Starting A Vegetable Garden

There is nothing like the taste of fresh vegetables grown in your own backyard. Whether you grow your favourites or try something new, there are a few simple tips to help you get started and enjoy your produce season after season.

Does anyone remember Ruth Stout? Over a half-century ago, she pioneered what she called her “no work” vegetable gardening method. It wasn’t completely “no work,” but it was a lot less work than a typical vegetable garden.

Ruth’s method has been resurrected recently by an English garden writer named Charles Dowding in his book “No Dig: Nurture Your Soil to Grow Better Vegetables with Low Effort.” Dowding sums up the method this way: “Simple is best. Taking easier approaches that work well is clever rather than lazy.”

I’ve tried all sorts of ways to grow a vegetable garden, and most take a lot of work. So much work that by July, when the spring crops have finished, replaced by oodles of weeds, retiring to the veranda for a cool drink seems like a much better idea than fighting weeds under a broiling sun to keep the vegetable garden tidy and productive.

I also have gardened by Ruth Stout’s no-work method, which she explained and showed to me at her Connecticut home. It really works.

“You don’t have to work but two days a year,” she said. “One day in the early spring and one day in the late fall. All the rest of the time is just planting seedlings and harvesting crops.”

She took her cues from nature: “If you look at how nature works, she doesn’t till the soil,” Ruth told me. “Each fall, she puts down a new layer of leaves that decay over winter to feed the soil. I just do it with hay.”

And so around Thanksgiving and on an occasional Valentine’s Day, Ruth spreads her vegetable patch with a few inches of weed-seed-free hay, such as alfalfa or timothy.

Kept moist, the hay decays, releasing its nutrients into the soil. The annual applications ensure there’s always actively decaying plant matter soaking into the soil. Actively decaying organic matter is the key to good garden nutrition. Renewing the hay each year does it, but so will 2 or 3 inches of compost covering the garden patch each fall, and again in spring if you think it’s needed.

Ruth Stout’s method

In the first year, whether you’re beginning your no-work garden now or in the fall, cut down anything growing on your new patch with a lawn mower set as close to the ground as possible.

Water the soil well, then lay down single pieces of cardboard from opened, flattened cardboard boxes over the whole patch. Soak the cardboard, then cover it with hay or compost and water it again.

Keep it simple by making your patch small — maybe 10 by 15 or 20 feet. A 10-foot wide patch with a path for walking down the middle will give you two areas of hay or compost for planting on each side of the path. It will be easy to reach the middle of each area from both the patch and the outside of the patch.

Dispense with the tedious work of thinning and weeding by foregoing planting seeds in the garden. Either buy started seedlings at a garden center or start your own in peat pots in a warm sunny spot.

When the starts have four true leaves, transport them to your no-work garden.

Planting makes perfect

To plant a started seedling, simply pull a handful of hay or compost aside and plunge a garden knife or trowel through the cardboard, opening a hole just big enough to accept the seedling. This will be easier after the cardboard decays and becomes incorporated in the soil by the next season.

Now pull the hay or compost back and snug the seedling into the hole. Don’t be afraid to use close spacing because there’s a lot of nutrition in the decaying mulch.

Water the seedlings well. The cardboard and the layers of mulch will prevent most weeds from sprouting, greatly reducing your need for weeding. The mulch also will slow the evaporation of groundwater, reducing your need for watering. Tests have shown that soils rich in organic matter hold water like a sponge, cutting way back on drought damage to crops.

And the decaying hay or compost will deliver fresh supplies of nutrients to your plants as needed and in the form they like (natural rather than synthetic chemicals).

Don’t let spent crops linger. When production slows, pull them out and either toss them on your compost pile or onto your garden patch.

Stagger them seasonally. Replace spring peas and spinach with midsummer crops like summer squash, cucumbers, beans, eggplant and, of course, tomatoes. In mid-August, start fall crops like chard, kale, peas, carrots and beets and Chinese veggies from seed in small peat pots you can tuck into the garden when summer crops start to slow. Plant potatoes as whole spuds into holes you poke through the mulch.

Leave chard and kale, plus root crops, to persist in the garden over the winter, but don’t forget to renew the mulch with hay or compost around Thanksgiving. Just make sure you don’t smother the leafy crops with mulch.

To sum up, mulch the garden patch in fall and maybe spring, if needed, with weed-seed-free hay or finished compost. Start vegetables in peat pots and plant them in the patch when they have four true leaves.

Plant only what you love to eat. Plant herbs like basil, thyme, parsley and rosemary at the ends of rows, pinching off a bit to use in the kitchen and to encourage new growth. Keep everything moist with regular watering. That’s minimal work for maximum yields.

And when it comes to getting rid of crops that are slowing down or have finished fruiting, be ruthless. Ruth taught me that.

Jeff Cox is a Kenwood-based garden and food writer. He can be reached at jeffcox@sonic.net.

Source: pressdemocrat.com