Garden Medley

I’m not Italian, but I am married to one. But even before then I was a major fan of cooking with garlic. I keep a lot of it in my kitchen and I think it’s the perfect thing to grow in my garden.

To get started just head out to the store and buy some heads of garlic. Break them up into individual cloves and plant. They’ll start sprouting in a few weeks. You can even plant garlic in the fall before the ground freezes (if you live in a place where that’s an issue) and it will grow for you come spring. (more…)

So you’ve decided to take the plunge and grow your own vegetable garden. Maybe it’s because you want organically grown produce without the high prices found at the store, maybe you want to show your kids where food comes from or maybe you just finally have room!

Whatever the reason, you want to read up on what you need to get done and keep things under control. Getting too ambitious with a vegetable garden can leave you overwhelmed and limit your ability to enjoy the produce. (more…)

A container garden doesn’t have to be limited to just flowers. You can grow a lovely vegetable garden.

Of course, not all vegetables will do well in containers. But quite a number will do rather well, as many vegetable plants really don’t grow all that large.

Tomatoes are perhaps the classic vegetable to grow in a container. They do well in at least 5 gallon buckets. Sugar lumps are a personal favorite. They’re really small, around 3/4 to 1-1/2 inches in diameter and grow in clusters. They’re just fun to pick and eat. (more…)

In his frustration with our recent failure of a garden, my husband is trying to figure out how to improve the soil for next year. His current idea, which we haven’t yet tried, is to save up veggie scraps and throw them in the blender with some water to pour into the planters.

I understand why he wants to do it - the nutrients should break down much easier in that form and improve the soil pretty quickly, but yuck! I’m trying not to think about what that could do to the blender, which we regularly use to make smoothies. (more…)

Getting your garden off to a good start requires fertile soil. However, the demands of your garden year after year mean that fertilizer is a must.

My personal favorite source of fertilizer is the compost heap. Everything that goes into your compost heap is something that could have ended up in the trash. Then you add in the fact that you don’t have to buy the compost and you have a great deal.

However, other fertilizers can be necessary for other reasons. You may not have a compost heap, may have started it too recently or you need something in your soil that compost can’t provide. (more…)

Square foot gardening was popularized by Mel Bartholemew. The idea is that you can garden more efficiently than the traditional methods allow.

A standard square foot garden layout starts as a 4×4 foot square. Depending on your space you can make several of these, with a 3 foot wide path between each square bed. The paths allow you to care for the garden without compacting it by walking on it, so the soil remains relatively loose.

Most people create boxes to hold the soil above the level of the rest of the ground. This is not an absolute necessity, but it is very common. (more…)