot that measures .71 acre, just south of Dayton, Ohio (growing Zone 5b); healthy for the suburbs, but certainly not what anyone would call a “farm.” In addition, most of that land is not able to be cultivated. Given what I know of the township’s rather zealous lawn-mowing regulations, I feel pretty confident that we would risk citation if we tried to plow up the sunny front yard or do much more than grow a few attractive herbs out there.

That leaves us with the well-fenced backyard, much of which is shaded by mature pines and oaks. Our total gardening space is 650 square feet of tillable ground, plus four raised beds that masquerade as flower beds. Our “micro-farm” is dotted with a couple of blueberry bushes and an assortment of container-sized fruit trees that are more entertaining than productive. We extend the season with a southwest-facing sunroom and a few sunny windowsills.

My process was simple: For a year, I would keep a running spreadsheet of my garden expenditures and harvests. In expenditures, I would tally things like seeds, plants and peat moss that get used up over the course of a season. I don’t tally expenditures for “capital improvements” like a new tool; after all, “no gear, no hobby.”

The income tallies record ounces of each vegetable or fruit harvested, plus a retail value based on the closest equivalent price I could find at one of the grocery stores I frequent. I always use the price for organic produce if I can find one, since my garden is grown without any chemical pesticides, herbicides or fertilizers. Since I consider my garden my most pleasant part-time job, my purpose was to prove how much money I saved over buying the equivalent amount of produce at a grocery store.

January

Snow blanketed the ground, and nothing was growing when my project started in January. The makeshift cold frame we built over one of the more hidden raised beds was too cold to even shelter leeks, and the unheated sunroom was not warm enough to support the planter box in which we grow lettuces.

However, that doesn’t mean there was no gardening to be done in January. The post-Christmas mail always brings an influx of “garden swag” — the stacks of seed catalogs that allow a pleasant escape from the soul-crushing darkness and cold. I placed an order for approximately $164 worth of seeds and plants, and our garden business started the year as so many others do — in the red.

February

My annual Groundhog Day ritual is starting the pepper seeds. I love to trek out to the shed, dig out the plastic mini-greenhouses meant for seed-sprouting, and poke the little pepper seeds into the trays of soil. These trays take up residence on my kitchen counter over the dishwasher, where the periodic heat from that appliance makes a poor man’s heating mat. I supplement with an old desk lamp fitted with a grow bulb. Others may have far more expensive seed-starting equipment, but mine seems to do the job.

March

March is a month for waiting. The pepper seedlings I started in February filled the kitchen counter. I planted the cold-tolerant lettuces — like corn salad and a mesclun mix — that slowly grow in our large planter box. We supplement the natural light with a bank of basic fluorescent light fixtures intended for workshops; fitted with grow bulbs, these lights are enough to supplement the light coming in through our windowed sunroom walls.

March is also a month for continued investments. I ordered another $37 worth of seeds and plants.

April

Success! The garden is officially making money.

April brought our first harvests, and they were both literally and emotionally sweet after the long winter. We harvested a few ounces of young leeks that grew from seed in an outdoor bed, and a couple of ounces of potatoes from one of our small “trashcan potato” installations — a container in which sprouting potatoes from my pantry potato bin are allowed to grow, flower and die back, giving us new potatoes. The harvest was enough for a batch of potato-leek soup. We also harvested the first of our greens from the sunroom, always a wonderful feeling since store-bought organic greens in their plastic clamshells are so expensive and so flavorless. Although our harvest only amounts to about $4, we are moving in the right direction.

May

When I think of May gardening, I always think of strawberries and peas. I grow both in containers, with the strawberry plants in large urns flanking our back door, giving us a few handfuls of strawberries a year. Peas also grow in containers, which limits their productivity but allows me to completely enclose them in fencing to keep out the now-awake and hungry critters that love my garden as much as I do. With a few more ounces of lettuce, I added a few more retail dollars-worth to my harvest tallies.

May also brings a few more expenditures. Tradition here holds that the last possible frost day is May 15, so Mother’s Day weekend is always spent in the local greenhouse, buying any last-minute seeds and herb plants to replace those that are annual or that didn’t make it through the winter. It makes for a welcome celebration of the end of winter, with the sunroom full of seedlings hardening off and plants awaiting a garden home. The front doorstep is also regularly dotted with deliveries of tomato plants I ordered back in January.

June

June gardens are my favorite gardens, filled with possibilities and with the opportunities for a short break to enjoy. With all of the broadforking, soil amendment (that is, compost sifting and application) and planting done, I can enjoy watching the little plants grow up their trellises and supports, and across the ground. I brought in another harvest of container potatoes and the first of the zucchini. The cucumbers also start to ripen this month, meaning I served sliced cucumbers at every meal and started to put up what would eventually become more than five gallons of bread and butter pickles.

My big surprise in June was the blueberry bushes, which are still young. I’d hoped to get 10 to 12 ounces of berries, but I was surprised by more than a pound and a half of homegrown fruit. Most didn’t make it into the house, as my husband and I shared each handful while we worked. It offset the disappointment at the failure-to-thrive of my radishes and carrots, my first clue that I’d let my soil get too dense.

July

July brought a continued abundance of zucchini, which went into almost everything I cooked, and cucumbers, which threatened to overtake the house some days. We also saw our first basil harvests, which were real treats — although some stores now sell organically grown basil leaves in clamshell containers flown in from California, they compare poorly to fresh basil from the garden. We save a great deal of money by growing our own basil and freezing the extra as pesto.

The first of the tomatoes come in during July as well, which really added to the retail value tally. Organic tomatoes on the vine are quite expensive in the store, so a plant doesn’t have to do much to pull its weight. With no more garden expenditures being tallied, and more than 80 pounds of vegetables harvested year-to-date, we were close to profitability.

August

If retail stores have “Black Friday,” then maybe Midwestern gardeners have “Green August.” The garden vaulted into profitability this month, led by zucchini and cucumbers, which finally quit producing toward the end of the month. With 76 pounds of cucumbers and 37 pounds of zucchini, my garden would have been profitable with these crops alone.

August is a month for abundance. More than 9 pounds of butternut squash went downstairs into storage for winter, and we continued to enjoy tomatoes, peppers and basil. We even harvested two of our first-ever apples from our dwarf apple trees. All in all, we ended the month with a tally of more than 182 pounds of vegetables harvested year-to-date, and we were in the black by $316.

September

September was all about squash and tomatoes. More than 12 pounds of assorted squashes joined the butternut squash already stored away, while every one of my eight varieties of tomatoes earned their keep by reaching a profitable production tally. However, I learned that I stunted my tomato production by letting my soil become too dense; we would purchase peat moss in the fall to start working into the soil to improve things for next year.

October, November, December

The end of the summer garden makes me sad. I brought in the last of the tomatoes, peppers and basil, and we had our first hard frosts. The potatoes continue to produce until the last container is empty. Plants that can over-winter in the sunroom came inside, and our dwarf fruit trees in the “micro-orchard” also came into the house, filling the south-facing window in the dining room and the east-facing window in the living room that gets brilliant morning sun. I looked forward to small harvests like a few ounces of greens and a sprig of rosemary in my pot roast. The harvest ended on Christmas Eve, as we shared an ounce of lettuce, tender and sweet.

Grand totals

The year’s experiment was a success. We grew more than 229 pounds of fruits and vegetables on our property with a retail value of $774.44. Subtract our $303.88 in expenditures, and we cut a healthy $470.56 from our food bill for the year.

Overall, the garden demonstrates that suburban gardeners can achieve a respectable level of savings on the yearly food bill with a modest garden and without any special gardening resources. Although I try to grow as much produce as possible from seed to keep the costs down, I bought tomato plants, herbs and a few cucumber plants to supplement those grown from seed. My seed came from sources that ranged from organic, non-GMO producers to the grocery store, where a lonely envelope or two of hybrid seed begged to come home with me. I fertilized exclusively with compost from a small and well-groomed pile, and I enjoyed the exercise I got from tilling the soil with a broadfork and weeding by hand.

Obviously, savings depends heavily on retail price. I opt to grow a great deal of the crops that are expensive to buy retail, especially those that see a significant price differential for the organic varieties: tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers and basil.

My experiment also proves that a gardener can have more than one failure and still save a lot of money. I lost crops of radishes and carrots in the dense soil, I planted a few pepper plants in a too-shady locale, and some of my squash vines grew impressively but failed to produce. Diversification is key.

Also important is starting small. I didn’t start out with a garden this big; every year, we add another strip of tilled land, another perennial fruit bush or tree, or another decorative raised bed or container. Every year brings a lesson or two, but we have proven that all you need is a bit of space and a desire to garden to save significant money and eat healthier food.  

Read more: Another writer explores the idea of profits from gardening.

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Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti is an independent writer, speaker, and owner of Hilltop Communications. Follow her gardening ventures and sustainable living projects at Fast, Cheap, and Good.

Source: grit.com

People look at my tennis court-sized vegetable garden and think I know what I’m doing. I don’t. My mother is a real vegetable gardener. She’s been fully organic since long before the word was in vogue. She makes her own compost. She soil tests.

I don’t do any of that. I wing it. Sometimes I fail spectacularly, like when I neglected to contain my strawberry patch and it pretty much ate my garden. But I’ve learned a few things over the years, and I do well enough now to make it generally unnecessary to visit the grocery’s produce section for several months running.

Google “vegetable gardening for dummies,” and a number of useful sites pop right up like beans in a bed. I’m going to visit a few of them, after I get this article in. But first, allow me to offer a few pieces of vegetable gardening wisdom that I learned myself, mostly the hard way.

Good fences make good neighbors. Out here in the wilds of West Tisbury, my nearest neighbors are varmints. Deer, raccoons, skunks, rabbits, and woodland rats are all eager to share my garden’s bounty. My first garden fence was composed of tall posts and chicken wire. Something tunneled under the wire into the garden and took bites out of my tomatoes, nibbled the bottoms off my beans, and ate seedlings right down to the soil. After a few years, the chicken wire got rusty and weak, and a pack of intrepid deer burst through it one late fall day and devoured all the kale I still had growing. So I removed the chicken wire and replaced it with stronger, rust-proof green plastic-coated chicken wire, and I trenched all the way around the periphery and buried the wire about a foot underground. Nothing gets into my garden now, unless I forget and leave the door open.

Give your plants a raise. Raised beds (mine are hummocks a few inches higher than ground level) allow for proper drainage so your plants don’t drown in a big rain. But more importantly, they allow for easier weed control. One year, before I started using raised beds, a guest looked out at my garden and said, “Wow! It’s so lush and green in there; what are you growing?” I was growing weeds. Weeds get out of hand in no time flat. That summer, they were waist-high.

Now, I lay down thick layers of straw between my raised beds, and while the straw’s own seeds sometimes sprout, I just pull up the grass and lay it on top, and soon enough, it becomes more straw itself. Other things can be used as mulch between the beds (I’ve even heard of people using newspaper), but I like straw because worms like straw. Worm castings (yes, I’m talking about worm poop) are a gardener’s gold. And by tunneling around underground, worms aerate the soil, making it looser and more amenable to root growth.

Another note on weed control: A couple of years ago, I began using black planter’s paper mulch on some of my raised beds themselves. With plants spaced at least several inches apart, you simply lay the paper (it comes in a roll) over your raised bed and cut holes in it where you want to place your seedlings. Water gets through, but weeds don’t. The paper is biodegradable and can be tilled into the soil when spent. One note of caution: because the paper is black, it warms the soil, so it’s best not used in the full heat of summer around tender plants like lettuces.

“The only way to win is cheat,” says the theme song from “M*A*S*H”. Gardening purists plant everything from seed, starting things indoors in flats. But I’ve learned that cheating — i.e., buying seedlings from local nurseries — is easy, reliable, and time-saving. And you can buy exactly the number of seedlings you want, whereas when you buy a packet of, say, fennel seeds, there are maybe 100 seeds in the packet, and who can possibly fit 100 fennel plants in their garden? Leftover seeds rarely germinate the following year, so you just have to throw out your extras, which always feels wasteful and vaguely murderous to me.

Don’t take tender seedlings straight from the greenhouse to your garden; they’re not yet hardy enough to withstand a cold night. To harden off greenhouse seedlings (i.e., acclimate them to real temperatures), leave them outside during the day and bring them inside for the night. After three or four days, you can put them in the garden.

See to your soil. Plants feed on the nutrients in your soil, so you need to replenish those nutrients every year. In the spring, I dig a few inches of compost into my whole garden, and this year I’ve vowed to finally take a soil tester kit to my dirt. My friend Debby Farber, of Blackwater Farm in West Tisbury, says that soil on the Island tends to be overly acidic, so she spreads lime on her garden annually to up the Ph. (Note: there are two kinds of lime — fast-acting and regular. If you add regular lime to your garden now, it won’t make a difference in your soil until next year. But the fast-acting stuff is caustic and to me a bit scary, since you’re warned not to let it come into contact with your skin.) As for fertilizers, Debby believes you really need only two kinds, Pro-Gro and Pro-Start, both of which are made by North Country Organics. Toss a little Pro-Start into the hole into which you’re putting a seedling to help with root development. As plants grow, sprinkle a little Pro-Gro around seedlings for further feeding.

Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Starting with a tennis court-sized garden can lead to waist-level weeds. Gardening is time-consuming. Some days, it takes me an hour just to pick what’s ripe. So unless you have unlimited time on your hands, start small, until you gain some confidence and know-how, and then expand.

And finally, don’t be afraid to ask for directions. When you encounter problems with mildew, bugs, and blights, (which I’m sorry to say you will, sooner or later), go to your favorite nursery and get advice (and products to remedy the situation.) I sought help a couple of years ago when I had a serious slug infestation; I was directed to a wonderfully effective, organic slug demolisher called “Sluggo.” I don’t want to know how it kills the slugs, or where those disgusting critters go to die, but suffice it to say that a few granules sprinkled around my seedlings seemed to do the trick last summer. No doubt any nursery on the Island could have told me about Sluggo, but I didn’t ask them. I asked my mother.

Source: mvtimes.com