GARDENING: PART III. WHAT TO PLANT WHERE AND WHEN

Okay, so now we’ve figured out how much we need to plant, so WHERE do we plant it and WHEN do we plant it? This can be two major questions.

Anyone living in the USA this spring knows our weather has been beyond belief weird this year.  Generally you can plant based on the predicted last frost dates for your planting zone and be pretty safe.  Only this year there are parts of the nation still watching snow melt on Memorial Day Weekend, and parts of the nation, like Oklahoma, have been as high as 90 on one day and below freezing the next.  This can make deciding on when to plant your garden a real challenge.

Once you get it in you also need a game plan for protecting tender plants if the temps do bottom out suddenly, or shoot up to uncomfortable limits quickly. 

There are numerous ways to protect from cold temps ranging from throwing an old blanket or sheet over the plants, to misting them with water, smudge pots or wall-0-water or glass cloche or bell jar.  How you do it is up to you, just remember if you plant early you do run the chance of a late freeze.

If you would like to use the wall-0-water system, but can’t go the price to purchase them then make your own.   It is VERY simple.  Fill empty plastic two liter bottles with water and set them in the sunshine around your tender plants to warm up during the day.  Then at night that water will expel the heat to your plants helping to protect them.  I have used this method with success many times.  When the temperature was predicted to really drop I’ve also dropped old sheets over the tops of the plants that were surrounded by my 2 liter water wall and it has worked as a greenhouse to protect the plants even at below freezing temps quite well.

Speaking of green houses. If you are determined to get a jump start on early gardening you can of course run a low hoop house over your garden rows, or use hot boxes or cold frames to get an early start as well.

The only problem with any of these ideas is you need to be certain to remove them once the weather heats up to prevent burning your plants.

Ideally I would love to be a person who is so organized that I plant all my garden by the moon phases.  Realistically, life happens and I end up trying to hit it as close as possible.

The idea behind planting by the moon phases is that it has been documented that certain crops do better if they are planted in the light or dark of the moon.  Light of the moon for above ground crops, dark of the moon for below ground crops.  Okay, so what is considered the light and dark of the moon.

The light of the moon is during the first two quarters of a moon cycle.  Meaning preferably close to the full or new moon phases.  With root crops being planted just after the full moon for best results.

Another consideration is the astrological sign that works best for your particular plants.  Since you can’t easily ask a plant “What’s your sign?”  I’ll provide them here.

As would seem logical root crops are basically your earth signs of Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn.  While your leafy crops be planted during Cancer, Scorpio and Pices.  Flowers thrive better if planted during Gemini, Aquarius, and Libra.  With seedy crops like strawberries  and nut trees do better if planted during. Aries, Leo and Sagittarius.  However, many believe that planting in these last signs, known as the fire signs, will not do well because they represent a barren time.  I’ve not experimented with this to see which holds true for me.  Perhaps one of you can and get back to me.

there has always been a bit of confusion for me, because some crops, say beets or radishes, are both above and below ground crops.  The young greens are good to eat and that part grows above ground, while the main plant you are growing for later consumption is below ground.  

Then does it mean plant the seed or plant the transplant?  Hmmmmm.  Time for a little research.

Sheer logic on the which moon phase of the dual crops would say go with which you want the most of tops, or bottoms on the plants.  Or you could compromise and plant right at the full moon and perhaps have lush growth of both.

The when does it apply to planting seeds or putting transplants in the ground took a little more research. Once that was done I found it was BOTH.  So if you are starting your seeds whether indoors or out you would plant.  Seeds or plants  for produce with seeds on the outside of the plant, like strawberries, nuts or blackberries should be planted between the New moon and the First Quarter.

Those that produce with the seeds inside them, like tomatoes, cucumbers etc should be planted between the First Quarter and the Full Moon.

Followed by root or bulb plants going in the ground either as seeds, or plants between the Full Moon and the Third Quarter.

It is suggested you should save the fourth quarter for harvesting to extend the keeping of the produce longer.

Like I said this is the ideal planting schedule.  The in real life schedule for me tends to be when I have  both the time and the gumption.

I do, however, work hard at companion planting.  A few years ago I spent a few weeks putting together an interactive spreadsheet as to what is best to plant near what for best natural plant protection.  It also includes what NOT to plant next to each other.  This chart has served me well and am very glad I took the time to do it.

I also try to rotate my crops to avoid problems each year as well.  But that is not always do able. An example are potatoes and tomatoes.  You should never plant either of them in a spot that has been planted the year before with either plant, because they are of the same family and are affected by the same pests.  But with the layout of my gardens, shade problems and other considerations I often find I can’t avoid at least some overlap. 

I’ve not had any huge problems so far, but then my soil is always being added to in the Lasagna Gardening Method.   This type of gardening is much like the gardening method of Ruth Stout or the Back to Eden Gardening Method. So that may have something to do with the lack of major problems.  After all in a sense I am rotating the garden soil, just not the plant rotation.

I tend to plant more by what space I have where.  Also by what permanent trellis is available.

This year is a prime example.  Generally I put the tomato plants in one of the middle rows of the main 24’ x 24’ garden and use tomato cages to try and support them.  My tomatoes always outgrow my cages no matter how hard I try and end up creeping on the ground.  This is not a good thing.  It increases the chances of problems like slugs, snakes, tomato bugs and rotting tomatoes. 

Therefore, this year I’ve decided to plant my tomato plants on the far outer edge of the garden where there is a permanent short trellis made from scraps of horse panels.  It runs the full 24 foot length of the garden there.  My plan is to tie the plants to this trellis in an Espalier fashion. While I won’t get as decorative as you would with fruit trees for this summertime crop I will basically use the same principles for all but two plants that I will put in flower pots to move to the indoors this fall.

Many people do not realize that tomato plants are actually perennial plants, as are pepper plants, but die back each fall when temperatures drop because they are a tropical plant. I am hoping to have our hoop house recovered by fall and will be able to move plants into it to extend our growing season. But that is another project for another day.

Back to planting the tomatoes.  According to my companion planting chart the good companions for tomatoes are: alliums (onion, garlic, chives etc), asparagus, basil, bee balm, borage, carrots,  celery, chard, horehound, mint, parsley, peas, and thyme.

The same chart also says avoid planting broccoli, corn, cucumber, dill, kohlrabi, and peaches near tomatoes. 

I take near to mean up close and personal, as in sharing the same bit of soil for some types of pests, and air space for others.

Based on this I will space the tomato plants to go the 24 foot length of the garden evenly. Then start working on the spaces in between.  This is where my pre-set garden areas and family preferences come in.

For some reason I’ve never had any real luck with onions other than Egyptian Walking Onions.  These onions can eventually be invasive, so you need to think about where you want to plant them, because they are a perennial plant if you let them have their way.  So these I won’t put in the main garden area at that trellis as many plants don’t do well with onions.  

I had lost my Egyptian Walking Onions years ago to my geese who had literally rooted out and ate them all.  A friend (thanks again Bob) recently gave me several generous starts of these wonderful onions that I can use year round and I want to get them in the ground asap.  I love these onions because they are self propogating, and grow year round.  I have often harvested them out of the snow.  Unless I truly need the bulb I don't pull the onions I simply cut the tops and they grow again, divide and multiply,  as well as the little bulbs that spring from the top every year that "plant" themselves wherever they land.  Truly a perpetual garden item with very little care.

However, alliums are suggested to companion plant with grapes and since that is a permanent garden some of my Egyptian Walking Onions  will be planted in that 24 x 4 foot garden.  I’ll plant others elsewhere to insure I never lose my entire crop of them again.  

The asparagus bed is on the opposite side of the garden and is where I had most of my tomatoes last year.  The permanent trellis on that side is mainly used to tie up the asparagus fronds as I let some of the asparagus go to seeds each year.  So no asparagus. 

Moving on to basil.  Yes I definitely will plant this near the tomatoes.  I do every year and both have done excellent as a result. My son and I love fresh pine nut and basil pesto, so I will plant a lot of this fast growing herb in the ground around the base of each plant. 

I plan on putting my bee balm and borage near the base of the grapes as well to encourage bees to pollinate my grapes in the years to come.  Both are basically self seeders, so they will do well with the other companions to go in this bed.  That will pretty well fill the grape bed and remove three “I want to plant” items from my planting list.

Although it is actually getting a little late in the season to do chard I will go ahead and plant it mixed with carrot seeds in a line between the tomato plants.  This serves multi-purposes.  The carrots will grow underground, not really taking up space from the above the ground crops.  The chard will help break the soil “crust” for the carrots.  Both benefit not only each other but the tomatoes as well.  We also be able to eat both the carrot greens and the chard as time goes on.

Because the mints and horehound can both be very invasive I will be planting those in pots on the outside of the garden  framework, but near the trellis.  I will also plant my herbs all in pots so they can be brought indoors this fall. 

By doing all of the above I’ve made my plan for all those plants in two long narrow strips.

I also discovered a problem when looking at the companion planting chart.  I had planned on planting the second row of the garden a Three Sisters row to take advantage of the main sunshine there. 

However, with looking at my companion planting chart one of the Three Sisters, corn, is not good for tomatoes.  So the second row will now be used for something else and the Three Sisters will be the third row.

Checking my companion planting chart I found I could put my pepper plants on the row and they would do fine between the two now already planned first and third rows.

Continuing on using my companion planting chart and eliminating things that already had a designated area, or for one reason or another I continued to plan out the 24’ x 24’ garden.

I had decided the last time I planted sweet potatoes and they had tried to take over the world that the next time I planted them they were going in the 8’ x 8’ garden and would be kept trimmed to stay IN that garden.  So that was decided quickly.  I choose from my companion planting chart things like bush beans that would grow up above the sweet potato vines.  With that garden being 8’ x 8’  I could let the sweet potato vines pretty much solidly cover the ground and root to form numerous sweet potatoes  and not fear having to step into it to harvest the produce from the upright plants because one or all of us could reach the plants if planted properly from the edges fairly easily.  Well except for maybe the middle plants, so I’ll put a long time to harvest date plant there.

This only left the 8’ x 24’ garden to decide on.   By the time I got to this point it was a matter of “what is left that I want to plant that does well in partial to full shade in the heat of the summer? 

Once the garden planning was done it is simply a matter of increasing the soil level where I needed to and getting started planting.

Jan who will next do a post on the actual planting, and adding or soil and trellises in OK

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE GARDEN PLAN: PART II-HOW MUCH?

This is a huge question for any gardener.  How much do I plant? 

According to intensive gardening guru John Jeavons you need 4,000 square feet PER PERSON to grow all the vegetables and soft fruits you would need for one year.  Let’s be honest, most people don’t have that much space.  For our family of three that would be 12,000 square foot of medium production rate garden space.  Or a large intensively planted garden of roughly 30 x 400 feet.  While we have sufficient land to put in that much garden.  It would entail a whole lot more work to prep the land for it than I was willing to do this spring.

However, with that being said there are a lot of other factors to consider. Like what you plant, when you plant it, succession planting, seasonal changes, pests, cut and come again crops and similar factors.  Also is not including the possibility of year round gardening, which I’ll go more into in the future. 

Basically with the year round gardening you eat with the seasons, so then the whole numbers game changes.

If you subscribe to Mel Barthlomew’s Square Foot GardeningMethod then you are probably familiar with his plan that includes 16 square feet (4 x 4) of salad greens, 16 square feet of dinner vegetables and 16 square feet of additional to preserve per person.   So to do that method for our family of three would mean nine 4 x 4 gardens.  This may be a better alternative for others, but my gardens are already set up, more or less.  So I need to look more at planting rows of food, rather than squares of food.  That does not mean I cannot include some of his intensive methods in the garden.  It simply means I need to plan my layout differently.

I, therefore, am looking at combining the thoughts of both gentlemn with the ideas of the Dervaes Family of California that live on one tenth of an acre city lot in the middle of Pasadena, CA and produce 6,000 pounds of food a year, to simply stretch our grocery budget and feed us in a healthy manner. I will never be as intense as the Dervaes family, but I do learn from their experience.

By calculating how many square feet I have to work with for my particular garden spaces, not including flower pots and planters I can get an idea of how much planting space I do have.  Those calculations to begin with look this way:

24 x 24 = 576 square feet

24 x 8 = 192 square feet

24 x 4 = 96 square feet

8 x 8 = 64 square feet

This ideally totals to 928 square feet, so very short of the 12,000 square feet recommended by Mr. Jeavons.  The reason I say ideally is because the square footage is chopped up due to the layout of my gardens and parts of some of the gardens are already occupied with perennials that include grapes, asparagus, horseradish (maybe, more on this later), and garlic.

I can extend this square footage with the flower pots and planters I’ve previously mentioned but one step at a time. First I need to calculate exactly how much I need to plant when to feed our family this next year.  So back to the calculations.

By cruising the web I gathered information on how much seed or plants you would need per person and have created a spreadsheet of the various foods I listed in my previous post, along with several others.  This is of course based on what my family will actually eat. No two families eat identical and what grows well in one area, will not grow well in another.  Some charts on the web calculate slightly different amounts, but they all boil down to pretty similar in the amount of space if doing row planting.

Of course if you are doing square foot or Intensive gardening your amount of space will be far less.  I tend to trellis up whenever I can to save space and for safety sake.

Yes safety sake.  It’s far too easy to trip over a hidden pumpkin on a vine covered ground, or worse yet meet an unfriendly snake as you high step along.  Up is far better!

When going up you may need to make slings out of old t-shirts, panty hose or similar stretchy fabrics for heavier fruits like squash, melons and pumpkins.  We’ve “diapered” many a piece of produce with excellent results.

After I did the chart I realized that more was going to have to go into pots than I’d originally planned on, but I already had the pots so this wasn’t a problem for me. As previously stated in the 'Mater Challenge", you can grow a LOT in a flower pot.

Next to figure out what to plant where for the best sunlight, companion planting and space.

Jan who finally has the geese out of her garden and is hoping to use the Memorial Day weekend to get it all planted in OK

 

 

THE GARDEN PROJECT: PART I

It happens every spring.  We get a flash of warm weather, then some dreary cold days and of course the “crud” hits the household in one way or another—generally me.  I, of course, always recover but while I’m hacking my way back to the land of the breathing my thoughts turn toward the warmth of summer and the beckoning garden plot out back.

Oh, I’ve already heard that siren’s call earlier in the year—like January 1, but I’ve not really done anything about it.  Now as I cough and carry on I look over my budget for the coming year and feel panic rising at the cost of groceries and animal feed.  I know in my heart I’m probably over estimating the cost of those items, but the sheer numbers of it is enough to send me back to bed to pull the covers over my head.

So the natural segue for me is to think about gardening.  I have the area, I have seeds, or can buy them, and I have the time.  So why not?  Oh I could come up with a long string of why nots.  But the truth is the only main one is laziness on my part.  I’ve always got an excuse as to why not to get started, but there is always a work around that excuse too, if I’d just apply myself.

Acknowledging this publically is one way I am hoping to push myself to have the garden on my dreams this year.  I’ve decided to use Mind Your Pennies as a way to journal my path to what I hope will eventually turn into a year round garden. 

I invite you to come along on that path and to blaze a trail of your own.  Whether it’s an herb in a pot on a window sill, or a full blown garden let’s see how we can work together to help feed our families on a budget. 

Along the way I’ll list my excuses for not doing something, and how I dealt with those.  I’ll list reference materials, websites and give some recommendations. Or at least that is my plan.  

I would love to have your input along the way.

 So here goes.

EXCUSE #1: The birds are living in my garden, so I can’t start now, it will have to wait.  While it is a fact of life right now, it is also merely an excuse. REALITY CHECK: We have other places we could safely house the 18 geese each night IF we’d just do a little repair. 

EXCUSE #2: Gary is working overtime all weekend, so he can’t work on the other locations this weekend.  Sean and I are still recovering from our annual bout with the crud. Whine!  REALITY CHECK: There are other things I can be doing to prepare for gardening that do not necessarily require I be in the garden this weekend.  In fact most of those other things can be done sitting down and fairly still. 

So enough whining woman, get started!  Did I mention I often talk to myself?

So let’s look at those things I can do sitting in the warmth of my home and in fact at the computer while recovering from this stupid head cold. So pull up your favorite cuppa and let’s get started.

PLANNING:  Any good garden plan includes just that a plan. So let’s start with that.  Planning the garden.

All good plans start with a list.  Great, I’m good with lists, it’s the follow through I often have trouble with. So let’s go there. Just exactly WHAT do I WANT to raise.  Well I want to raise it all of course.  But that is where I generally get in trouble.  I over plan my garden area, and as a result end up with an uncontrollable jungle I am afraid to go into for fear of not seeing a snake until it is too late later in the summer. So much of what I plant goes to waste.  So I need to keep my urges under a reasonable control this year.

I’ll start out with my ideal garden list and then trim it down on paper to a realistic list as I go over the next several posts. 

So here’s what I’d ideally like to grow this year:

FRUITS: watermelon, cantaloupe, strawberries, grapes (two types), blueberries, various other melons, gooseberries I love trying new fruits and veggies and Baker’sSeeds makes that all too easy.

VEGETABLES: green beans, garden peas, purple hull peas, black eyed peas, corn, snow peas, potatoes of various colors, sweet potatoes, acorn squash, turban squash, zucchini, crookneck squash, a variety of summer and winter squashes, cucumbers of various types,  Jerusalem artichokes, artichokes, asparagus, assorted beans, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, carrots, turnips, rutabagas, beets, radishes, lettuces, okra of various types, salad greens, onions of various types, spinach, rhubarb, tomatillos in various colors,

TOMATOES: Roma/paste, yellow, white, green, red, pink, slicers, grape, and cherry of various colors, lots and lots of tomatoes!

PEPPERS: Bell of a variety of colors and sizes, jalapeno, chipotle, poblano

HERBS: sage, oregano, marjoram, mints of various types, catnip, thyme, dill of a couple of types, stevia, cilantro, parsley of various types, chamomile, chives of various types,

EDIBLE FLOWERS: Pansies, Nasturtiums, violas, roses, calendula, sunflowers (for seeds)

Whew!  I’m already tired and I know I’ve missed some of the things I THINK I MUST have. 

REALITY CHECK: I only have a certain amount of basic garden space.  That is currently the following gardens (1 each) 24 x 24; 24 x 8; 24 x 4 (which currently have my grapevines in it) and 8 x 8.   I do have a lot of planters around the gardens edge inside the garden cage that herbs and similar items could go in.  I also have areas outside the garden that I could hang planters out of the reach of goose necks that could be used.

So my list is made—ha, ha.  Now how much of each should be planted to meet our needs. We are a family of three, plus I want to preserve foods for this coming winter and future needs, just in case I don’t make it to year round gardening.  Enough of that negative thought Jan, you must be positive you can do this AND do year round gardening (sorry had to take a time out to scold myself.).

So step #1 making the list, the subject of this post is sort of completed.

 I’ll end this post here by encouraging you to make your own ideal list and move on to step #2 where we’ll trim that list.

Jan who knows her list is far bigger than her gardening space and capabilities in OK