Farm Dreams

Homesteading, Organic Gardening, How to Farm, Preparedness, Self-Reliance

Garden Virgins - A Guest Post from Sweetbreads

The Aspiring Farmer Blog

After reading Daisy’s post from last week I felt like my palm had been read. Found the perfect place and moving in just in time to get some seeds in the ground? Check. Sick of spending money at the grocery store when growing our own food seems to be at the tips of our fingers? Check. Extremely high aspirations for what we’ll be able to produce in the first year? Check.

These are all the ingredients to make a garden failure all that more tragic. It was as if she had already laid my first year of gardening out in front of me... and it was a disaster! The reality is that it probably will be and that mother nature wouldn’t have it any other way, but that’s the first step, right? It almost HAS to be a disaster the first year. So what are we doing to prepare for the impending garden of doom?

Firstly, we ordered a TON of seeds. Yeah... maybe a few pounds less than a ton, but still - way too many. It’s just too much fun seeing all of the things you’ve always dreamed of growing and then having them be available at the click of a button for literally two or three dollars a packet. Especially when you start thinking about how many seeds are in each packet and how much food that would equate to. There is little thought of the extreme amount of labor that will go into it. It’s all glory and garden gluttony. I can see the bounty now!

We also mapped out the garden on the land. There’s a relatively fertile plot just across the driveway from the house. Perfect view from the kitchen and living room window and plenty of southern sun with shade around the edges. We took a soil sample and got the results back this week. We were pleasantly surprised with the results and now we’re ready to plow in, but (like most things in our lives right now), there’s a lot more planning to do in the meantime!

Like Daisy, I had no idea where to start. I spent some time online at GardenWeb and Organic Gardening, checking out lots of forum posts, including Farm Dream’s. I also read a free book by Gertrud Franck called “Companion Planting”, which is available from the Soil and Health website for free, and started reading Elliot Coleman’s book, The New Organic Grower (still working through that one).

One of the great suggestions from a Farm Dreams member was to use the Mother Earth News Vegetable Garden Plannera free tool (for a 30 day trial) that allows you to easily map out your garden beds and plan everything from planting and harvest times based on your location. It’s been very helpful so far and will be a great way to keep notes on each plant variety as it grows (or doesn’t!).

As our garden plot has only a thin layer of nice dark soil above endless inches of heavy red clay, I’m very eager to introduce some additional organic material by using green manure. If you didn’t plant a cover crop, Gertrud Franck has a great suggestion to introduce green manure during the growing season. She plants her entire garden with rows of spinach spaced a foot and a half apart in early spring, leaving no additional space for footpaths. These rows become a grid that outline the spaces for your main crops to be sown or planted. The spinach provides shade and protection to the young main crops as they sprout. Once it has served it’s purpose, the spinach can be cut worked into the soil which then becomes a footpath between rows.

With lots of tips under my belt from my reading and lots of great suggestions from helpful forum posters, the planning has officially begun in earnest. There are obviously still a lot of uncertainties looming - Will we be able to fight off the weeds? Will pests and blights plague us? While we’re doing our best now to learn as much about these things as we can, some things can only truly be learned by doing, and I have a feeling that gardening is going to be one of those.

There’s still a lot we haven’t figured out yet. For instance, what about fencing? How high should the fence be? Should we also put a strand of electric fencing around the outside? Is chicken wire enough, or should we use woven wire?

We also have to address our water needs. We are on a well and the well is very far away from the garden so we’ll be looking into various water collection and storage ideas, potentially combined with pumps and drip irrigation.

We’ve only got 3 weeks left for studying before go-time! How did your first garden experience turn out?

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Tags: Gardening, Little Seed Farm, Sweetbreads

3 members like this

Comment by Jeff Hamons on February 13, 2012 at 2:00pm: RE you going to be building any sort of a hoop house? Starting seeds indoors. These are decesions we are making just like you!

Comment by Joseph Wittenberg on February 13, 2012 at 2:16pm: Sounds like you have some fun coming up! What are you thinking of planting? Thanks for the link to the companion planting. I have a similar book in hard copy but always nice to have the digital back up.

Comment by Little Seed Farm on February 13, 2012 at 2:20pm: We are going to build a hoop house, but probably mostly use it for goat housing. We haven't yet decided what to do for the garden. Maybe low tunnels? Maybe a proper hoop house or quonset? We probably won't be ready to plant much until mid-March/early-April, so we'll miss most of the worst weather for our zone, but we'll also be getting a late start...

Comment by Little Seed Farm on February 13, 2012 at 2:23pm: What are we thinking of planting!? I think it's fair to say "everything"! We got a little over-zealous in our first seed-buying experience and definitely have way too much. Topping the list are various greens (pac choy, spinach, arugula, lettuces, etc). We love fresh greens, so they are top priority. Beans, squashes, herbs, peppers, tomatoes and the like round it out. We used a combination of High Mowing, Seeds of Change and Seed Savers to get everything we wanted (and more). I think next year we'll try some from Baker's too, but hopefully we'll be able to save a lot of our own.

Comment by Joanne Rigutto on February 13, 2012 at 3:31pm: You know, over ordering seed isn't necessarily a bad thing. With the exception of onion and a few other crops, seed, when stored properly, will keep for a very long time. So extra seed is a safety net for this year (if something fails early enough in the season, you still have seed reserves to draw from for a second planting) and if it's something you did well at, you'll have seed of the same variety for next year. I should know, I got ambitious and purchased a pound of butternut squash seed last year and then didn't get any of it planted. I think I have seed now for about 10 years...

On the greenhouse, you can use a hoop house or build a frame out of anything. And it doesn't have to be huge to do a lot of production. I ran around 400,000 plugs through my greenhouse last year and it's only 9' X 10' or so. I stack the trays for germination, use 72 count plug trays instead of individual pots, and then I have tunnels that I can move the trays into for grow out. So you can do a humongous amount of production with just a small space, especially when it comes to greens.

Comment by Little Seed Farm on February 13, 2012 at 4:14pm: Very good point on the storability of the seeds. The people at High Mowing said to double-bag in ziplocs and freeze in an air-tight container for long-term storage. They just said to be sure not to let the seeds thaw out again unless you were ready to use them.

Thanks for the tips on the hoop house and seed starting, we got a lot of work to do on that front!

Comment by Joseph Wittenberg on February 13, 2012 at 4:15pm: Sounds like a great start. If you need some cheap diy hoop house or greenhouse plans I can send you some that I have. If you are concious of the wind you can make a good Pvc hoop house for pretty cheap.

Comment by Joanne Rigutto on February 13, 2012 at 4:51pm: Yup, I'll second what Joseph said. I found out last year that if I orient my tunnels so that they run in the same direction as the wind (in my case I usually have south winds so my tunnels are oriented north/south) and then brace the ends well, you don't have any where near the pressure on them as if you orient them perpendicular to the wind. All I need is some pinch clamps to hold the film on them. When I had them oriented perpendicular to the wind I had to nail down the film with boards and could only access them from the ends, which really sucks when you're working with tunnels that are 50' long and only 42" at the ridge.

PVC hoop houses and tunnels are, in my book, the most cost effective way to get a jump on the season and keep tender crops going through the winters.

Comment by Little Seed Farm on February 13, 2012 at 7:54pm: Thanks Joseph, that would be fantastic. We'll be in touch once we get out there and figure out the strategy. I had seen a couple videos and some instructions for a basic PVC hoop house, seems like a good affordable option

Comment by Daisy on February 14, 2012 at 9:48am: Oh no! I hope I didn't scare you. On the other hand, I wish I had gotten a tough dose of reality before I moved to the homestead. I really thought gardening was easier than I found it to be and I wish I had a better back up plan that first year. By the second year though, we were feeding ourselves 100% from our garden, so necessity lays way for fast learning!

A couple of things that I wish I had known to help that first year are:

- It takes about 5 years of working the soil (adding green manures, compost, etc.) for virgin land to become productive, so until then expect pests, lack of nutrients, poor water holding, etc. To hurry this along you can either put in raised beds, try lasagna gardening, or till in TONS of organic matter.

- Grass clippings are your friend! Get a mower with a bag attachment and cut grass ALL the time. Don't let the grass go to seed, but cut it before it seeds and then use the clippings like mulch in your garden. You have to put it on very thick but it will form a mat which will hold in water and keep out weeds. Push it away from the very base of your transplants or else it could rot them. The clippings will compost into the soil and make extra rich and fluffy soil for the next year.

- Trust your local feed/hardware store. These people know what grows in your area. At first I thought buying seeds from a dusty old place was not as good as the fancy catalogues, but when my crops failed and I went to the small local store saying I needed something fool proof they knew what to give me. They know the varieties that will grow in your climate, when to plant them, and many old farmer's tales about how to get the best crop. From there, I was able to venture out to the more exotic veggies and knew I always had something to fall back on.

- Buy a duster and a bag of diatomaceous earth. I don't like using DE too much because it can hurt the beneficial insects as well, but I was bombarded by so many pests the first year that I had to do something just to save some food for us. Hand picking didn't keep up with them, garlic spray didn't keep them away, and I was committed to as natural a garden as possible, so I opted for DE and dusted the plants that were being attacked every morning for about 2 weeks until it broke the insects life cycle. It saved a few hole filled cabbage heads for us and I'm happy to say that by year 3 I no longer needed to dust the cabbage because I had figured out better ways to grow it (spaced further apart, under fabric row cover and lots of onions in between).

You're right on when you say that you'll just have to jump in and start learning. Different things will happen in your garden than anyone else and so you'll learn what works best for you. Keep the faith and learn every gardener's mantra which is "There's always next spring!"