Gardening Tips for my Friend

Posted by Katie Elzer-Peters
March 26th, 2009
Filed in Garden Maintenance
Tags: flowers, vegetables, Weed Control

Does Your Garden Look Like This?

I am hoping to be in good enough shape-physically and economically-this fall to have Nancy teach me how to surf. In the meantime, she said she has been reading the blog for gardening tips, so I told her I would write one in her honor today. I am not exactly sure how much gardening experience Nancy has, so I’m going to make this post really basic. If you have never gardened before, and you are looking forward to planting a garden this summer, here is how to do it.

So you Think you Can Garden?

I have good news for you! Anyone can garden! Let’s say you want to plant a few yummy vegetables and a few flowers this summer. You don’t want to spend a lot of money, and you don’t have a whole lot of space. You have a little bed on a sunny side of your house. Maybe you only have enough space to grow in containers. Here’s what you do.

Step One: Select your Location

Are you planting vegetables or flowers? Do you want a perennial garden (plants that come up every year) or annuals (plants that you re-plant each year)? If you are planting vegetables, you need a location with full sun (at least 8-10 hours of sunlight a day). The west and south sides of a house are ideal. In the south, you can supposedly grow lettuce and a few green leafy vegetables in part shade during the deep summer. We’ll see.

Step Two: Decision-Seeds or Transplants?

There are a lot of things you can plant directly outside, from seed, that will sprout easily. Most of the plants in my “seed mosaic” post are easy to grow. Turnips, beeets, swiss chard, spinach, lettuce, and radishes are all great cool season seed crops. Squash, pumpkins, dill, and cucumbers are good summer seed crops. You can also grow sunflowers, zinnias, marigolds, four-o-clocks, cosmos, and amaranth easily from seed in the summer. Sow cool season crops about a month or two before average last frost. (Nancy-that is NOW in coastal NC!) Sow warm season crops directly into the ground after danger of frost has passed.

Transplants are great for things like tomatoes, eggplant and other warm season crops that you would like to start producing before August. Transplants do go through a bit of a “shock” after you put them in the soil, but you can make up some time over direct-sowing seeds. I feel like transplants from the store are just as good as those you grow yourself, unless you want a lot of one particular plant. (I am starting basil inside because I want twenty basil plants. Yes, I’m insane. Don’t go there.) I have noticed, over the last three weeks, that it really did take about three weeks for my lettuce transplants to snap out of their funk after I planted them, while the seedlings are up and doing well.

Step Three: Coming to Terms with your Time

The types of plants you grow have a lot to do with how much time you want to spend taking care of them, and how much of each you want to eat. If you don’t want to eat zucchini every day for two months, don’t plant more than two or three zucchini plants! If you don’t like cutting flowers for the house, or constantly dead-heading, you might rather grow perennial plants-a nice assortment that blooms throughout the summer-instead of annuals that require more care and feeding. Easy plants: daylilies, mexican sage, mexican petunia, lantana, guara, ornamental grass, knockout roses, beets, radish, lettuce, turnips. Time consuming plants: tomatoes, summer squash, hybrid tea roses, annual flowers (zinnia, marigold, salvia).

Step Four: Prepare the Soil

Unless you are blessed with lovely, loamy and fertile soil, you will need to amend your soil by adding compost or other organic matter. (For a great primer about how to do this, get our ebook!) You can buy compost, or make your own. You’ll find a lot more info about compost makers in our compost pages!

Step Five: Plant and Maintain

If you plant your plants in good soil, in a location where they will be happy, all you really need to do is weed, water and harvest throughout the summer. If you can, feed with compost tea, or a seed meal mix. Most gardens fail because people stop paying attention to them. The plants still need water if you go on vacation. Don’t forget about them!

We’ll do some more easy gardening tips posts later on, but if you are thinking of gardening this summer, start working on your soil and planning your garden! It is time.